Japanese Director Hirokazu Kore-eda Talks About His New Film at the Taipei Film Festival

The title, it turns out, comes from a Japanese song by Teresa Teng.

After the widely praised Our Little Sister in 2015, Hirokazu Kore-eda has brought out a new film this year, After the Storm. It, too, watches family life through a warm and truthful lens.

After the Storm opened in Japan this past May, but Taiwan has to wait until September for its official release. Before that, the Taipei Film Festival gave it its Taiwan premiere during the festival (June 30 – July 16) and invited Kore-eda to join a "Spotlight Dialogue" about how he made the film, and about the ideas that have accumulated across his work.

Anyone who has seen any of Kore-eda's earlier films will pick up his style quickly — an almost flat plainness that renders the texture of daily life, and his characters' inner feelings, in fine detail. There are no dramatic peaks and troughs in his films; they move audiences by catching the particular smell of ordinary days. Kore-eda is often called "the heir to Yasujirō Ozu."

This realism has a source: Kore-eda was deeply influenced by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the celebrated director of the Taiwan New Wave. Both men hold to a realist attitude and keep their attention on small, ordinary people. The difference is that Kore-eda's films are focused even more tightly on family life, and similar themes come back again and again — death, fathers, kinship, the shape of a life.

In his films a funeral is not an ending but a starting point. And in the background of these stories you will often find a father who never amounted to much, or who is simply absent. What does that have to do with Kore-eda's own life? The title After the Storm, meanwhile, is taken from a line in a Japanese-language song by Teresa Teng, A Premonition of Parting (《别离的预感》/《別れの予感》) — what led him to that song?

Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Spotlight Dialogue" at the Taipei Film Festival

C: Chang Shih-ta, Taiwanese film critic H: Hirokazu Kore-eda Q: Questions from the audience

C: After the film Wansei Back Home came out last year, a lot of people in Taiwan and Japan learned for the first time what "Wansei" means. We now know your own father was Wansei. Now that you are a father yourself, have you come to a belated understanding of him? (Note: "Wansei" refers to Japanese people born in Taiwan between 1895 and 1946, who returned to Japan after the war in compliance with government orders.)

H: I don't think children particularly want to know what kind of life their father lived. My father's young years in Taiwan were, I believe, very happy ones. But near the end of the war the Japanese government conscripted him, and while he was fighting the Soviet army he was seized and taken to Siberia, where he was forced to work for three years before he could return to Japan.

After that his life did not go well; he could not live it on his own terms. So many people of that era had no say in their own lives — effort and dreams alone built nothing, because larger forces beyond their control lay behind it all. I think his life left him with no small amount of regret. But I only came to understand this slowly, after he died and after I reached this age myself. I have my own regret too: while he was alive, I never asked him more, never listened more to how he felt.

C: In your work these past few years you keep handling the theme of fathers, including in this new film, After the Storm, where Hiroshi Abe also plays a father — one who by ordinary standards is a failure: irresponsible, often absent. You just spoke about your own complicated feelings toward your father. Now that you are a father, how do you put those complicated feelings into the work?

H: In this film the father never appears, from beginning to end. The story starts after his death, when the son comes home to help his mother, who lives alone, settle the father's affairs — so the father is never on screen. The question becomes how to show the family members who are still living, and, through their interactions, their attitudes toward the father and their memories of him. I tried to describe the parent-child relationship in that form.

Our Little Sister, which came out last year, was in fact shot at the same time as After the Storm. It also begins at the moment of a father's death: the four sisters he leaves behind spend a year together, slowly sorting out what they feel about him and about the bond between them. I think of the two films as sisters, a pair set against each other — both use the living to describe someone already dead.

C: A few years ago you published a collection of essays, and one passage in it concerns your father. In 2001, the year after he died, you and your mother were at home for New Year's when a postcard arrived out of nowhere — a letter your father had written 15 years earlier, addressed to his son 15 years in the future. Once the shock passed, you began imagining how the self of 15 years earlier differed from the self of 15 years later. It is now 2016, exactly 15 years on — how does the person you are now differ from the one you imagined? (Note: on the essay collection As Slow as Walking (《有如走路的速度》), see our earlier report.)

H: I'm 54 this year. When I was young I assumed that at 54 I would be a much steadier adult. When I was younger still, I thought 54 was about where a life started heading for its end. But now I find that at 54 there is still a great deal I want to do — life is only beginning, and there are many dreams left to realize.

In Japan in the 1990s, letters to the future were popular, and my father sent one. He died in 2000, and at the turn of the year into 2001, with our family in mourning, nobody would normally have sent us a New Year's card. Yet a postcard arrived — the letter to the future my father had written 15 years before, addressed to me. It said: "May you always have a happy, complete family."

I remember reading it and thinking, what on earth is he talking about — he was hardly a family man himself. If he had been alive I might have been furious: how could he say a thing like that? But because he was dead, I took the postcard as a last word, an instruction left behind. Life is strange. The very next year I did get married. Perhaps my father lent me a hand.

