By Cathleen Rountree [1]

Upon first meeting one of the great humanist filmmakers, Hirokazu Kore-eda [1], last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by his modesty and peacefulness, characteristics embodied also by Soza (Junichi Okada), the reluctant swordsman/hero in Kore-eda’s most recent film Hana [2], screening this week at SFIFF [3]. An aficionada of his four previous films: Maborosi [3] (1996), After Life [3] (1999), Distance (2002), and Nobody Knows [3] (2004), I was ecstatic at the opportunity to meet and speak with this foremost world cinema director, who, as far as I’m concerned, should be considered one of Japan’s Living Treasures.

Although I’ve always been partial to Japanese films (naturally, the masters: Kurosawa [3], Ichikawa [3], Mizoguchi [3], and Kobayashi [3]––but especially Imamura [3] and Oshima [3]), they’ve assumed a deeper resonance since I lived in Kyoto (where Hana was entirely filmed) for two months in the early 1990s, studying the Traditional Japanese Arts.

After Life, in particular, had a profound affect on me. Contemplating the film, I wrote:

 

The literal translation of the Japanese title Wandafuru raifu is “Wonderful Life” (a la Frank Capra), which fits its universal theme, its empathy for nostalgia, and its homage to cinema. The film opens up as 22 recently deceased people arrive in what turns out to be a limbo way-station. But this is not the Purgatorio of Dante. The staff or counselors in this abandoned school house-cum-film studio, has only beneficent intentions: to help each individual select, in three days, the “most meaningful or precious memory” from their lives. For most of them this proves to be a decidedly fettered task. One young man flat out refuses to make a choice, another prefers his dreams to any actual experience, a teenager at first chooses her trip to Disneyland, while a gregarious man focuses on his sexual memories. The reinterpreted and filmed memory becomes more important than the original memory. After Life seems as much about filmmaking itself as it is about the concept of heaven. Movies do, after all, help shape our memories and serve us as faithfully as his remembered madeleines served Proust. The refreshing absence of any religious implication serves to keep the focus on the characters and their memories and the stark lack of music also prevents sentimentalizing the process. Kore-eda offers some inventive ideas and themes on the conundrum: What happens after we die?

 

Only a month before meeting Kore-eda, this eternal philosophical and spiritual question turned, for me, from compelling to urgent, when my dearest friend of 20 years died. And, even though I was at a world-class film festival, surrounded by fascinating people and captivating films, I felt strangely removed, at a distance from “normal” life, and frequently overcome by emotion.

What would this twenty-minute encounter with one of my favorite directors render? (After all, during 20-plus years of interviewing world-renowned figures, I’d been (more than) occasionally, disappointed.) Was I carrying any obstreperous projections into our interview? Was I guilty of taking the metaphor, “the film director is God,” a bit too literally? What was I expecting, an oracle? I was about to find out.

I learned that I wasn’t the only one who had suffered a great loss. During the filming of Hana [4], the exalted Shohei Imamura [4] passed away, as had another individual much closer to Kore-eda. I was somewhat embarrassed by my raw emotional state, but by the end of the interview, which came much too quickly, his humanity, his grace, and his own personal revelation left me with a smile and a little bit of joy.

Our translator was the inimitable and ubiquitous Taro Gato (assistant director of the Asian American International Film Festival, film producer––Steven Okazaki’s White Light/Black Rain, and, naturally, Japanese-English translator, extraordinaire––does that guy ever sleep?).

 

Thank you for seeing me. I’m really honored to meet you. I love your work.

Hirokazu Kore-eda: What publication are you writing for?

I’m freelance and write for a number of print and online publications, but one that might interest you is the Jung Journal.

[There are a few moments of back-and-forth between Gato and me, and then between Gato and Kore-eda, before they recognize the name.]

 

Kore-eda: Oh, yes, the psychologist! Wasn’t he a disciple of Freud?

 

That’s right, but Jung contributed a more spiritual awareness to psychology, just as your films have a spiritual underpinning.

Kore-eda: Very interesting.

That’s probably why Jungians love your work so much.

Kore-eda: [laughs] I’ve heard that!

I have three areas that I’d like to cover: community, memory, and death. This sounds odd, but I feel a little like I’m visiting a psychic and I’m going to be getting some spiritual answers.

 

Kore-eda laughs uproariously.

