Joyce Bernal: Apologize to regain respect

‘You have to recognize that he or she is just human.’ JOYCE BERNAL’S INSTAGRAM-

MOVIE and television director Joyce Bernal, who’s currently working on the GMA 7 soap, “That’s My Amboy,” weighs in on the pressure-cooker environment during shooting, which could, at times, lead to outbursts on set.

“If I could change something about the culture, I would like to lessen the amount of sequences that need to be shot in a day. For TV, we do 30 to 35 sequences, so the talents need to arrive on set already prepared; we don’t get much time to really get to know them,” she told the Inquirer.

“For movies, we shoot only three to five sequences per day, which gives us ample time to personally rehearse the talents and see if they could really do the job at hand. If not, we could have them replaced, or come up with workarounds. There are times, however, when talent coordinators don’t do their job well.”

Talents and stars being berated and cursed at by the director goes way back to the time of Ishmael Bernal, Joyce pointed out—not that it has to be that way.

“You’re always dealing with a lot of people, so someone’s bound to mess up… I myself had been hard on some of the people I worked with at times.

“But if you’ve hurt someone, you have to apologize. You have to recognize that he or she is just human. You have to apologize to regain his respect,” she said. Allan Policarpio