C: Was your father, as you knew him, the sort of man who would do something like that?

H: No, he didn't seem like the sort of man who would.

C: If you were to write a letter now to your daughter 15 years from now, what would you write?

H: First I'd have to consider whether I'll still be alive in 15 years.

C: You will be — look at Director Hou (Hou Hsiao-hsien), he's still doing fine.

H: True. But if I write something too grand and I'm still alive when she reads it, I'd be embarrassed in front of her. Thinking about it now, that kind of thing is rather awkward — I never expected my father to write me a postcard like that.

C: Or do you say all this by making films instead?

H: It was only after I became a director that I realized I am better at expressing my thoughts and feelings by making films than by saying them out loud. Some friends have come to me after a screening and said that when they spend time with me they have no idea what I'm thinking, but after the film they know exactly what I wanted to say.

C: You always put your own feelings into your films, and After the Storm goes further — you shot it in the place where you grew up, Kiyose in Tokyo, where you lived from the age of 9 to 28. So can we say this film carries more autobiography than the others? And if so, which parts?

H: Compared with my earlier work, this film is unusually autobiographical.

But putting a director's own experience and ideas into a film is risky, because it does not necessarily reach the audience. Precisely because you lived it, the feeling is very strong — and other people, who have not lived it, find it hard to feel the same. So in laying out the story you have to add a good deal of coloring and design before people can understand the feelings and thoughts that came out of the experience.

C: These past few years have been the peak of your creative life, and your family life is happy. Yet if After the Storm is partly autobiographical, as you say, what the film describes are experiences of failure — the main character sighs that none of us grows into the adult we wanted to be. Why explore that feeling at this stage of your life, in this autobiographical work?

H: I first thought of making After the Storm in 2009, at my 30-year high school reunion. Seeing my old classmates, I wondered whether the dreams we all had in high school had come true. Some had accepted who they now were; others were still resisting, still trying. I thought that was good material — the struggle that comes at an age like mine, a fork in the road of a life.

So After the Storm is also about this: when your life has gone down a road you never dreamed of, how do you live in the present? Is that misfortune, or is it happiness? Is it a starting point in a life, or an end? I think everyone sees it differently, and in the film each character has their own way of handling it.

C: When you were in high school, what kind of person did you imagine becoming?

H: In elementary school I wanted to be a baseball player. In high school I only thought: as long as I don't turn out like my father.

C: Did you manage it?

H: On that score, I think some of my father's faults were passed down to me. I have to accept that as my fate.

That I became a director has a great deal to do with my mother, who loved films. After she became a mother she had no time to go to the cinema, so she would put on Hollywood classics while she did the housework, then set the housework aside and watch with me. I watched an enormous number of films with my mother, and I always thought that was the main reason I ended up a film director.

But now it strikes me that becoming a director may have something to do with my father too, because he loved to gamble. You can't simply call filmmaking gambling, of course, but it isn't a steady job either — every day brings a great many decisions and bets.

C: What kind of bets do you mean?

H: Film, for me, is not purely an art. Some filmmakers do try to keep out everything outside the work itself, everything not to do with creation — box office, stars.

I don't love money, but I don't hate it either. I think the act of creation still has to take box office and casting into account; it makes a film more complete, and it is more fun that way than as pure art.

C: Over the years your films really have pleased both the crowd and the critics, and the box office keeps setting records, so you could be called an increasingly successful gambler. The title After the Storm comes from Teresa Teng's Japanese song A Premonition of Parting, but since there is no Chinese version, many people may not know it well. Now that you've made it the title of a film, tell us what memories and feelings you have of Teresa Teng.

H: In 2008 I made Still Walking, with Hiroshi Abe and Kirin Kiki as a mother and son. It went so well that I wanted the two of them to play mother and son again, and before I had worked out the plot in any detail, I thought I would settle the title first.

The Japanese title of Still Walking comes from an old Showa-era song heard in that film, Blue Light Yokohama. So for this one I thought I'd again find the words of an old song to use as the title, and that is how I came upon Teresa Teng's A Premonition of Parting.

As for why this song: I had already pictured the scene where it plays — a typhoon night, an old song coming on the radio right after the typhoon warning. I wanted the song to draw a reaction from the mother, so it had to be a song about a love she had never known. That pointed to Teresa Teng, because her songs are all about being the other woman — or, put more kindly, forbidden pure love, that sort of thing.

Those are feelings the mother never had, so I listened to every one of Teresa Teng's songs, and when I got to A Premonition of Parting it felt right — and the words "deeper than the sea" can be read in more than one way, which made them a good title.

C: Roughly, that line means: my love for you is deeper than the sea, so isn't this love of mine enough? Kirin Kiki was a little scornful of it at the time, saying that in all her life she still doesn't know what a love deeper than the sea is. Could you tell us about the Kirin Kiki you know? With her and Hiroshi Abe playing mother and son a second time, were there any sparks you didn't expect?

