1) Just click here for previews.
2) IMDB Filmography
Thursday, February 5, 2009
仁義なき戦い* BORYOKU (Violence) - Kinji Fukasaku
Interview is without subtitles. Sorry!
Battle Without Honor and Humanity.
An interview on violence; just click here.
blogger Tags: Kinji Fukasaku, Violence
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
An Interview with Kinji Fukasaku
He changed the face of Japanese action cinema forever with Battles Without Honour and Humanity and its many offspring in the early seventies, but the last two decades Kinji Fukasaku's career increasingly became that of a journeyman director, albeit a very successful one. Now with Battle Royale, the film that shocked a nation with its violent portrayal of a future society where juvenile delinquency is eradicated by extreme means, the director is back doing what he does best. Even at 70 years old, Kinji Fukasaku continues to make films that shock, grab and disturb the viewer.
TM: Is Battle Royale a warning to the youth or advice?
KF: (long silence) You know, both those words sound very strong to me, like things you would very active set out to do. But I didn't make the film which such strong thoughts in my mind. This film is a fable. The themes which are included in the film are very much realistic modern issues, youth crime is a very serious issue in Japan. It's not that I'm not concerned or not interested, but those are just the basis of the fable.
TM: I asked specifically about it being a warning or an advice, because the film ends with a very strong message: "Run". It came across as being very positive.
KF: That was the conclusion of the fable that was developed throughout the film. I guess it could be seen as a message. I took your question as having a much stronger meaning than just a simple message. That's why I answered that it wasn't particularly a warning or advice. To me, these are greetings to the young people. Those were my words to the next generation of young people, so whether you take that as a message or as a warning or advice is up to you as the viewer.
TM: In the film you're taking these children, contemporary children, and putting them through wartime experiences. Maybe they are similar to the kind of experiences you yourself lived through in World War II or right after. Is there a reason behind this? Do you feel living through those experiences builds a person's character?
KF: The young people's existence in the current time in this world presents different issues. To themselves as well as to others, the adults. Looking back to when I was fifteen I went through a certain period and experience. For this film I posed myself the question "How would that be for these young people?" I am fully aware that there is a generation gap between where I stand and where those kids stand. How we fill this gap was one of the issues we had to deal with during the actual shooting of this film.
So I wondered what the significance of making this kind of film in today's Japan would be. What sort of result or conclusion would that bring? To be honest to you, that was something I had to wait for until the film was actually made. When I mentioned it wasn't as strong as warning or advice, I couldn't answer your question in a strong, positive way, that this was the message or that. It was just my way of talking to them, saying some words to the children.
TM: Was it a problem for you that many children couldn't see the film as a result of the R15 rating it received from the ratings board?
Because of my own experiences as a fifteen-year-old, and also through the original novel which sets the story around fifteen year olds and then the actors who were all cast around the age of fifteen - although there are differences, some are older - the R15 decision by Eirin naturally was something I couldn't accept. I did lodge a complaint and asked for a review.
However before this issue with the censor board came to any kind of conclusion, we had an interjection from the parliamentarians who alledged that this film is very harmful to the youth. Then there was also the question cast by them as to the validity of the organisation and system of the censor board itself. Because Eirin is a self-regulatory censor board and board members are selected by the film industry. So I had to withdraw my objections against the censor board for the time being in order to fight the parliamentarians. Therefore the issues which are still pending with the board will have to wait until I get back to Japan after the festival.
I want to explain just so there will be no misunderstanding. These censor board members are elected by the film industry. Japan went through an experience during the war of being oppressed by different government regulations as well as after the war, when we were subjected to a different kind of very painful experience of oppression by the occupational forces.
The censor board has a role to play to actually appeal to society by self-regulating with a strong message: that we oppose any government regulation or repression as well as any restrictive measures by the police for example. In this sense I don't believe Japan is unique. This stance is prevalent all over the world.
TM: You call the film a fable, but I feel it's certainly a political fable. It's very interesting that the politics of the government in this film are very conservative or reactionary and that they are the ideological opposite of the politics you questioned in your films from the sixties and seventies. There the politics seemed to be more progressive, wanting to rebuild Japan and move forward.
If you talk about the reconstruction of Japan after the war, the most important objective for the government at the time was to really rebuild Japan, so in that sense you may consider the attitude of that government progressive. However if you put the spotlight on the people, also the situation I went through, I could not help being very interested in the fact that people were actually going in the opposite direction, in the interest of the government's banner of reconstruction of Japan. Because the government was very keen on, and pre-occupied with, the reconstruction of Japan and rapid economic growth.
But I had doubts. Under that kind of situation where would the government be taking the whole nation? What direction are they taking us? And those were the question I could never shake off and I even felt resistance to what was going on. That was very much clear in my films of the seventies.
TM: So with Battle Royale you're still asking basically the same question? Where are these politics taking us?
