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Hirokazu Koreeda’s films have been garnering international attention from his very first feature, Maborosi, which won the Ozella D’oro at the Venice Film Festival in 1995. He followed this success with After Life (1999), which is perhaps his most well-known film in the US (an American version is currently being adapted by 20^th Century Fox). Seamlessly blending documentary (over 400 people were involved) and feature-film techniques, After Life follows workers who are in a waystation for the recently dead and who must choose the single greatest memory from their past lives to take with them into the next. There followed Distance and Nobody Knows, the latter of which is based on the true story of four young children left to take care of themselves after their mother abandons them.

Koreeda’s interest in working with documentary elements and dramatizations of real-life stories is perhaps a natural result of his having started out as a documentary filmmaker; his subjects have included the first man in Japan to make public the fact that he had AIDS, and a Korean man who “passed” as Japanese for most of his life.

His latest feature, Still Walking, has been hailed by Stephen Holden of the New York Times as “the closest thing to a masterpiece” playing in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Koreeda has described Still Walking as having come out of recently having lost both of his parents. The story of a family who meets for their annual remembrance of a sibling lost fifteen years before, the movie takes place over a single day. As the director himself has stated, there are no major events in the film; only the before and after are examined, because, according to Koreeda, “that is precisely where the essence of life can be found.”

The Rumpus caught up with him at the Fairmount hotel in San Francisco, where he was in town for the San Francisco International Film Festival.

The Rumpus: You studied at Waseda University in Tokyo — famous for its literature department — in order to become a novelist. How did you end up becoming a filmmaker?

Hirokazu Koreeda: I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements — two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class. In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I’d never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I’ve always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.

Rumpus: But then you made documentaries before you made feature films.

Koreeda: First I wrote the screenplay for Nobody Knows and showed it to people at the studios without luck. But around that time I was making a documentary about an official in the ministry of the environment who committed suicide. This man oversaw cases surrounding the victims of Minamata disease, which was a huge controversy at the time — a corporation had been found illegally dumping mercury into a river, causing thousands of deaths, horrifying disfigurement, blindness, paralysis, for which they denied culpability. This man was a morally upright person, and he was in a bind. The government didn’t want to pay out any money or admit that there was a problem, but the victims he met were clearly suffering terribly, and he sympathized with them. He was caught in the middle and ended up committing suicide.

I interviewed his wife for a television documentary and afterward wrote a book of nonfiction about it. I was deeply moved by her reaction to her husband’s suicide — how she was able to make sense of it and how and if she would be able to get on with her life. I worked on this book for two years. A producer who read it told me about a novel, Maborosi, by the writer Teru Miyamoto, that had a similar theme, and suggested I direct an adaptation of it. I’d actually read the novel as a student, but then when I looked at it again it really struck me — the core of the story was the same, about a woman trying to grapple with her husband’s suicide. I mulled over this project for five years and then finally filmed it. So my first feature took this long path from documentary to nonfiction to screen adaptation of a fictional work.

Rumpus: Your newest film, Still Walking, has more personal origins than your other films. How did this affect the making of it?

Koreeda: It’s not totally autobiographical, but I based the characters on people close to me, and a lot of the dialogue actually came from things said in my family. But whereas the challenge of, say, Nobody Knows was to take events from a real incident and then try to try to get as close as possible to the characters so I could understand them, in Still Walking it was quite the opposite: in order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.

Rumpus: Maborosi drew comparisons to the films of Yasujiro Ozu when it came out. Still Walking seems reminiscent of Ozu’s work as well — perhaps more so.

Koreeda: When I made Maborosi, I was aware of drawing from Ozu’s style in framing certain scenes — unsuccessfully, to be honest. But Still Walking was so personal that I really set aside any consideration of technique or style or influence and just worked intuitively. The motif of family in Still Walking is similar to Maborosi, so perhaps that’s where the Ozu comparison comes from. Actually, seeing the movie now in completed form, I’d say it has more in common with Naruse’s work than with Ozu’s.

Rumpus: What about camera angles? You stick mostly to medium shots, with a minimum of close-ups, and the framing of them is similar to Ozu’s famed “tatami-eyed view.”

Koreeda: The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice.

Rumpus: You’re able to get some of the most natural acting from children I’ve ever seen. Was there any particular method to this?

