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White on Rice

Coverge by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : 40-year-old Jimmy is growing up, or at least he's getting older. While mooching the upper bunk of his ten-year-old nephew's bed, he enjoys the never-ending generosity of his sister Aiko, and dodges the wrath of his impatient brother-in-law Tak. He thinks that if only he could get married all his problems would be solved. But when he falls head over heels for Tak's niece things only go from bad to worse.

Opened Mrach 12, 2010

Runtime:1 hr. 25 min.

Interview with director Dave Boyle

Q:  Could you talk about the collaboration in working with co-writer Joel Clark? Do any of you guys speak Japanese, because there are lot of Japanese lines in this film?
 
Dave Boyle:  I speak Japanese, Joel does not. Basically our collaboration went like this. I didn't meet him until midway through writing the screenplay. And when we are both writing in English together, the actors and I decided which scenes were gonna be in Japanese and which scenes were gonna be in English.

I worked with the actors on the Japanese language dialogue, so the screenplay is mostly English, but there are parts with a Japanese version of the lines. And I let the actors improvise some of the Japanese language dialogue or at least change it to fit their way of speaking. 
 
Q: So you aren't born from Japanese parents?
 
Dave Boyle:  No, No, I'm not. Do you know the Japanese talent, Kent Derricott? I learned Japanese the same way that he did a long time ago, I was a volunteer missionary except I didn't go to Japan. I went to a Japanese community in Australia. I thought I learned to speak Japanese, and I learned a little bit about Japanese culture and stuff. In making a movie, I really relied on the actors for the dialogue and some of the cultural things. 
 
Q: Did you happen to know that the actress Nae was really popular in Japan back in the 90's? How did you get to cast her?
 
Dave Boyle:  I've actually seen her in Yoji Yamada's movie, Gakko (School). Around the time we were making the film, she was just starting to do Hollywood movies like Letters from Iwo Jima and Inland Empire. I think that somebody suggested we try to talk to her. She really liked the script. She's really an amazingly talented actress, a lot of fun to work with. So I hope she gets more recognition.  

Q: So what was the particular element that fascinated you enough to cast her?
 
Dave Boyle:  Well, I had a meeting with her and Hiroshi, who played the main character. They really seemed like  brother and sister, they had a really good interaction with each other. They really had the right type of chemistry to play brother and sister. So that's why I knew she was the right person for it.
 
Q: There's interesting stuff in the film. The Japanese traditional man, close to 40~50 years old like the main character in this film, kind of hates or dislikes tall woman. I thought that you kind of got that down about the Japanese!
 
Dave Boyle:   That's actually my favorite scene in the movie, and the part of the tall woman was really hard to cast. You know, it’s hard to find somebody who is a good actress and tall enough to make the gag funny. Kayako Takatsuna is actually not that tall—she's always standing on a box or whatever so that she looks really tall. But she was really a great actress.
 
Q: What about the kid, Bob, played by Justin Kwong?  In the film, he doesn't speak any Japanese at all. And there are a lot of people in this country who can't speak  their parents’ own native language? You are consciously aware of this as you incorporate it into this film?
 
Dave Boyle:   He's just like the character Bob in real life. His mother is Japanese, and she was always on the set and always spoke to him in Japanese, but he just speaks back in English. And a lot of my Japanese American friends or Asian American friends have the same thing. You know they get to a certain age, they don't wanna speak their parents’ language any more. They just start to speak in English, and later on in life, they regret it. 
 
Q: The main character, Jimmy, played by Hiroshi Watanabe, had an ex-wife. But you actually didn't go through the process of showing their back ground story of how they divorced or got married. Did you consciously avoid that to focus on the current situation?
 
Dave Boyle:  Yeah, I thought it would be a little bit funnier if we never meet her and the only thing we know about her is see her picture. I think probably no matter what we did, whatever I imagined about their first marriage, it's probably funnier than anything that I can come up with. So I just leave it up to the viewers to imagine his life in Japan.
 
Q: Could you talk about the process of casting Hiroshi Watanabe? He was really the right choice for the actors.
 
Dave Boyle:  You know it's funny. I made another movie called, Big Dreams Little Tokyo, a very low-budget indie movie. I did that before he was in Letters from Iwo Jima. And we became friends. I thought he was really good in my first movie. He just played the little part, but he totally stole the scene away from everybody else.

So I remembered him, and  I thought he would be really great in a leading role like a comedy. I thought that he would be really great for the tora-san (Japanese comedy series) type of movie. So I had a script called White on Rice, and at the time, it wasn't about the Japanese language or Japanese theme, it was just the story about a 40-year-old man. And I decided that I was gonna cast him in the lead role. I changed around to Japanese culture a little bit.
 
Q: Could you talk about the challenge of balancing out trying to avoid the stereotype of Japanese or Asian character while at the same time trying to be funny?
 
Dave Boyle:   Yeah that can be challenging. Since I'm not Asian, I had to be extra careful. But I think what I was trying to do was—basically have all the characters be very unique in themselves. And whatever that somebody might think of a stereotype, I tried to make the character so specific that it is different from what people would expect.

There's a big variety in a number of different characters; I think there’s somebody in the movie for everybody to relate to. You know, when Americans see it, I don't think they’ll feel that all Asian people are like Jimmy or all of them like Bob. They just recognize them as individual characters—for their individuality instead of as a stereotype. So far, the reactions have been good. 
 
Q: What was your fascination about Japanese culture?
 
Dave Boyle:  You know it's funny. I speak Japanese, but I just kind of learned that accidentally, I guess. My first movie was more specifically about the Japanese culture whereas this one is just a story that happened to star Japanese characters, if that maked sense. So it's not really directly about Japanese culture, it's just about people that happen to be Japanese. 
 
Q: So what is your next film?
 
Dave Boyle:  I'm working on a couple of different projects that I'm writing. And I'm shooting a very low budget movie this summer called Surrogate Valentine. That one doesn't have any Japanese language. But I’d like to make a movie in Japan at some point. I'm actually going to Japan for the Japanese premiere of White on Rice this weekend (10 March 10 2010). I and Hiroshi and Nae are all gonna be there at the Osaka Asian Film Festival. 
 
Q: Have you found a distributor in Japan?
 
Dave Boyle:  We don't have a distributor yet, but we are shopping it around. And I think that the festival would be a kind of big test. There will be a first-time showing with Japanese subtitles to an all-Japanese audience. So depending on their reaction, we can probably find a distributor in Japan. That's what I hope.

End.