Giacomo Gex’s “The Treasure Hunter,” which had its world premiere this week in the Newcomers Competition at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, follows the director’s best friend, Jack, as he searches for treasure in the Philippines. It’s a tale reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo.” Variety debuts the trailer here.
According to local legend, during World War II the Japanese Army took booty they had looted from across South-East Asia to the Philippines and buried it at various locations. Jack, funded by his father, decided to join the many treasure hunters on the archipelago. “The Treasure Hunter” follows Jack as he plows millions of dollars into this quixotic search, digging at various sites, based on local rumors.
Although many of the scenes in the jungle were shot underground in caves and in shafts dug in the hope they would lead to caves, Gex didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. The dangers were real enough, but the filmmaker’s focus on getting the shots he needed drove him on.
“I am not someone who’s filmed in warzones or extreme conditions, but I have been in potentially dangerous situations,” Gex tells Variety, sitting on the quay in Thessaloniki, a Greek port city overlooking the Aegean Sea. “One of my first short films was about a repossession agent in Los Angeles, and he would bring me with him to very dangerous areas in L.A., and would tell me not to get out of the car, but I knew that for the shot and for the film, I had to get out of the car, and I had to be with him, and I felt very unsafe.
“Often, when I’m behind the camera, I will forget about the realities around me and forget about the dangers, because I will have this illusion that I’m safe behind the camera because I’m so focused on the shot and so focused on capturing the scene and framing the shot so that I can get the scene that I need and get the coverage that I need, that all sense of danger can disappear, and I had this same sensation in the jungle.
“The Treasure Hunter”
Courtesy of Gex Films
“When we went into the caves and underground, there were very brief moments where I would cut the camera and suddenly realize I was 10 meters underground, lying on my belly on the floor in this cave that I couldn’t even sit up in, feeling the dampness and remembering that there are snakes in the Philippines. The king cobra is a very common snake there, and it’s very dangerous. A lot of the locals carry around charcoal tablets so that if you get bitten, you eat these, and it absorbs the poison from your bloodstream.
“I was very aware that that was a threat so in those brief moments, I remembered that, yes, there could be a snake nest in there, and because they’re digging, they could aggravate it and threaten the children of the mother snake, and it could attack us. But I would say even more dangerous than that is the potential that the cave collapses because you’re fiddling around with it and you’re knocking about on the rocks, and none of this has a structure. It’s just purely natural. And a lot of those caves were left over from earthquakes, so they were not necessarily solid. And so, yes, there were dangers like that, but then I would go behind the camera again and forget about that, and then I would be okay.”
Jack’s hunt for the treasure is seen as compulsive, almost an addiction, which triggered conflicting emotions in the filmmaker. “As his friend, many times I put the camera down, and hugged him. But in many moments, I wanted to put the camera down, but I couldn’t, because I knew that I had to film what was happening and let it unfold. That’s the very tricky thing as a documentary filmmaker – you’re constantly battling with the ethics of it. But I felt it my duty to capture the consequences of addiction and what it can do to him and everyone around him. I felt it important to show that, and yes, I did tell him many times to stop, and I also told him that he should seek counselling.”
Jack’s obsessive search, and Gex’s determination to capture it, brings to mind Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” and Gex acknowledges that Herzog was an early influence on him as a filmmaker.
“The Treasure Hunter”
Courtesy of Gex Films
“There was something about his main character, but more about the soul and spirit of Herzog in that film that penetrated me in a strong way. I feel like I absorbed that, and it was definitely a subconscious influence. I never tried to copy it or emulate it in any way, but there was something that Herzog did with the jungle and Fitzcarraldo himself. And there was something about this quest of the impossible that was almost futile and almost for nothing … well, for us, for nothing, but for the character everything. And there was that similarity that I realized with Jack.
“Whenever I am struggling and I feel sorry for myself during any part of the process, I always remember that Herzog pulled a real-life steam-boat over a mountain. If he could do that, I could probably do anything.”
It was when Gex spoke to Jack’s father in London that the idea of a film based on this search began to take shape. “I started talking to his father with cigarette smoke rising up in the shadows, and this voice with a gravitas to it, and suddenly I saw this image of him in front of the camera,” Gex says. “I hadn’t started filming him yet, but he was telling me about the story and I saw there was something about him that was extremely compelling, and even deeper than Jack, because he’s obviously an older man, and he brought a far greater seriousness to it, because there’s one thing – a young guy running around the jungle because he’s passionate about treasure – and another thing is this middle-aged, or more than middle-aged man, with an entire family, who’s putting his life on the line and taking big economical risks for this treasure. And it was at that stage where I was like, ‘This isn’t just a little film running around the jungle following my friend. This is more than that, and I have to have him on camera.”
Giacomo Gex shooting “The Treasure Hunter” in the Philippines.
Courtesy of Andrew Fuchs
Jack’s father hated being filmed and didn’t want to be interviewed, but Gex managed to get a four-hour long interview with him, but he didn’t get anything else. “He didn’t ever want to be interviewed again, even though I tried and tried and tried and tried.” Finally, when Jack’s father moved to Mexico, Gex decided to turn up on his doorstep to get an interview with him, but two weeks before he was supposed to go to Mexico, he got a call from Jack to say his father had died.
“It was at that stage when I realized that that was the film’s ending. I didn’t know what the ending would be for many years, and a lot of people told me I was crazy and that if you don’t have an ending, you don’t have a film. There is no film if you go on forever with him just searching. People would get tired of just watching him search. But when his father passed away, I had this instinct that the circle was closed.”
Despite the tragedy of the death, Gex sees it as having a positive side. “It was not just a sad, negative ending, because it was, in a way, cathartic for Jack. It was like this weight that was lifted off him, and obviously it was very sad, but I think he became much more his own self and his own man. He was more of an independent human being, and freer. It was what I saw as a friend.”