Koreeda: Well, the movie is pretty tightly scripted. But with the actors playing the children, I didn’t give them a script. All I told them was that this was a movie about going to their grandparents’ house during summer vacation, and that they should just run around and do whatever came naturally. The adult actors had to act around this; they had to deliver some very specific lines without knowing what the children around them would do or say. This collision of a predetermined and more random elements is something I’ve always been drawn to, and that I was pretty satisfied with in the final result.

Rumpus: Has the foreign reaction to your films ever taken you by surprise?

Koreeda: Yes. For one, I never thought Still Walking would be of any interest to Westerners or picked up overseas.

Rumpus: Why?

Koreeda: I didn’t think Westerners would get it at all. I figured, for example, that they would sit and think, why don’t these people ever just say what they’re thinking? And then the characters themselves don’t experience much growth, if any, from beginning to end.

I don’t believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband’s suicide. But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan — which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn’t find it interesting at all. But then again to my surprise it was also well received. Perhaps there was a stylistic element they were responding to — I was aware of Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, that forties documentary style, while I was making it — so maybe that was it. At any rate, I don’t concern myself with what the critics will say; you really have no idea anyway. That’s part of the fun of making movies, seeing what the reaction will be.

Rumpus: To what extent is a film’s reception in Japan dependent on its reception overseas?

Koreeda: If a movie is nominated for, say, an Academy award, that movie will instantly become popular in Japan. There’s always been a bit of a complex the Japanese have about being taken seriously in the West. At the same time, the contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West — say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase — are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They’re either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

Rumpus: To go back to our first question, do you ever think about writing novels? What about doing more documentaries?

Koreeda: Actually, after Still Walking was made, I was asked to write a novel version. I accepted eagerly, but then about a month into it I realized how difficult writing a novel can be. I finished it and it was published, but it was difficult. As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I’d love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn’t happened.

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His latest, Tokyo Sonata, is a much more straightforward film and gets attention as much for the timeliness of its subject matter as for the quality of the filmmaking — the protagonist loses his job in the very first scene, and when he returns home, finds himself overcome with shame and unable to tell his family. Instead, he dresses up for work each morning and leaves the house as if nothing has happened at all. With such dark starting material, the movie could easily come across as hopeless; instead, Kurosawa shapes his material with a lighter touch (see the full Rumpus review).

We caught up with Kiyoshi Kurosawa when he was in town for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

The Rumpus: I’ve got a bit of a strange question to begin with, and that’s about cardboard boxes. I’ve noticed quite a few of them in your movies: Eyes of the Spider opens with a Sho Aikawa’s character taking out his aggression on the man he believes is his daughter’s killer by beating him over the head, ineffectually, with cardboard, not quite ready to do full physical harm but nonetheless overcome with rage; Bright Future ends with a long shot of schoolboys kicking a pile of boxes down the street all the way through the credits, suggesting a broader generational malaise. Where did that interest begin?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Okay, you’re right, that’s a pretty odd question. Well, there’s not any particular thematic reason I use them. The reason is much more practical — there are times when I decide in the middle of shooting a scene that I need a quick outburst of emotion on the part of a character. Often, it’s an urge toward violence, a desire to strike out in some way. I haven’t written the moment into the script, but now I want the character to lose it a little. Items like cardboard boxes and bags of trash are easy; on a practical level, they’re easy to stage, their presence makes sense in any number of locations like the street or in a warehouse, and using them is safe for the actors. Furthermore, I love the sound of a pile of cardboard boxes being kicked in or thrown about, and stuff goes everywhere so it’s also very visual.

Rumpus: You’ve had a fascination with working in different genres, ranging from horror to yakuza to revenge films. Were you conscious of working with any particular genre while making Tokyo Sonata?

Kurosawa: I didn’t think of it as being as directly in a genre like, say, a horror film, but it was nonetheless very much inspired by the domestic dramas that are common on Japanese television, where the kitchen table becomes the dramatic center of the story. The kitchen, after all, is the one place where all the members of a family gather together every night, where there are disagreements and reconciliations, where secrets come out into the open. So that was where I deliberately located the center of my film.

