Latest news with #Plan75
Tokyo Weekender
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Tokyo Weekender
Renoir Director Chie Hayakawa on Turning Grief Into Art
Chie Hayakawa was in elementary school when she decided she wanted to be a filmmaker. The Tokyo native went on to study photography at the New York School of Visual Arts before releasing her breakthrough short 'Niagara,' a story about a girl who goes to live with her dementia-afflicted grandmother. It was selected in the Cinéfondation section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. Hayakawa's debut feature, Plan 75 , came eight years later. A critically acclaimed dystopian drama about a government-sponsored euthanasia program available to all Japanese citizens 75 and older to address the country's aging society, it was awarded the Camera d'Or Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. Her latest flick, Renoir , a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale set in Tokyo in the late 1980s about a pre-teen girl named Fuki whose father is battling terminal cancer, was recently nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or prize at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival. Hayakawa recently spoke to Tokyo Weekender about the film. Complete Interview with Chie Hayakawa Why did you decide to make Renoir? My previous movie, Plan 75, was an issue-driven film. I, therefore, wanted to make something different; a movie about emotions that I couldn't describe in words. I've been wanting to make a film about an 11-year-old because I was about that age when I first started to think about becoming a filmmaker. There were a lot of ideas and scenes in my mind for my future film. © Renoir – Loaded Films You mentioned Plan 75, which also deals with preemptive grief. How connected are the two films? And what was it like making such a personal movie from an emotional perspective? My personal experience of living with a father who had cancer affected my perception of death, solidarity and human dignity. So I think you have similar underlying themes in both films. For me, making Renoir was like a journey to find myself. I gained a new perspective on my childhood. What kind of films inspired you when making this film? I was inspired by movies which have a child as the protagonist, such as Shinji Somai's Moving , Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, to name a few. Why did you decide on Renoir as the title? I wanted to have a title that didn't have a specific meaning. I like the contrast between a story about a little Japanese girl and a French painter. However, after showing the film at Cannes, a lot of people mentioned that the movie was like an impressionist painting. A picture starts to emerge with a lot of brush strokes and colors. Renoir has a lot of small episodes which don't look like they connect with each other, but the collections of these episodes help to give the film something special and, I hope, leave a lasting impression. © Renoir – Loaded Films The film includes a story about a pedophile who attempts to groom Fuki via phone chat chat lines. Why did you include that? Girls are constantly exposed to such dangers. Sometimes they don't understand what's going on, but have a feeling of fear or uneasiness. They also have curiosity about sexual things at that age. I wanted to depict a girl's complex feelings and bitter experience. How her dignity can be hurt by men's desires. Why did you choose the Yellow Magic Orchestra song 'Rydeen' in the movie? That was the song I danced to at a summer camp when I was a child. Also, the film is set in 1987, so I think it also embodies the positivity that Japan was feeling at that time during the bubble period. Telepathy is another theme in the film. Were you interested in that growing up? Yes, I was drawn into it. I practiced a lot when I was in my early teens. I wanted to believe it existed and that miracles were possible. © Renoir – Loaded Films Yui Suzuki was the first child to audition for the role. What impressed you about her? And what was she like to work with? I found that she has her own universe inside of her. She is a very creative artist who is brave and is very comfortable in front of the camera. I really liked her strong gaze. Once I cast her, though, I was expecting that it would be very challenging to direct a child. However, it was so easy working with Yui. I didn't really give her detailed directions. I just let her do whatever she wanted. She acted so naturally. She has real talent. What about the performances of Lily Franky and Hikari Ishida? Lily Franky reminds me of Chishu Ryu because his acting is so minimal and his presence, just standing or sitting, gives a very strong and true impression. I was impressed with Hikari Ishida's performance as she embodied a mother's frustration, desperation and weakness. How did it feel to be nominated for the Palme d'Or? I was honored and felt very encouraged as a filmmaker. But at the same time, it was very surrealistic to see my name among other legendary filmmakers. For a long time, it didn't feel real. Of course, I would love to be nominated again. My future goal, though, is just to keep making films that I can put my soul into. Renoir is showing at Shinjuku Piccadilly Cinema with English subtitles until July 17. Related Posts Chie Hayakawa's Renoir Competes for Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2025 Johatsu: A Haunting Documentary About Japan's 'Evaporated People' David Lynch and Japan – The Twin Peaks of a Decades-Long, Mutual Obsession
