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Tokyo!

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

From the Left, Interview with Writer Gabrielle Bell, Director Michel Gondry, Director Leos Carax

 

Q: Did you view this film as sort of a deconstruction of Tokyo? Or what was your goal in analyzing Tokyo through cinema?

(MICHEL GONDRY) I think the duration of each segment sort of pushes us to create something surprising, because you just have 30 minutes, and I think it leads you to something abnormal. I don’t know how it is for everybody else, because we didn’t speak to each other, and we didn’t know what subjects [the other filmmakers] were treating, but I think this duration pushes you to bring more unexpected elements. There is a feeling of monster in Tokyo. With Gabrielle [Bell, co-writer and author of the source material], we are reading some Murakami and Edogawa Rampo, and I remember the Murakami one was a giant frog who has to fight a giant snake. It’s a very good one! There’s actually this [Edogawa Rampo] story of this guy in a chair. Pretty creepy!

Q: Leos, did you feel the same way about the effect that the duration had on your filmmaking technique?

(LEOS CARAX) With a project called “Tokyo!,” or “Paris,” or “New York,” I think it’s very superficial. You’re in the position of a foreigner, and we’re three foreigners, and it’s us vs. Tokyo, so it’s a superficial position. So I of course tried for [Merde, the sewer monster] to be the “ultimate foreigner.” I imagined he would be like a child from some lost civilization, with his own religion – fundamentalist, terrorist child – and to use the pop culture of the monster in the city. 

Q: Was Merde’s milky eye an homage to “Les Diaboliques?” 

(LEOS CARAX) No. I don’t do homage. [Laughs]

Q: Also, in the trail sequence, Merde talks about how he was born of the people; he’s their son, and they raped his mother. Was this a social commentary on westerner’s breeding terrorists?

(LEOS CARAX) It’s a bit ridiculous, the psychology inside these monster films! It’s not very serious, and not some statement. I mean monsters are always a product of the system, but it’s not meant to be [a cultural criticism].

Q: Could you talk about the casting of Steven Seagal’s daughter, Ayako Fujitani, in your segment ‘Interior Design?’ 

(MICHEL GONDRY)I love Steven Seagal so much! No… [Laughs] I did a documentary on Ayako after the shooting and we met her father and put them together, and it was pretty crazy. Actually, he’s a cop. In Louisiana, he has a radio, and if he hears about a murder – a rape or a murder – he goes and takes the bad guy out! Just imagine: you’re a bad guy, and you get caught by the police, and it’s fucking Steven Seagal arresting you with his gun! [Laughs] He’s like that, and he wanted his daughter to be a cop too. He thought it would be safe for her, but she was like, “Dad, how is it safe to be a cop?” He had a very weird logic… But anyway, we picked her because she sort of reminded Gabrielle of the original character she wrote the story about. We didn’t know she was half American at the time. We believed she was Japanese and could speak really good English, and she responded very well to the sensibility of the story, probably due to the fact that she’s half American, but we didn’t know that at the time. 

Q: Could you talk about what inspired you to make this film? Did you take some trip to Tokyo that left a lasting impression on you? 

(MICHEL GONDRY) Yeah! We all went to each other, “Let’s go make a movie about Tokyo!” No, the producer just called us.

Q: What about the three themes of the film? Did you coordinate with each other on these?

(MICHEL GONDRY) I tried to, but this guy [Carax] didn’t want to! 

Q: Did you know each other before? 

(MICHEL GONDRY) Yeah, we met once. 

CARAX: There were three films, and none of us knew what the others were doing.

Q: Leos, you’ve had two long absences from filmmaking in your career, from 1991’s “The Lovers on the Bridge” to 1999’s “Pola X,” and from that to now “Tokyo!” Were there any particular reasons for these long gaps in your resume?

(LEOS CARAX) [Shrugs] No particular reason… Just didn’t get to make the films I wanted to. This was an opportunity to make something....

(MICHEL GONDRY)It was a great offer that I experienced with the movie. The main constraint is to get a famous actor to finance the film, especially in America. We didn’t have that because it was a third of the film, and the producer was not there to say, “No, you can’t do that!” Ryo Kase (“Letters from Iwo Jima”) is pretty famous, but Ayako is not. It was good that we didn’t know anyone, because we chose them for the right reasons. 

Q: Many of your films explore the psychological toll that relationships have on people, whether it be “The Science of Sleep,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” or your short “Interior Design.” Why are you so attracted to exploring this theme in your films?

(MICHEL GONDRY) Well, I think I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong with me in this matter, and when it comes to do a movie I’m sort of naturally inclined to keep this reflection going. I would have a hard time to do a movie about a restaurant; to be invited in a good or bad restaurant doesn’t really speak to me. Or, a movie on Wall Street – although that’s come to be in my interest seeing the situation. But, it seems to be more naturally… how I use my brain, by deviance or obsession or whatever, so it’s easier for me to think about that than other subjects.