Yes.
TM: A strong theme in the film is the generation gap. Especially that the older generations feel that the younger generation no longer respect their elders. But in the film, many of the children's main motivation is a father or an uncle, an elder figure.
The fact that adults lost confidence in themselves, that's what is shown in the film. Those adults worked very hard in the seventies in order to rebuild Japan. They went through that period working for the national interest. Of course there was a generation gap between the young and adults, even throughout that period, but consistently adults were in control in terms of political stability and whatever was going in the nation.
However, since the burst of the bubble economy, these same adults, many of them salarymen and working class people, they were put in a very difficult position with the recession or economic downturn and all of a sudden most of them started to lose confidence in themselves. And the children who have grown up and witnessed what happened to the adults, their anxiety became heightened as well. So I put this film in this context of children versus adults.
TM: It also seems to me that the children in the film are trying to do good towards their elders. For instance the stranger in the class constantly credits his father for something he is good at, another says he is able to make molotov cocktails because he was taught by his uncle and so on.
For these boys, the older people are not right there by their side to give advice. They are in a very distant presence. They have gone off to an area from which they will never return. Take the father who hung himself. He told his son the message to "go for it" and "you will make it", but he is no longer there. In the classroom, the teacher is not even liked by his own daughter and then he loses his affection for the children who are the same generation as his daughter.
All these things are all dramas unfolding in front of the children. But these adults behave at their own whim. They have their own thing to do, their own logics or arguments or emotion. Not to any specific purpose. They are just running wild as it were with their own feeling or whatever they wanted to do or didn't want to do. The impact of those adults' behavior on the children was something that was interesting.
TM: The generation gap was also a theme in a film you made about ten years ago, called The Triple Cross. But there it seemed to be the opposite, you seemed to be on the side of the elders.
Yes. You say that I was on the other side, but the young people in that film were not fifteen years old, they were all in their twenties. Even if they are in their twenties, they don't really have a significant purpose or a standing of where they wanted to go. And they would go really far off, to the point of anarchism in order to support the band that they had. Even if that meant at the expense of the lives of some of their friends.
JS: I want to go back to the sixties, and one of my favourite Japanese films, Black Lizard. The story was written by Edogawa Rampo, but it was an adaptation by Yukio Mishima. I wanted to know what it was like to work with such a well-known figure.
(laughs) I was very attached to Mishima's literature, especially the book Forbidden Colours - I don't know if it's been translated. It's sort of similar to a film called Death in Venice, the generation gap is a common thread in this story as well. Although there isn't any common thread with this book, I was very interested in Mishima's plays. Black Lizard was one of them, as well as a series of modern Noh plays. I had the same strong interest in these plays as in his prose, therefore Mishima was very much of interest to me.
I do not know the other side of Mishima, but as far as making Black Lizard is concerned, I remember talking with him about making this film with Akihiro Maruyama. He was very happy that this actor was selected to play that role. Before Maruyama started playing in the stage production of Black Lizard, this play was written about ten years before that and the role was played by many other female stars like Yayako Mizutani and Machiko Kyo, but they were not particularly interesting in terms of the play. Mishima particularly was fond of the production in which Akihiro Maruyama performed. Rather than great actresses, and even though Maruyama was not a veteran actor on the stage, Mishima seemed very, very happy and felt closest to his play through the performance of Maruyama.
I too felt very moved by Maruyama's performance in the stage production of Black Lizard. I really enjoyed his performance far more than those of any of the other so-called stars, female stars. I mentioned this to Mishima and I remember we had a really interesting, warm atmosphere when I talked about that with him.
You know, Black Lizard, Battle Royale, the Battles series, those always warrant a lot of time to talk. Every time I talk about them, no matter by who I'm interviewed we don't have enough time and I feel very sorry about that.
Source: http://www.midnighteye.com/features/im_kinji_fukasaku.shtml
Steve Rose talks to Kinji Fukasaku
The kid killers
The veteran Japanese film-maker behind Tora! Tora! Tora! has turned his talents to murderous teenagers. Steve Rose talks to Kinji Fukasaku
The Guardian, Friday 7 September 2001
It has taken 40 years for Kinji Fukasaku to break on to the international scene - and he had to murder 40 schoolchildren to do it. His latest film, Battle Royale, generated a national controversy in Japan with its violent premise, in which a class of schoolchildren are coerced into killing one another, until only one remains. A tacit indictment of Japan's competitive education system, its disaffected youth, and its faded martial pride, the film was opposed and almost banned by the government. Naturally, it then became a massive domestic hit.