New Indian Express
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Cinema Without Borders: Intimations of mortality—Renoir
Unlike Plan 75, in Renoir Hayakawa goes back in time to the late 80s, but both films underline her knack for poignant and elegant storytelling. Both are complex but tender, gentle and empathetic explorations of the human condition and are marked by restraint in the craft rather than needless artistic flourishes. Moreover, both are about death—enforced in one, untimely in the other, but in neither of them does the filmmaker take recourse to sentimentality or gloom. Drawn from her own childhood experience, Renoir may not be seen as distinctly engaging, cohesive and well-rounded as Plan 75. It meanders while dealing with several story strands and movements of the plot and leaves one with a sense of uneasy open-endedness than comforting closures, more questions than answers but it still holds well because there is a veracity to emotions in Renoir when it comes to Fuki—how the impending bereavement leaves her confused, isolated and disconnected with her reality and the loved ones—perhaps consciously so—and how she escapes to fantasy to forget or make sense of the unreasonable blow. "We cry when people die. Are we sorry for ourselves or the dead?" she wonders, even as she writes a class essay on "I'd like to be an orphan", much to her teacher's dismay. Hayakawa wins the day by casting the amazing Yui Suzuki as Fuki. She has just the perfect mix of the idiosyncratic and imaginative, innocent and vulnerable to make the inner struggles of the character strongly resonant. Franky Lily and Hikari Ishida are stoic but freaky as the devastated couple. In Hayakawa's world, dualities are all. Urban loneliness and disconnect cut across age groups, be it the child in Renoir or the many aged folks in Plan 75. But both the films eventually also deal with solidarities, be it friends and the family in one or the community in the other. And death and life are eventually posited as two sides of the same coin, not so much about the bleak and the dark but about continuities despite the many pauses.
Japan Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
‘Renoir': An impressionistic portrait of grief and girlhood
Screened in the main competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Chie Hayakawa's second feature, 'Renoir,' is rather unlike her first, 2022's 'Plan 75,' which also premiered at Cannes and became a favorite on the festival circuit. In contrast to the earlier film's clear concept — the elderly are encouraged to sign up for state-sponsored euthanasia in a near-future Japan — the movingly impressionistic 'Renoir' is a loosely plotted journey through the life and mind (including the vivid dreams) of an 11-year-old girl (talented newcomer Yui Suzuki) as her father succumbs to terminal cancer. In scripting and directing 'Renoir,' Hayakawa drew on memories of her own father's death from cancer when she was her protagonist's age and the film feels deeply rooted in the characters' pasts and intensely alive to their present moment. One parallel is the 1993 Shinji Somai masterpiece 'Moving,' which also features a strong-willed girl (Tomoko Tabata) dealing with a family crisis — in her case, her parents' divorce. Similar to Somai and Hirokazu Kore-eda, another master director famed for his work with young actors (see Suzu Hirose in his 2015 'Our Little Sister' for a pertinent example), Hayakawa draws out a performance from Suzuki that is true to her character's stubbornly individual nature while feeling natural and unforced. And like Tabata, who later went on to a flourishing career, Suzuki is a riveting on-screen presence, even when her character, Fuki, is silently observing the adults around her with a hard-to-read expression and distanced air. This attitude may impress as coldness, as if she hardly cares whether her father Keiji (Lily Franky), who looks frail and elderly, lives or dies. But the blank looks, we come to understand, are a sort of coping mechanism, as is Fuki's interest in psychic and mystic powers, from mind reading to magic spells (with failures by her and others serving as moments of mild comic relief). Although her mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), is a busy career woman who seems to regard Keiji's illness and Fuki's presence as burdens, when we catch glimpses of earlier, happier times, we realize that Utako is not an ogre. Instead, she's trying to function in the face of overwhelming stress and, as Ishida's heartfelt performance reveals, deserves sympathy. The story, which unfolds in the summer of 1987, when Japan's bubble economy was at its height and digital distractions were nowhere to be found, is more a succession of incidents than a tightly woven narrative, but its development is not scattershot. Rather, its portrait of Fuki and her parents is cumulative in its power. There is also an undeniable sadness and darkness to it: Fuki becomes close to a classmate — a tall girl who shares her fascination with the supernatural — but their friendship does not last. Utako, on company orders, joins a therapy group, but the understanding leader turns out to have ulterior motives. Keiji tries to maintain his ties to his company from his sick bed, but his colleagues view him as a man of the past. 