Q: Could you talk about the role of comedy in your films? Many of your films seem to have that ‘theatre of the absurd’ aspect to them, and you have a knack for casting comedic actors in many of your films.

(MICHEL GONDRY) Well, I think it’s measure is a little in-between. Like if I go to a video store, I don’t know where I’m going to look for my movies. Like “Eternal Sunshine” – sometimes it’s in comedy, sometimes it’s in drama, and it’s always problematic. A lot of directors come from [music videos] like me, with slick visuals and fashionable attitude which I don’t really like, so I have more of this comedic element. And the casting, I draw more on how I think they’re going to express their comedy. But on the other hand, I got an actor as well like Jim Carrey who wanted to become dramatically believable, so you get an actor who’s gonna take a chance on you more than an actor you could afford. Everybody wants to be Tom Hanks, and Jim Carrey has this obsession – he made this bitter comment how he’s always nominated for the Golden Globe and never for the Oscar – and he’s having a huge career, but he feels still a lack of recognition, so those actors are really drawn into taking chances.

Q: Leos, in confronting this reserved society with this ‘Id’ let loose on the street, you seem to provide an interesting juxtaposition. And when you go down to the monster’s cave, there seems to be a reckoning of the past, with all the accoutrements there reminiscent of Nanking. Was this intentional – this monster as a reckoning of the past?

(LEOS CARAX)When I say I could’ve made the film in any other city it’s true, but since it was Tokyo, I used elements from the sewers to get at their past. That’s why I used Nanking, because it’s their big trauma. But it’s a very clichéd thing to have the monster use whatever the civilization has produced against it, whether it be nuclear with Godzilla, or here it’s Nanking grenades that the monster’s going to use against today’s Japanese. It’s a monster movie, and it’s about the ultimate foreigner coming outside of the sewers and killing everyone on the streets. 

Q: It’s a country with such a high suicide rate, yet also a very big drive to be capitalistic conformists, so how did these themes play out in your film?

(MICHEL GONDRY)One thing that was a little problem to deal with is the idea that the chair is not a traditional furniture in Japan, it’s more recent, but once we visited Japan, and we saw people have dinner with chairs, it was ok. A lot of the time, there’s still this idea to be around a small table and sit on your knees, but the chair existed. But the idea you’re referring to, the suicide – I think there’s something about self-erasing in Japan, like the idea of the woman wearing the bandage to make the feet smaller, and I think that reflects that pretty well. I mean the story was written by Gabrielle about a couple in New York, but there are elements in Japanese culture which actually accentuates and gives meaning to this transformation that were maybe not so obvious in New York. 

Q: But could you talk about the sense of alienation in Japanese society?

(MICHEL GONDRY) Honestly, when I go into a country like Japan, which seems very foreign, I try to look for the resemblances more than the differences, and it takes a while to see that – it takes the same times as it does to make friends. For instance, you don’t really choose your friends – you see what’s inside them, and then you can identify the same motivations, the same problems; there are similarities inside them to what is inside you, so I look for that more. The story was happening in New York initially, and as I said, with Tokyo it was even stronger. I could talk about what I find very specific in Tokyo… It’s a very fluid and quiet city at the same time – very energetic, and quiet – because people are not so expressive. When I went back to America after spending a few months in Tokyo, I found people were walking like horses!

Q: Could you talk about how you’re influenced by the Surrealist movement? 

(MICHEL GONDRY) This is how my influences work, if there is any: I have a dream, and then I put it in a movie because I think that’s my dream, and then I realize my dream was influenced by whoever, and I feel I’m stealing! But because it’s been digested by my dream, I feel legitimate in using it. I mean it’s not always like that… I remember having a conversation with Charlie Kaufman about breaking into an ex-girlfriend’s apartment – and actually I did it in my life, it was pretty creepy! And then I put it in a movie, so was I stealing the idea of Charlie? But I lived it! But I lived it maybe because Charlie and I talked about it. See, it’s hard for me, you never know. I try to invite influences, but I prefer to watch movies and get stimulated. It’s very dangerous to claim yourself to be a surrealist, because there is something about the quality of dreams that you can’t point out – it vanishes. I think that a lot of directors, in my opinion, who are visually surrealist, are anything but. All the visuals in advertising… There are some director’s I won’t mention in there, but they take so much from the surface of surrealism. I know the guy who did the costumes for “Ivan the Terrible,” and it was Polish, and just after World War II, and they had no money. It was in black & white, and to do the earring of Ivan, they took some chestnut shells, covered them in tin foil, and put them on the ear, and it looked amazing! When I hear with “Titanic” that they went all the way to China to get the plates… A lot of people working in advertising just take the surface, and I don’t think it has anything to do with surrealism. There are qualities in the surrealist films that are very handmade and put together, cause it leaves gaps for the brain to fill. 

Q: Leos, would you consider yourself a surrealist? 

(LEOS CARAX) No. I don’t know much about surrealism…