Chito Roño —CONTRIBUTED “I’m depressed,” said award-winning filmmaker Chito Roño as a way to explain why he has been inactive in making movies for quite some time now. Roño’s last big-screen project, the horror film “Ang Mga Kaibigan ni Mama Susan,” was released last year but was filmed back in 2020. “It’s true that I receive so many scripts.
I’m lucky because I get to choose my projects. I also choose my writers. The reason I’ve not made movies for years now is that I’m kind of depressed.
All they (producers) want for me to do is horror. I’m so sick of these people—that’s just a joke!” he said, laughing. “Seriously, I’ve found interesting material, but I want to go back to the days when I was doing drama.
” However, Roño said he understood where the producers are coming from. “It’s hard to sell films these days aside from those that people obviously want to watch, like love stories and horror flicks. I can relate to them.
I would sometimes say, ‘Let’s just sell barbecue to make money!’ Some films, like ‘Firefly’ and ‘GomBurZa,’ are lucky because they got included in the Metro Manila Film Festival. If you put them on a regular [screening] day, I doubt if they will make much. That’s the reality of life,” said Roño during a recent roundtable discussion on filmmaking and screenplay writing that was also attended by directors Jun Robles Lana, Mae Cruz-Alviar, Pepe Diokno, Sigrid Bernardo, Joel Lamangan and Zig D.