Rumpus: While at first glance, the film seems like the story of a man who loses his job, by the end of the film I actually thought the most important character in the film might be the story of the mother. She’s the one who tries to hold the family together.

Kurosawa: Actually, I wanted to give the stories of all four members in the family equal weight. During the first half, structurally speaking, the salaryman’s story is at the center. The mother’s story (played by Kyoko Koizumi) doesn’t really come to the forefront until the latter half of the film. I did this purposefully. The other three members of the family — the father and the two sons — have stories that are, literally, located externally, out of the house and out in the world. For Kyoko Koizumi’s character, the conflict is an internal one. Her world lies primarily within herself and in the house, and she simultaneously discovers that what she thought existed both within herself and in her home are lacking. She starts to question who she is, and in order to find the answer she needs to be outside the home. Since this happens in the second half of the story, it’s possible that she came across as more of the center of the film.

Rumpus: You also fill the narrative with wonderful tragicomic details about how the Teruyuki Kagawa character conceals his unemployed life — he sets his cell phone to ring every so often, for example, on its own. How much research did you do into lives of secretly unemployed workers?

Kurosawa: I did do a bit of research for this film. The particular detail you just mentioned about programming a cell phone I owe to Sachiko Tanaka, who helped cowrite the script and whose thought it was. But more generally the phenomenon of the unemployed leaving the house and pretending to go to work every day is, of course, established and real, so I did some research and then built up my story imaginatively around that fact.

Rumpus: You regularly place your characters under severe psychological stress that causes them to do some unusual things. This is pretty much a feature of every one of your movies, but one example that comes to mind is Sho Aikawa’s character in The Serpent’s Path, who in helping a man avenge his daughter’s murder deliberately frames a number of innocent people, for reasons we only find out about at the end. How do you approach these kinds of characters?

A scene from Kurosawa's "Retribution"

Kurosawa: Well, I do put my characters in trying, even twisted, circumstances. But what I’m very carefully trying to do is to create characters who are first and foremost regular people, no different than you or me. Their situations are unusual, sure, but in my movies how the characters deal with pressure in those situations is fundamentally not dissimilar from how you or I deal with our own pressures. The difference may primarily be described as one of scale. What I tell my actors in these scenes is to play them as if they are as normal a person as possible, even when they’re given an abnormal line or action.

Rumpus: You’ve been quoted in DVD Talk as saying that Americans are given to questioning the motivations of the characters in your screenplays, saying, “What’s going on with this character now?  What’s his intent?” To which you answered, “He doesn’t have any intent.  He’s just being.” Do you find that when you watch American films, there is a lack of moments of “just being”?

Kurosawa: Yes, definitely. As much as admire American films, I do often find that characters’ actions are too obvious or simplistic, and therefore unrealistic; I get bored with characters who can be reduced down to a single motivation. On the other hand, in the best American movies, characters have a clear goal, but there’s still somehow an element of mystery to them; their behavior and state of mind feel more natural. I puzzled over this at first, how the directors had achieved this effect. Eventually, I figured out that the answer lay in abbreviating a character. American filmmakers have a particular knack for injecting meaning into the space between scenes. In other words, a character may do something in one scene and then when you see them in the next scene, and you don’t know what’s happened in the interim — what decisions they’ve made, for instance — that space gives you the element of mystery that creates a fuller character.

Rumpus: To what extent do you work with the conventions of American Hollywood-style films or against them, in terms of genre or screenwriting structure?

Kurosawa: There are any number of angles to this question, but one way to answer it is to say that my opinion is the genres we have today were invented in Hollywood, so that when I think of genres, I think of American movies. These genre films are themselves impressive; at the same time, what I admire about the best American directors, like Clint Eastwood, is that they are able to work within a genre and then stretch the definition of that genre in a new direction — to, in effect, destroy the very genre they started with and create almost a new category of film.

In terms of screenwriting structure, I was really conscious of that form of screenwriting until quite late in my career — I’d place it around the time I made Cure in 1997. But I often found that sticking too closely to this formula really hindered the development of something more organic and left me a little dissatisfied. So when I wrote Cure, I decided I was just going to really just forget about that and to concentrate on making something that was truly my own vision. I’ve mentioned Clint Eastwood already, and I have to say that in recent years even in the US, any number of directors have taken on the form. This has emboldened me as well.

