Cinespot : An Exclusive Interview with Japanese Director Hirokazu Kore-eda

An Exclusive Interview
with Director Hirokazu Kore-eda
(Part II)

Family

Cinespot: A lot of your films, like Maboroshi, Distance, Nobody Knows and Still Walking, are about family relationship. How important is "family" to you?

Kore-eda: I do think family is very important. Talking about Still Walking, what went through my head when I was making this film was that, a family is difficult to get along with, it's something I really wanted to have to deal with. Once you lose somebody in a family, then you realize how precious it is. It is that kind of ambivalent feeling that I wanted to get across and that's how I feel as well.

Cinespot: Do you see a change of family value in recent years in Japan?

Kore-eda: How does it seem?

Cinespot: Like, if you compare it to the 60~70s when you grew up?

Kore-eda: Well (long pause)..., I am not a researcher and I don't have a generalized response, but I think that often when we talk in Japan about the breaking up of family system, perhaps it is becoming more like American style family where people sort of act independently on their own. The typical case in Japan until the early 1970s, the time when I grew up, was that the family usually had a living room where everybody gathered to live, and that was where the dining table and the television were, so the whole family would gather to eat and watch television together. But now I think children have their own rooms, they keep their own room keys, they have television set in their own rooms, and they don't gather around at the family table anymore. So what is symbolic in terms of Still Walking is that this sort of gathering of two or three generations together around the table eating corn tempura only occurs once or twice a year now, usually on special occasion when the family gets together like that. What in my childhood was a daily life having three generations around the family table, this kind of thing has become a special occasion now. In terms of this film, I think this is the kind of change we are seeing.

In response to your previous question, it occurs to me that even though I see changes in Japanese family, if people see this film and are reminded of Ozu's films, then in the 55 years since Ozu was making his films, maybe there are things that haven't changed either, maybe there're many more things that haven't changed. It is an interesting perspective as well.

Financing and documentary

Cinespot: To some people, your films don't always have very strong commercial appeal, how's the financing process? Was it difficult?

Kore-eda: My films are not big budget films, even this one (Still Walking) only costs about $2 million dollars or so to make. For an independent film, it is not necessarily a small budget film, but it is also not that difficult to gather this kind of budget. Nobody Knows was recognized and was quite successful within Japan and abroad, so that might have helped. Before I have made something like Still Walking, I know it is not something often made in Japan these days, and I know it doesn't have a large audience. But the fact that I was able to get financial backing for this film, it shows that maybe it is doable in terms of films of this scale.

Cinespot: You started out your career making documentary, and you always use a lot of documentary techniques in your narrative films. How do you see the relationship of narrative film and documentary?

Kore-eda: I have a vague idea about making films about something, but my intuition tells me this would be good as a documentary, or that would be good as a narrative film. If I need to really reason it out, I think it would become very boring. If I need to have some kind of logic behind to make a film, it would become very uninteresting. What is good about having done a lot of documentary is that I realized how to actually make things actual people might say. When I was in college, I wrote a lot of scripts, very Ozu like scripts, I was watching movies and then writing scripts, trying to make my own films like the films I had been watching. For example, I would think it is the way Chisu Ryu (Ozu's regular actor) would say this line and wrote a script that way. After I worked on documentary, I understood how bad those scripts would be, because they are not how real people talk at all. I was able to learn how actual people talk.

Furthermore, what is important is observation and listening, so the eyes and the ears are very important. I think it goes beyond genres, whether you are making a documentary or narrative film, you depend on your eyes and ears. Even if I have a script but the way the actors speak doesn't fit what is written, it has to be changed so that it sounds natural for the actors to say. So I think it is a very important thing I learned from making documentaries.

Cinespot: We heard that your latest film Air Doll just got into Cannes. Congratulations.

Kore-eda: Yes, thank you. The style is completely different from my previous films.

Cinespot: Thank you very much for talking to us.

Kore-eda: Thank you.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the interview was very successful. Director Hirokazu Kore-eda was very generous and answered all of our questions in details. Again, we would like to appreciate director Kore-eda for sharing his valuable time with us. Please give a round applause to director Kore-eda!

Special thanks to Larsen Associates for coordinating and making the interview possible.

Thank you!

Written, photographed and compiled by Kantorates

5/2009

Click here to go back to Part I.