Yukihiko Tsutsumi interview: “The Killer Goldfish is a new approach to Japanese filmmaking” | easternkicks.com (2024)

As LIFFF prepares to welcome a Japanese box office giant to London, we look back on his wide-ranging career…

The London International Fantastic Film Festival (LIFFF) embarks upon its inaugural edition next week, and its opening night is one for the books. Storied director of domestic blockbuster hits Yukihiko Tsutsumi (2LDK, Egg, 20th Century Boys) will join the London audience in person for the Uk premiere of his new film The Killer Goldfish, accompanied by producer Takeshi Moriya and lead actress Erika Oka.

You’ve likely seen a Tsutsumi film, even if you don’t realise that you have. Ahead of the team’s arrival in London, we speak over Zoom for a career overview interview. Festival director Kanako Fujita provides translation, and Tsutsumi is joined by The Killer Goldfish and SUPER SAPIENSS producer Takeshi Moriya, who also offers insights.

In Japan, you’re a director that needs no introduction. You’re astoundingly, impressively prolific. Internationally, Takashi Miike is widely thought of the Japanese director with the most credits, but you’re not far behind. What drives you to create so much?

Yukihiko Tsutsumi: I originally started in television, as a variety show director. In 1988, I debuted as a film director. I’ve directed 56 films since, and I’ve also directed TV shows, theatre productions, commercials, and more. I stopped counting how many TV series I directed.

The reason why I’ve been involved in so many productions is that each film is quite low budget. To make a living, I’ve had to make a lot.

Tell me more about those beginnings. You did a lot of television, you participated in some anthology films at the start of your career, and some V-cinema productions. I’m curious about your journey from these early days through to blockbusters.

In the late 1980s, there was little distinction between TV and film.If you could make interesting shots and cuts, they’d let you try something else as well.

There were so many opportunities open for directors.It was a transition period from a traditional Japanese filmmaking style into a more casual one.It was a transition period for technology too, moving from shooting on film to digital. Because of that, I didn’t have any fear starting my filmmaking journey.

I directed in many different genres. The famous director Morita Yoshimitsu (Haru) took notice of me and recommended me for a short film in 1988. That was my debut, Bakayaro! I’m Plenty Mad. After the completion of that film, I moved to New York, where I built a company with the Japanese community there.

Could you tell me more about that period of transition to digital?What interests me there is that it’s a period when a lot of Japanese filmmakers were coming up for the first time, a lot of whom are still shaping the Japanese film landscape today.

At that time, there were still a lot of people with a traditional filmmaking style.It was the minority who didn’t see a distinction between TV and film. The majority still followed a Japanese traditional studio style of filmmaking.At the same time, there was a tradition of making a film out of hit TV series.Film was starting to be considered as something that follows a popular TV series.

I directed quite a lot of variety shows and TV series during this period, and that trend worked in my favour such that I made quite a lot of films in the 1990s.

Even today, there are a lot of directors who follow the traditional mode of filmmaking, for example Takeshi Kitano. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it’s not something I’ve learned myself. Even in the U.S., there are still many directors who shoot on film. But I’m a director who was born with a digital style.

I think that comes through in your feature film work.There’s a televisual style, and I mean that here as a compliment. The visual surrealism is often reminiscent of Japanese TV commercials.It feels like you’ve learned from TV rather than from cinema.Is that accurate?

I learned from Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.I liked comedy most of all. I’d say my style is also adjacent to the music videos of that era. I had to learn how to make films, and that took around twenty years from my debut. Along the way, I developed my style and encountered many other directors who made surreal films, Aki Kaurismäki, for example, I respect a great deal. There was a lot of that type of director in the U.S., and I was influenced by many of them.

What’s your perception of how your films have been received internationally, or how much they’ve travelled?I’m familiar with you from films such as 20th Century Boys, 2LDK and Egg, but there’s a vast filmography of yours that most people in the U.K. and the U.S. haven’t seen.