'Renoir,' however, does not descend to miserabilist drama. Like an 1880 painting by the title artist — a portrait of a girl whose cheap reproduction becomes Fuki's prized possession — it also glows with a youthful beauty and light. And we eventually see a smile from our protagonist that is not in a dream. Death hurts, but her life continues — and hope endures.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Renoir' Review: An 11-Year-Old Girl Ponders the Mysteries of the Universe in Chie Hayakawa's Extremely Low-Key Coming-of-Age Drama
An article published in a 1982 edition of the research journal Social Science & Medicine found that an overwhelming percentage of Japanese doctors neglected to share terminal diagnoses with their patients, as they felt it was unethical to condemn someone to a death sentence. That information is only glancingly alluded to in Chie Hayakawa's 'Renoir,' a diaphanous coming-of-age story that's only clouded by the burden of unbecoming (no surprise to anyone familiar with Hayawaka's dystopian euthanasia drama 'Plan 75'), but the principle behind it haunts the film's young heroine all summer long. Her name is Fuki (gifted 11-year-old Yui Suzuki), she lives in a sunny Tokyo suburb at some point during the country's transitional period in the late 1980s, and she's almost subconsciously convinced that people aren't telling her something. There's a gap between her and the rest of the world, and it only grows wider after her dad ('Shoplifters' star Lily Franky) is admitted to the hospital during the final months of his bout with cancer. It's not as if the girl doesn't know about death (her short story 'I'd Like to Be an Orphan' has one of her teachers asking a lot of questions answered by the story), but the distance between recognizing mortality and living in its shadow is vast, and Fuki is desperate for someone to help close it for her. More from IndieWire 'Highest 2 Lowest' Review: Spike Lee Returns with a Jarringly Fun and Upbeat Riff on One of Akira Kurosawa's Bleakest Films 'Splitsville' Review: Open-Relationship Comedy from 'The Climb' Team Hits All the Right Notes Of course, Fuki doesn't know what she doesn't know, and her mother Utako (Ishida Hikari) — who often talks as if her daughter weren't able to hear her — has no interest in telling her. 'Do we cry because we feel sorry for the dead,' the girl asks herself in a rare snippet of voiceover, 'or because we feel sorry for ourselves?' Her only answer is to not cry at all; to keep a straight face and listen for the secret frequencies of the universe for guidance. Inspired by an American mentalist she sees on TV, the ever-imaginative Fuki becomes obsessed with telepathy; it starts with guessing what card someone might be thinking of, and quickly evolves into 'hypnotizing' a grief-stricken neighbor into talking about her late husband. Later, Fuki will neigh at a horse in an effort to understand them, listen to her own voice echo around a tunnel in the hopes of hearing something she couldn't distill from her thoughts, and even meet a grown man from a telephone dating service in a singularly harrowing sequence that reflects Hayakawa's continued fascination with the darkest parts of the human psyche. It's a fascination that's on full display from the opening moments of 'Renoir,' and renders the entire film allergic to the cuteness that seeps into so many coming-of-age stories like it. Animated by the creative spark that pops and fizzes behind Suzuki's eyes at all times, Fuki remains a compelling figure despite her refusal to betray her feelings to the outside world, and 'Renoir' leans on the character's quiet mystery as the movie drifts from one semi-connected episode to the next. Hayakawa is a plaintive storyteller who refuses to indulge in emotional cheats of any kind, and would rather a scene be impenetrably oblique than overexplain its purpose. 'Renoir' may not be quite as sterile as 'Plan 75' (a low bar), but the film is reserved enough for its title — a reference to 'the painter of happiness,' whose work is glimpsed for a half-second in the background of one shot — to feel like a perverse joke at Fuki's expense. It's possible that Hayakawa may have been inspired by the warm lighting found in some of Renoir's work, but there are few moments in which she allows her movie to indulge in the effervescence of a Tokyo summer, and even fewer in which she conflates the country's rapid transition with the equally seismic changes that befall her young heroine. Hayakawa's script eschews any sweeping commentary in favor of a more honest and incidental portrait of growing up — one that would rather be true to the reality of Fuki's experience than mold it to fit the poetic forms of adult memory. The film's plotting is elliptical (Utako's maybe affair with the counselor at her anger management seminar is filtered through a child's understanding), its direction