H: Hiroshi Abe and Kirin Kiki work together with real understanding, which is why I wanted them a second time. As for Kirin Kiki, her acting is utterly natural, and many people assume she improvises; in fact it is all extremely careful calculation and rehearsal. Before she goes on set, for instance, she reads every word of the script with great care. And on set — she was playing a mother who had lived in that old house for 40 years — she would handle the props and furniture over and over, learning where everything sat, so that she would look like someone who knew the house well. Hiroshi Abe and I both learned a lot from her.

C: Living space in Japan is very cramped, and yet into that space you put the 189-centimeter Hiroshi Abe, even soaking in a tiny bathtub. What effect were you after in using an actor of that height, in a space like that?

H: The units in what Japan calls collective housing are smaller than an ordinary apartment; the space feels as though it has been discounted. So I thought a big actor like Hiroshi Abe in an apartment that small would give a sense of being wedged into a tight space — which is also a little like his life in the film: stuck, unable to move.

Q: There are always child actors in your films. How do you get them to understand your directions?

A: I don't give them a script and I don't tell them the story. I only explain roughly how the characters relate to each other and what they need to do. I have them react on the spot, there and then. Of course I have to choose, at the audition, children who can react that way. My approach is to hand out no written material at all — everything is directed live, on set.

Q: This is the third time Hiroshi Abe has played a character called "Ryota." Does the name mean something particular to you?

A: I'm not used to naming characters. If I can keep using the same name I would much rather not change it. It isn't the trouble of it — I genuinely find naming embarrassing. A name that sounds too cool, or too striking, feels wrong.

Ryota was in fact a younger member of my high school club. His name is Yano Ryota, and I took it for my character without asking. The real Ryota is handsome, but he's a bit absent-minded and clumsy, and at the time I thought: so even a handsome man can be imperfect. The first time I gave the name to Hiroshi Abe, in Still Walking, it fit perfectly, and after that, whenever I was writing an original script and needed a character who reflected a little of myself, I'd call him Ryota to begin with — and then I didn't want to change it.

Having used it so many times, though, I apologized to Yano Ryota, and said that as long as the film got made I'd give him tickets. When I wanted the name Ryota again for Like Father, Like Son, I told him first. He asked, "Who's playing me?" I said, "Masaharu Fukuyama," and he was entirely fine with it.

C: And if it were Masaya Nakagawa — Lily Franky?

A: That would probably be fine too.

Q: In casting, have you ever seen someone in a TV drama and felt you had to work with them?

A: Sometimes it comes from watching other directors' work, but more often the chance comes through auditions, or from meeting people at festivals. That said, rather than dramas, I prefer watching actors on variety shows — you see more of what they're really like.

Q: Can you give an example from a variety show?

A: I found Hiroshi Abe on a variety show. There was a late-night Japanese program then called Chimpanzee News, in which a chimpanzee played the anchor and someone else dubbed its voice.

In one episode Hiroshi Abe was the special guest and had to answer the chimpanzee's questions while on a treadmill, and they kept speeding the treadmill up. Even with the machine going very fast, Abe refused to break into a run. I thought: this man is so handsome, so why is he being so corny about it (laughs). That was very close to what I had in mind for the lead in Still Walking, so I called him the next day. I did not, of course, tell his agent that I had found him on Chimpanzee News.

Q: You worked with Lee Ping-bin for the first time on Air Doll. How did that come about, what was it like, and what did it do for your later work?

A: Mainly it was because of Hou Hsiao-hsien. I loved Lee Ping-bin's camerawork in Hou's films and was curious how he thought on set, so I asked him to work with me. On set he always put the camera on a dolly and moved it slowly. He would watch the whole rehearsal, watch the actors' performance, and only then decide where the camera and the track should go, following the direction in which the actor's feelings were flowing to try to catch the emotion.

I remember the first scene, Mr. Itao sitting on an elevated train, the camera following where he sat, taking in the train's movement and the scenery outside the window — filming as smooth as running water. But it was very hard to shoot, because it involved whether the track should be straight or curved, and exactly what ended up in the background; it had to be adjusted every take.

At the third or fourth take, Lee Ping-bin said, "This one will do — it's the best." In the edit we confirmed that it really was the best take. Most cinematographers find it hard to say that to a director so directly. I remember thinking, how cool of him (laughs).

Q: In your writing, how do you fold plain, everyday life together with dramatic elements? Is there a trick to it?

A: After the Storm has no particularly dramatic turns; instead it weaves the small things of daily life all the way through into a story. The truth is that the ordinary is the precious side of life, and only once it is gone do you find it cannot be recovered. So in the writing you do have to watch for this, and watch whether the characters notice the small things around them. What I deliberately put into this film was the setting of a typhoon night. But what matters more is making everyone see how much the small things in life really count.

Cover image: Douban Movie