I’m aware of the overseas popularity of live-action films based on manga, especially in France. The 20^th Century Boys films and Beck are examples of that.

As for 2LDK and Egg, the former was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the States, and the latter is soon to be released on Blu-ray. Those are my original scripts, and I don’t quite understand why they’re popular. The Killer Goldfish is also my original script. I think the style is similar to those two films.

I agree. To me, it feels like an amalgamation of your past work: an interesting middle point between your original works, like 2LDK and Egg, and some of your more commercial work, like 20th Century Boys. There’s a slick commercial style to it, but you throw in these highly unusual visual elements.

The Killer Goldfish is actually intended more for European audiences than the domestic audience. I thought if I shot in a similar way to 2LDK and Egg, it might suit that audience better. Then there’s the script, which concerns the revenge of the Neanderthal people.

I’m glad that we’re bringing it to the UK. Hopefully its intended audience will connect with it.

As you noted, you’ve had some original works that you’ve written and directed yourself, but many more of your films have been directed from other people’s screenplays. Do you view yourself as a director-for-hire, generally speaking, or do you feel yourself deep down to be an auteur of sorts?

We’re marketing The Killer Goldfish at LIFFF as being ‘from the director of 2LDK’, and that means something to some people, but how much do you want it to mean to people?

There may be some noticeable trademarks, but I’m 80% a director-for-hire, and 20% an auteur director.I’m not necessarily thinking in terms of high art, but I want to capture what I find interesting through the medium of film.

Next year, I’m turning 70. I don’t think I’ll keep doing 80/20. I want to make what I want to make and make money from it if I can. The Killer Goldfish was born out of that sentiment.

Reading up on Western critics’ takes on your films, I found one quote for example that described them as ‘fast paced and frenetic’.I would use words such as surreal, structural, and sprawling.What would you say is the core of your filmmaking?

Since I tend to gather many elements that I want to include and put them in a single film, I understand why people describe my films as ‘frenetic’, and I use that sort of style for commercial purposes.

I’d like to make a film dealing with social issues and real-life incidents in Japan. In Korea recently, there was a film called 12.12: The Day that explored a real historical event. I’d like to make a film like that.

I find it striking that your films that centre female perspectives with strong interiority, 2LDK and Truth, you co-wrote with a female co-writer, Uiko Miura. Can you tell me about that collaboration?

She’s a great writer.She has a strong core in terms of the way that she lives.She’s especially good at writing women’s jealousy and envy, how women develop hateful feelings towards each other. We work on a lot of scripts centring dialogue scenes.

We shot Truth during the pandemic. It was screened in the UK at North East International Film Festival, and I won the Best Comedy award.The way she writes, it’s something interesting and I’s something that I don’t have inside of me. I trust her.

Tell me about Egg. It’s a remarkable film, and a film with a distinctly arthouse sensibility made just before you made a more complete move into blockbuster filmmaking.So I’m curious about the genesis of that project. It’ll be on readers’ radars anew soon, as it’s getting a Blu-ray release early next year from Error4444.

I had been preparing a big film. It was to star Kōji Yakusho, an adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s novel Exodus from Hopeless Japan(Kibō no Kuni no Exodus). We were planning to shoot in Thailand, it was quite a big-budget blockbuster film. But, for various reasons, it didn’t work out, and we suddenly found ourselves with a blank schedule for three months. I talked to the producer for that film, asking: if I write the script within one week, can I shoot something else? And that’s how we started working on Egg.

I did finish the script in one week, we did pre-production in ten days, and we shot the entire thing in two weeks. Egg is a kaiju film, and it’s quite hard to prepare a kaiju in ten days, but we somehow managed it.

You’ve adapted a variety of source material to film.You’ve done manga in 20th Century Boys and Beck, as we’ve discussed. You’ve done video games in Forbidden Siren.