unimposing to the point of feeling unformed, and its poignancy more rooted in the slow build of Fuki's snowballing isolation than it is in the moment when someone finally breaks through it. There are a handful of memorable episodes along the way, such as the nightmare fuel of Fuki's aforementioned pedophile encounter, and the much nicer sequence in which she spends a day at the track with her father, but incidents like that only have so much value to a story whose beats only matter so far as they help broker Fuki's connection to the world beyond her. As would be the case in real life, there's no single incident that explains how Fuki grows over the course of that one fateful summer (even if one especially meaningful gesture towards the end helps pull her out of her silent isolation). But 'Renoir' — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl's inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season. Life can try to keep its secrets from her, but it's only a matter of time before someone as curious and deprived as Fuki is able to discover them all for herself. 'Renoir' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chie Hayakawa on Revisiting the Pain and Wonder of Childhood in Cannes Film ‘Renoir'
Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa made a quiet but unforgettable entrance onto the world stage with her 2022 feature debut Plan 75, a haunting dystopian vision of state-sponsored euthanasia for the elderly. Selected for Cannes' Un Certain Regard section, the film earned the Camera d'Or Special Mention and introduced Hayakawa as a director with an artfully restrained style and a compassionate eye for human frailty. Now, just three years later, she returns to the Croisette with Renoir, an intimate and emotionally charged childhood drama that marks her first appearance in the festival's main competition. Where Plan 75 was shaped by conceptual clarity and allegorical heft, Renoir is rooted in something looser and more elusive: the spontaneous feelings and fractured memories of childhood. Set in suburban Tokyo in 1987, the film centers on 11-year-old Fuki, a sensitive girl who retreats into her imagination as she watches her father succumb to terminal cancer and her small family fracture under the weight of impending grief. As her parents struggle with sorrow in their own isolated ways, Fuki becomes adorably fixated on telepathy and the occult, convinced that she can bridge the emotional chasms around her through the invisible powers of the mind. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Chronology of Water' Review: Kristen Stewart Makes a Boldly Assured Directing Debut, Starring a Transformative Imogen Poots Spike Lee Toasts 'Highest 2 Lowest' With The Hollywood Reporter and Threads at Cannes Bash Ruben Östlund's 'The Entertainment System Is Down' Sells to Memento for France For Hayakawa, Renoir is both a deeply personal film and a deliberate departure. 'I wanted to take a different approach this time,' she explains. 'Rather than building the film around a clear concept or message, I began with fragments — emotions and images from my own childhood — and allowed the story to emerge organically.' Hayakawa's own father died of cancer when she was young, and many of Fuki's shifting feelings — guilt, yearning, fear and awe — mirror the director's own conflicted experiences from that time. 'I'm trying to look at my childhood with compassion,' she says. 'To acknowledge the loneliness, the confusion, the selfishness—and still find a way to forgive myself and connect with others.' Despite its period-specific setting, Renoir resists nostalgia and sentimentality. Hayakawa says she chose 1987 not just because she was the same age as Fuki then, but because it was a pivotal moment in Japan's postwar identity — at the height of the country's economic bubble, when material excess masked a growing sense of spiritual emptiness. 'It was a time when people were intoxicated by prosperity but also deeply lonely,' she explains. 'I wanted to portray how fragile and precious people are, especially when they're quietly breaking apart.' The title Renoir refers to the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting 'Little Irène,' a replica of which Fuki demands her father buy her in the film. The connection there is also personal: Hayakawa's father bought her the same print when she was a child, and the image has stayed with her ever since. 'The story's connection to the painting or to Renoir the artist doesn't run deeper than that,' she says. 