No, but, actually, I’m not kidding so much. My dearest friend passed away a month ago, so I’ve been thinking a lot about death and After Life. I’ve written extensively about that film. And I’m wondering, what do you think happens after death?

Kore-eda: Personally, I believe that nothing happens after one dies; it just ends there. But my interest is in how people continue to live their lives, after someone close to them passes away. That’s what I want to continue to portray. And though After Life was titled as such, in English, I wasn’t interested in what really happens after somebody dies, so much as the life. With that film, in particular, I basically used the situation in which dead people have to remember the brightest moment of their lives. So, even in a film about death, I think I was putting the spotlight on life itself.

 

I’ve chosen these three elements: community, memory, and death, because they seem to be the main thru-line in all your work, in all of your films. Community, especially, in After Life, Nobody Knows [4], and Hana [5], in which community is very important. I wonder if you could speak to the concept of community and what it means to you, in your own life and in your films, and why it’s important.

 

Kore-eda: I don’t think that I understand what I portray in my films to be community itself. I think about it as inter-relationships. It may be slightly different, or, perhaps, it’s the same thing. But I’m always interested in showing characters more than what is simply within them. I think that a true character emerges from interactions with others. Showing the self in interaction with another. That’s how a story would move, that’s how characters move. In After Life, you’ll see that the people in that way-station, they change with their interactions with the people who come through. The same thing in Hana, you see the protagonist changing by way of his interactions with others. So that’s the structure that I’m interested in: how people relate to others. So, perhaps, you might call it community, I call it inter-relationships.

Would you address the concept of cinema as a metaphor for life? I grew up with a single mother and I spent much of my childhood in movie theatres. So, in some ways, films became more real to me than life; and, certainly, a way of forgetting about my life. After Life included a very strong element of this notion of movies as a metaphor for life.

Taro Gato: Definitely!

[Kore-eda takes a couple of moments before responding and almost seems to be struggling for an answer.]

May I add something before you respond? Sometimes it’s almost easier to be more deeply involved in a movie, than in life…and that can be worrisome.

Kore-eda: I think I understand that feeling of a worldview within a film often feeling more fulfilling than one’s own life. I’ve felt that, too. And that’s probably, exactly, why I spend my life creating them as well. But in After Life [5], what you see is that inside the film they are re-creating these movies––and they’re often cheap––they have cotton clouds and static trains, but, ultimately, it’s about the people who watch these movies and feel something real within them, because it’s part of their real life. Ultimately, in this movie, it’s not so much about the world within the movie often being more real or more fulfilling than their own. It’s their own life that they didn’t like! But through the movie of their life, they are able to see that. After Life is all about capturing that expression when the people recognize this through the movie, because it’s their own real life.

Yes.

I’m wondering what your inspiration for Hana was. I do see the thru-line, the similarity to your earlier films, but it’s also a new direction from your previous films.

Kore-eda: Methodologically speaking, I made a series of films that had a certain documentary touch to them. But I always realized that reality in cinema isn’t simply about documentary style. So I wanted to take on the challenge of making more genre films, or films that are known as more fictional pieces, like musicals or period films. I’d felt this way since Distance, so in Hana [6], I did try to take on that challenge.

Also, I’d made a series of dark-themed films, and I wanted to make something where you can leave the theatre with a smile and there’s a little bit of joy at the end.

Who do you make your films for?

Kore-eda: When I make a film, I always think of one person who I want to show this film to. Sometimes it’s a very specific individual, an actual face that I can conjure up, and sometimes it’s a little bit less specific. But with this particular film, it was about my mother. She loves movies and she really likes cheerful films, so I wanted to make something she would be able to enjoy. Unfortunately, she passed away before I completed this film, so she never saw it. But I did make this film as something I might be able to show her.

That’s very moving. I appreciate you mentioning this, and I’m sorry for your loss.

Last question. (I ask all directors this question.) Do you feel any sense of hope or optimism about the state of our world today?

Kore-eda: Japan included, I don’t think the world is in a very good state at all. That said, I think that if I were completely hopeless, I wouldn’t be making films right now. I make films because there is some hope.

 

 

 

Cathleen Rountree [7] is a film journalist and author of nine books, including The Movie Lovers’ Club, about the process of creating community through finding meaning in movies. She covers film festivals and writes extensively about films and directors for various venues, including Documentary Magazine, Release Print and Greencine. She teaches Writing and Multicultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Read her blog on Women in World Cinema at www.womeninworldcinema.org [8].