What’s your approach to adaptation?Do you yourself go look at the source material first and work from there?What makes you feel like a project is the right fit with you, or makes a producer come to you and go: I think you’re the right director for the job.

Manga is quite easy to adapt, because the picture is already there. My job is to make the look match the original panels as closely as possible. For example, making actors put on wigs and costumes. Particularly popular in Japan right now are ‘2.5-dimensional’ musicals, the adaptation of novels, manga, or anime into live-action musicals.My style is quite similar.I would say mine is a 2.5-dimensional way of creating characters.

The impression of a novel or the understanding of it depends on each individual.When I adapt novels, I usually pursue the images that I had in my mind when reading them. I do a lot of research related to the content in the novel, so that I should experience something similar to the author did when they were writing the book.For example, if a film was dealing with psychotherapists, I do a lot of research into them, I do interviews, studies, and then, finally, we shoot.

You mentioned how adapting manga is easier for you because the picture is already there.In the case of 20th Century Boys, that’s especially true. There are few mangaka as cinematic in their panelling than Naoki Urasawa.

I’d like to ask a few questions about 20th Century Boys, because those films were my introduction to your work. I first saw them in my teenage years, and they were formative in my love of Japanese cinema.

We’re around 15 years on from those films now. At the time of production, it was the most expensive Japanese film project in history.It’s an incredible undertaking, so I’d love to know how that project came about, how it was brought to you, and your reflections on it.

It was a trend in that period in the 2000s for TV broadcasters to produce big budget films. 20^th Century Boys was produced by one of the main ones, Nippon Television, who made an offer to me.

The manga was already a huge hit, so I knew the title. I’m not a manga otaku, so I hadn’t read it. When I got the offer, I started reading. I fell in love with it, it was so interesting.

I began to assemble the team. A lot of my time was spent making the actors look like the characters. Rock music was a major part of the manga, so I emphasised that. And there was a lot of CG.

I took inspiration from George Orwell’s 1984 and the futuristic sci-fi cinema of Terry Gilliam. I was really into that world, and I spent years trying to capture it well.

Urasawa worked closely with you on the film’s production. I know he contributed the original song, ‘Bob Lennon’. I’m curious about that collaboration.

Urasawa-san is a rock musician himself.When I look back on that collaboration, I remember we mostly only talked about music.

For example, the guitar that Kenji uses, I thought it was a Martin guitar. But actually, Urasawa said, it’s a random guitar, around 10,000 yen, that he found in a thrift shop. He suggested casting Yukihiro Takahashi of YMO [Yellow Magic Orchestra] fame for Kenji’s band. Urasawa-san decided to participate in the screenplay himself, which we gladly accepted.

Another behind the scenes story about Kenji’s guitar is that it’s actually my guitar. Expecting Kenji’s guitar to be an expensive one, I bought a really nice, pricey one, about 400,000 yen. I gave my guitar to the production crew completely new, but the assistant director added aging and dirt to it. I cried a little bit.

Speaking broader on the present, it feels an exciting moment in Japanese cinema right now.There are new Japanese filmmakers emerging on the international stage, and it feels like the world is finally beginning to take notice of Japan again.After the period in the late 90s into the early 2000s where, internationally, Japanese cinema was blowing up, I feel we had a relatively quiet decade or two. Now things are starting to pick up again. What’s your impression of Japanese cinema today, both domestically and abroad?

Tsutsumi: I would like to ask producer Moriya’s opinion as well, but, as for my opinion, I’d say overall the level of Japanese cinema is quite low compared to the global standard, except for a few popular Japanese film directors nowadays.It’s partially because Korea is now rising, so Japan is now relatively lower in the global standard.We have a tradition of Kurosawa and Ozu, but I don’t think it’s been passed on to our generation.

That’s because a lot of companies are making films purely for the sake of profit.For our new project, The Killer Goldfish, we wanted to change this situation, and that’s why our company Supersapienss pursues a new style of filmmaking, not to just look for profit, but for artistic purposes as well.