'Among the great impressionists, Renoir is particularly popular in Japan, and in the 1980s replicas of his paintings could be found on the walls of many homes. Such replicas were a symbol of Japan's admiration of the West at the time and its desire to 'catch up.'' Produced by Tokyo-based Loaded Films, Renoir reunites many of Hayakawa's trusted collaborators from Plan 75, including DP Hideho Urata, composer Rémi Boubal, and editor Anne Klotz. The cast features a stunning breakout performance from 11-year-old Yui Suzuki, alongside pair of Japan's most accomplished veteran actors, Lily Franky (Shoplifters, Like Father, Like Son) and Hikari Ishida. The Hollywood Reporter connected with Hayakawa in Japan ahead of Renoir's world premiere. Where did the premise and your approach to Renoir come from? My previous film, Plan 75, was structured around a very clear concept. You know, you make a film because you want to express something that can only be said cinematically. But after I finished Plan 75 and started doing interviews, I sort of had to explain the premise and the social issues in Japan that inspired it over and over. And that kind of wore me out, and sometimes I doubted my explanations about the film. So I wanted to take a different approach this time and see what kind of film I would make if I started a project without having a clear vision. Instead of a concept or issue-driven film, I wanted to make something purely emotional. When I started writing the script it was just a collection of all these little episodes I had been thinking about since I was a teenager. They didn't really connect to each other at all, and I didn't have any strong concept or premise to tie them together. So you deliberately made a film that you wouldn't be able to articulate in words — and now I'm going to ask you to explain it all in words. Hmm. (Laughs) That's how did you find your way to a story? It was very difficult. There were originally a lot more characters in it, but over time I narrowed down all of the episodes until it came to portray one summer in one little girl's life. But I still didn't really have a concrete theme in the beginning, or even during the process of writing and shooting. It wasn't until the editing phase that I realized maybe it was a story about this girl who doesn't quite have compassion for others, but then she gradually learns what real pain is — and through that pain, she takes one step towards adulthood. But that only came to be by linking all of the little episodes that make up the movie. As I was doing it, I felt like I was making some kind of sculpture out of clay — trying to shape something, but I don't know what it is. Only through the process of actually making the film did the story take shape. I imagine it could be quite scary to go that deep into making a film without yet knowing what it's really about. It was really stressful, but fun too — because I really didn't know what the result would be. Sometimes I was totally without confidence, and other times I simply enjoyed looking forward to seeing what the film would turn into. On the first day of the shoot, I held a meeting with my whole team and said, 'To be honest, I'm not sure if this movie is going to be any good.' Gradually, though, by working with my creative team and the actors, I started to feel it — that there was going to be a very strong film there. But I still couldn't see the full picture, and that was quite have to talk about your lead actress, Yui Suzuki, who plays 11-year-old Fuki. She's a revelation. She seems like a true natural. How'd you find her?So, I was aware that the casting of Fuki would be the most important part of making this film. So I was expecting to audition hundreds of kids. That's what I was prepared for. But Yui was the very first girl we had come to audition. She had appeared in a college student film that was shown at an Independent film festival in Japan, and one of my producers had done the translation and English subtitling for that film, and another producer was a member of the jury at that festival and had seen it. Both of them eagerly recommended her to me, saying she's really good. So we called her in to audition and I immediately thought she's amazing and could be the one. But she was the very first person we had seen, so I thought, 'I can't decide already, I have to see more girls.' So we held many more auditions but Yui was always on my mind, and after one or two months, I just said, 'Okay, yes, Yui is the one.' Had you worked with child actors before? How did you approach your collaboration with her? It's such a sensitive performance. No, this was the very first time for me to work with a child actor. She started modeling when she was a baby, so she's incredibly comfortable in front of a camera. It's like she doesn't even feel it. During one of our first conversations, I asked her, 'What are your strengths?' And she said, 'I'm really good at imitating animals.' And then she did an amazing horse sound, and a cat, and a sheep — and they were all perfect. Her reaction was so instinctual. So I immediately wrote that into my script. There were so many things about her that inspired me, lots of details that made it into the script. She was a big source of inspiration. But it was my first time working with a kid, so I was reading lots of books and interviews with directors about different approaches to working with child actors. Some directors work with them from a script, and others rely entirely on improvisation and even do things to make them cry when necessary. But I really wanted to respect her as a collaborator. She was already 11 years old and I thought she should understand the nature of the project she's involved in. So I tried to explain the story and the style of the film to her as much as I could. But as I said, I was still grasping at it myself. One of my biggest influences for this project was the Spanish film, The Spirit of the Beehive [by Víctor Erice]. So I sent Yui a DVD and