Rumpus: Are there any particular genres you’ve found are easier or harder to work with, and are there any genres you haven’t tried that you’d like to try in the future?

Kurosawa: The genre that was easiest to work with was the gangster film. One of the hardest genres to work with was horror. This might sound surprising, but there’s a simple reason for this. In a gangster movie, the characters’ histories are already implied — a gangster’s past is easily suggested, and all you need to do is to move the story forward. In a horror film, it’s always necessary, at the moment that, say, the ghost appears, to then go back and explain where the ghost came from. It’s sort of a pain to do back story in film; I find myself wanting to just move the story forward. So, anyway, right now I don’t have plans to go back to doing any horror films. As far as new genres to tackle, there are so many I haven’t done, and to be honest I’d like to do them all. Musicals, for example. Straight up comedy. Period drama. I’m interested in everything.

see also: Kiyoshi Kurosawa and a Cinema of Disaster

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa

No matter the country, there is undoubtedly no more-dreaded euphemism in 2009:  we in the US get “downsized,” the English are made “redundant,” and the Japanese are the victims of “risutora,” the English origin of which (restructuring) suggests its foreign origins.  In Japan, a culture whose social rules are enforced less by law than by shame, risutora has resulted in the phenomenon of unemployed salarymen dressing up for work every morning and leaving the house to wander about the city for the day while they try to figure out a way back to respectability.  It’s difficult material, and a lesser director would have given into the impulse to dance the dramatic version of the limbo:  how low can you go?  Kurosawa refuses that route, and while he isn’t averse to crossing over to the dark side, often in scenes that are wince-inducing, it’s his sheer stubborn willfulness that keeps this tale from sliding off into the ocean.

Kurosawa’s protagonist (Ryuhei Sasaki, played by Teruyuki Kagawa) is ignominiously treated to his risutora just as the opening credits finish rolling, and his inability to come clean to his family soon has a way of magnifying his wife’s (Megumi, played by Kyoko Koizumi) and two boys’ (Takashi and Kenji, played by Yu Koyanagi and Kai Inowaki, respectively) problems and multiplying their secrets.  Kurosawa cleverly sets the Saskai’s family’s home right beside a pair of Tokyo’s notoriously busy commuter tracks, with the result that no domestic scene is entirely sealed off from the outside world; it’s in this house that the most compelling confrontations of the film play out.  These range from the relatively minor efforts of the younger son to learn the piano (if you’ve ever wondered whether Mozart’s genius would have been allowed to flourish had he been limited to practicing on a mute Casiotone, Kurosawa has your answer) to the humorously bizarre, though not entirely unimaginable, volunteering of the older son for the US Armed forces.  Sasaki himself undergoes a training of sorts from a veteran of secret unemployment, and his wife goes out and gets herself a driver’s license.

For the first three-quarters of the movie, conflicts play out quietly but grippingly.  But just after reaching a moment of painful intersection—with potentially revelatory fallout—the entire drama is quite literally taken hostage, and this is where the movie slips off the rails.  For a time, we are jumping from location to location, and events that would have been otherwise dramatic felt muddled and attenuated.  I longed for the home by the train tracks.  In a short cameo, the veteran Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?), his smooth face beginning to gather the lines and contours useful to a skillful, mature actor, manages to inject a desperate energy into the floundering storyline.  The ending, however, comes across as an unsatisfying attempt at quiet elevation.

Really, though, the problems of the last quarter of the movie don’t mar the accomplishment of the first three.  The performances are uniformly captivating, and—apart from some odd, symbolically heavy-handed dialogue—utterly convincing.  Teruyuki Kagawa plays his denial and frustration well, withholding stronger emotions for use in scenes where they would count most.  Yu Koyanagi, bound for the front lines, is strong both with and without hair; and Kai Inowaki plays the younger boy likeably, without resorting to Macauley Caulkin-style cuteness.  But the center of the traditional Japanese household is mother, and so it’s fitting that Kyoko Koizumi’s role, both in the script and in performance, anchors the whole.  In an understated way, the weight of all of those conflicts is carried on her shoulders, and she delivers with grace and subtlety.

Given the current economic climate, my first instinct coming upon a story revolving around job loss was to lower my eyes and walk quickly past.  I’m glad I didn’t.

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