Takeshi Moriya: I think the Japanese film industry is so closed off as a domestic industry. I wanted to make a system that’s completely different from the traditional Japanese film commission system.With Supersapienss, the creators submit their original script and then have creative authority from the beginning to the end of the filmmaking, from the writing till the film reaches audiences.That was what we were aiming for.

Tsutsumi: I think there are so many fun, amazing Japanese independent films being screened in cinemas every single day in Japan.I hope international audiences will discover something more than Godzilla or anime.Because the domestic market is so small, I see the need for these films to break through into the international markets, and I’d like to spend the rest of my career working on that.

I think that’s a wonderful goal. Breaking through international barriers with this amazing mass of work that’s being produced in Japan is at the heart of what we’re trying to do with London International Fantastic Film Festival. It’s at the heart of what I’m trying to do with my interview work with Japanese filmmakers. So it’s a goal that I feel we share. It’s important to me, and I admire that sentiment.

As we’ve discussed, The Killer Goldfish is the first production by SUPER SAPIENSS.Tell me about this collective, who you are, and how it came about.

There was a film festival hosted by Moriya-san in Aichi Prefecture during the pandemic. Moriya and I, along with KatsuyukiMotohiro (Summer Time Machine Blues) and Yuichi Sato (City Hunter), spoke over Zoom for an hour during that festival.

We discussed filmmaking and questioned the traditional Japanese filmmaking process. Under that system directors wait for the project to be offered to them, they make the film, and then it’s distributed.We questioned this whole process and decided to start a collective of the four of us called SUPER SAPIENSS. We’re not making films for investors, we’re making them for individuals who empathise with our creative visions.Which is why we crowdsourced this film. We invited backers to revise the script and visit the shoot. It’s more like filmmaking in university, where all the students come together to make a film. A group of people creating something fun together.

What was the conceptual genesis of The Killer Goldfish? Unlike other recent films of yours, this is an original work, and it’s created with a cross-media element.

The idea came to me quite suddenly while I was walking from Ebisu Station in Tokyo to my friend’s house one day. I immediately called my screenwriter friend Takayuki Kayano, who lives in Fukuoka. I explained the central idea, Neanderthals sending messages to modern homo sapiens. It’s scientifically proven that modern homo sapiens still carry the DNA and genetics of the Neanderthal people. The idea in the film is that the Neanderthal people use genetically modified animals to send messages to modern humans.

This idea of messages from the past influencing the present is reminiscent of 20th Century Boys. I think it’s interesting how your director-for-hire projects inform your later original works.

But the story itself is completely different.There’s a murder incident, and then the protagonist dies, and they reincarnate into different characters.

I was also inspired by an academic book about homo sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It won the Wenjin Book Award. I read it a couple of years ago, and it piqued my curiosity about the topic.

We’ll discuss the content of The Killer Goldfish further in the onstage Q&A after the film, which I’m looking forward to.

We’re excited to welcome you to London next week. Have you been to London before?

Yes, I was in Kensington for about a month in the ‘80s. I spent two years in New York also. I wonder why I can’t speak English.

As a closing question, do you have any words for the London audience?What does the film have in store for them?Who do you think will most appreciate this film?

Tsutsumi: People might have a perception about Japanese cinema as something serious, but I want to prove that there are some crazy directors as well. I would like the audiences to enjoy the diversity of Japanese film.There are a couple more Japanese films included in the LIFFF lineup, so I hope the London audiences discover the rise of Japanese cinema in the 2020s.

Moriya: We’re so happy to have been selected as the Opening Film for the London International Fantastic Film Festival.I hope the fire starts from the UK for The Killer Goldfish, and I hope the audience enjoys this completely new kind of film.

The Killer Goldfish screens in its UK Premiere with cast and crew in attendance on Tuesday 26^th November at BLOC Cinema as Opening Night Film of London International Fantastic Film Festival (LIFFF). You can purchase tickets here.