asked her to watch it, and explained to her that the film we are trying to make is not like anything you usually see on TV in Japan. What was her reaction?She said it was her first time watching a foreign film and that she was kind of scared beforehand. But she said she really loved it, and that she understands that it seems difficult, but that we're trying to understand the feelings of kids — and she really liked that. And how did you work with her on set? Once we started doing rehearsals and shooting, I realized that she really didn't need my direction at all. I didn't really direct her in any detail. I would just say, 'This is the situation, and you can just walk this way and then sit down over there' — really simple things like that. I didn't really need to explain to her how she should feel, or what kind of face she should make, or anythign like that. She's very natural and she would add clay to the sculpture in her own way. I really came to trust and rely on her. She's a real artist. You've mentioned how you deliberately wanted to make a film quite different from . But I have to say, I did see some real continuity between the protagonists — particularly Chieko Baisho's character near the end of . There's sort of an existentialist quality, or a mindfulness and sensory joy in the way your protagonists relate to their world. They struck me as similar characters who happen to be on opposite ends of the and the protagonist of Plan 75, they both appear passive in a way. They always seem to be just taking things in — the people and the situations around them — but we also get a strong sense of emotion from them somehow. We feel their spirit. So, in that sense, I agree that there's a real connection between these characters. Of course, there's a shared sensibility because they were both created by the same writer/director, I suppose.I have to say, even though we've only met a couple of times, I found that Yui kind of looks like a young version of you — and even has a similar vibe to you. Did you see her as your avatar to an extent?(Laughs) Well, not really. When I was casting the protagonist, I remember thinking that the most important quality was that she had to be very attractive. Not that she needed to be beautiful — not in that way — but she should have a quality where people can't help but keep watching her. I didn't at all try to find someone who looks like me, but during the shoot, some of my collaborators did say to me, 'Hey, Fuki kind of looks like you.' But I really didn't aspire to make an autobiographical movie. If anything, I think maybe I started subtly imitating her, because I was always studying her so closely through the monitor on set. You know when you spend a lot of time with someone, you start unintentionally imitating their facial expressions? It may have partly been that. A core observation I kept returning to while watching the film is the way children feel things very intensely but seldom have the intellectual framework or language to understand and communicate what they're going through. So I just loved how you used dream sequences as a way of gaining access to Fuki's emotional world. At the beginning, she's going through some very tough emotional moments without really realizing it, and she has quite strange and scary nightmares. By the end, when she finally gets a warm hug from a teacher who recognizes what she's going through — and she gets to enjoy a happy day of playing at the beach — we get that adorable, cheerful dream of Fuki aboard a glamorous boat party — which is just the sort of thing you would hope for a little girl to dream about. I don't really have a question here, but you handled all of that so elegantly — it makes me teary-eyed just thinking about it. Well, I'm really happy to hear that, because I've gotten a lot of comments from people asking why those scenes are in there, or what they are supposed to mean. So that's a relief. Do you see yourself as part of a humanist filmmaking tradition in Japan? For example, it seems inevitable that Hirokazu Kore-eda will be referenced in discussions of this film — especially in Cannes, where he's a regular — because of its tone and the graceful foregrounding of a child actor. Yes, I'm expecting that people will refer to Kore-eda-san, because of the theme and the child actor part. I even cast Lily Franky, who is one of his regular actors. I myself feel Kore-eda-san's influence. I got to know his films when I was a high school student and I love his work. But an even bigger influence on this film was Somai Shinji's Moving. I reference that film a lot. As for the visual style, before shooting I spoke with my DP a lot about Moving, The Spirit of the Beehive and Edward Yang's Yi Yi. So there are several direct influences. So, after debuting in Un Certain Regard three years ago with , you're in Cannes main competition with this year. It seems you're fast becoming a member of 'the Cannes family' as Thierry Frémaux likes to call it. How are you feeling about it all?When I first saw my name among all of those other amazing directors on the competition lineup, it felt surreal. Of course, I'm honored, but so far, it just feels very weird. It doesn't seem real yet. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
