I was completely blown away by the fact that the number of Japanese films produced each year is around 600, comparable to that of the United States.
Continuous stories about high school girls, stories where the characters somehow have incurable diseases or die in accidents, young people’s love lives and parent-child conflicts that take place in cheap flats, yakuza stories where the characters curse at each other rolling their r’s, animation, or live action based on anime or comics… The current situation seems to be dominated by stories like these.
The characters all have smooth faces without a single wrinkle, not a single stray hair, and without a slightest hint of sweat, and who definitely will scream or cry. The nauseating decorations of snack bars and karaoke bars, the same model of system kitchen installed in kitchens whether in apartments or rural homes, and family members coming home with plastic bags from the supermarket or convenience store.
There is a coat hanger from Nitori in the room, and for some reason there are two or three towels and underwear or socks hanging on a plastic clothes hanger at the back of the room. A lawyer is drinking juice noisily from a carton with a straw, and together with the ending credits a high-pitched shouting song that was featured in the film starts to play… I have absolutely no interest in these kinds of cheesy, everyday film-type movies.
You may be hearing the objections: “This is Japan, after all,” “What’s wrong with that?” and “Isn’t it realistic?” Japanese cinema has fallen to this point because it has thrown these faces with no sign of life into settings that are like sketches of ‘a possible story’, ‘a scene you’ve seen somewhere, sometime’, ‘what’s right in front of you’ and ‘a reality that only exists in Japan’, and letting the actors act as they wish.
What was it that made such an impact on these current directors who are mass-producing such films that they thought, “I want to become a film director?” What made all the on-site production staff want to get involved in film production?
Some people may say, “There’s no such thing,” or “I was invited by a friend by chance.” I’ve also seen directors boast in YouTube that, “I don’t watch that many movies,” and that “I don’t think many people in the industry have watched films not so many either.”
On the other hand, I have even heard people say things like, “Were we yelled at, kicked, and forced to work like a slave without sleep every day for such a crappy movie…”
As proof of this, we hear that today’s Japanese film industry is more seriously short-staffed than ever, with young staff quitting one after another.
In the late ’90s, my short films were invited to film festivals around the world and received worldwide recognition. When I started to make every effort to make a feature film, most production companies didn’t even look at me. However, I received offers like, “Do you want to make an idol film for Ki–y?” and “TO–I SFX are looking for a production manager, do you want to give it a try?” I was also invited to his elegant cigar room by the president of a furniture company, who told me, “If you have 5 million yen, you can make a (feature) film, right?”
I flatly refused all of these offers because I knew that it would end up being something else, not a film.
We often hear things like, “Many people grab their chance from there,” “Some directors have become masters after working in pink films, ROMAN-PORNO, V-CINEMA and idol films,” and “Many have been ruined because they were too particular,” but is that really the case?
The reality is that directors who debuted in the 1990s and were fairly well-known are now directing late-night TV dramas, and most other directors, perhaps to make a living, are now professors or part-time lecturers in newly established “film departments” at universities or art universities.
The same goes for the technical staff; cinematographers and others who show even the slightest bit of insight quickly find jobs as part-time professors or lecturers, while many others seem to have left the film industry to find other jobs.
It reminds me of a line from the movie Traffic, in which a Mexican drug trafficking leader mocks the detectives and says, “You are like Japanese soldiers left on an isolated island, without knowing that you have lost the war”.
The people who created the “island nation” of the “Japanese film industry,” which has been abandoned by the public because it has mass-produced movies that are like poorly made sketches, and has fallen to the point where it has been lumped together with the pronoun “content,” do not realize that they are continuing to increase the number of people who “work like slaves, but cannot make a living, no matter how hard they work” in order to make ends meet…
“Too much pickiness crushes a talent”, they say, but there is no such thing as an artist without a strong pickiness. A clumsy sketch or doodle made without any particular attention to detail will never be elevated to the status of art; it will simply be glanced at by people (consumed) and quickly forgotten (thrown away).
That’s why I believe that if I don’t pay strict attention to the script, subject matter, composition, colors, music, and editing of the film I want and need to make, I will regret it for the rest of my life.