- Battle Royale
- Release: 2001
- Countries: Japan, Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 114 mins
- Directors: Kinji Fukasaku, Kinju Fukasaku
- Cast: Aki Maeda, Takeshi Kitano, Taro Yamamoto, Tatsuya Fujiwara
Battle Royale has all the hallmarks of an angry young director out to make his name, but Fukasaku's name is already well-known in Japan. Aged 71, he is probably the most commercially successful director the country has ever produced. He began in the 1960s, shooting non-mainstream crime films, gradually making the genre his own, harnessing national frustration at Japan's postwar poverty, and sating audiences' desire for straightforward, contemporary action movies. His gangster output reached its peak in the 1970s, with the yakuza series Battles Without Honour, and Humanity, Japan's nearest equivalent to The Godfather.
These films have had a direct influence on modern directors like Takeshi Kitano (who plays the teacher in Battle Royale), Audition director Takashi Miike, and even Quentin Tarantino. Fukasaku's other work has covered just about every genre, from the war epic Tora! Tora! Tora! to The Black Lizard, a collaboration with Yukio Mishima, to Message From Space, a low-budget Japanese rip-off of Star Wars.
You're 71 years old. Why make a movie about teenagers?
Teenage violence has become a major social problem in Japan in recent years, but the phenomenon is confusing to adults. In the past there was still violence but there were always reasons behind it, like poverty. These days it is more difficult to understand, and so they don't know what to do about it. I have always been interested in the subject, but I am primarily a film-maker, and I didn't know how to make a film about it in a commercial way until I found this story.
Did you find it difficult to relate to modern teenagers?
How the children in the story reacted to violence reminded me of my own experiences during the second world war, when I was 15, the same age as the children in the film. So in a way I could identify with their situation. Children these days don't know anything about war. Even their parents didn't really experience it.
What was your experience of the war?
I was working in a weapons factory that was a regular target for enemy bombing. During the raids, even though we were friends working together, the only thing we would be thinking of was self-preservation. We would try to get behind each other or beneath dead bodies to avoid the bombs. When the raid was over, we didn't really blame each other, but it made me understand about the limits of friendship. I also had to clean up all the dead bodies after the bombings. I'm sure those experiences have influenced the way I look at violence.
There was quite a fuss with the Japanese authorities over the film. What really happened?
A politician raised the issue in the Japanese parliament. He said that Battle Royale could be harmful to children, and so they should intervene. Historically in Japan, the film industry has censored itself. But they said censorship should be controlled by outsiders. They were being foolish. We had many discussions but they didn't really go anywhere. By then, the film was already made. I travelled around Japan showing it to kids of 16 and 17, asking what they thought, and I felt that those youngsters were much more sensitive and sensible than those foolish adults who wasted so much time discussing the film. They didn't understand that their censorship was more harmful than the film itself. During the war, we weren't allowed to see any foreign films in Japan. Because I had had that experience of regret in my youth, I felt determined to fight against this censorship.
So what was the outcome?
The film was eventually rated R15, for people of 16 and over, which I was very much against. I was hoping it would be shown to people the same age as those in the film. Because it was forbidden, they wanted to watch it even more.
Another of your films people might have seen here is Tora! Tora! Tora! Have you seen the new Pearl Harbor?
I saw Pearl Harbor, but I think they cut certain sequences. I didn't think much of it. I couldn't really understand why anyone would want to make such a film; and its vision of the war seemed so unreal to me. My role in Tora! Tora! Tora! was more like a technical director for the aerial combat sequences. I was nothing to do with the screenplay. I had a lot of reservations about the project because I didn't feel the film portrayed the war that I had experienced. In the film, both the Japanese and American officers are portrayed as people who know what they are doing. If everybody had been so gentlemanly like that, the war would never have happened! It was what they did wrong that made them fight.
How was working with Beat Takeshi?
It was great fun, but it wasn't the first time. Ten years ago, I wanted him to star in a film but it never happened because our schedules didn't match. Takeshi was a busy TV personality, and the only schedule he could do was filming with me for a week then going back to TV for a week. I needed eight solid weeks with him. So I had to leave the project, and Kitano ended up directing it, and that became his first feature, Violent Cop. This was the first opportunity to work with him since then. I probably wouldn't have made Battle Royale if Takeshi couldn't have played that role.
You seem to have so much energy. What's your secret?
[Laughs] Battle Royale was the first film in 10 years I've felt passionate and enthusiastic about. So I didn't mind the physical or emotional difficulties. It's no secret. It's just better to do something you like than something you don't!
blogger Tags: Kinji Fukasaku, Beat Takeshi
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Two Minute Crash Course on Interviews
The Two Minute Crash Course on Interviews
Spring 2005
Parachute Newsletter
by Richard N. Bolles
In his book, "Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut," author David Shenk argues (cogently) that whereas information was once something we just couldn't get enough of, now we are all drowning in too much information.
Of course, David isn't the first to make this point. That honor belongs to Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament: "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."
Which brings us to our subject for today: the job interview. What a superb example of David's (and Ecclesiastes') point! Go look in any book superstore, and you'll drown in information about the job interview.
David argues that we all need to acquire a new skill in this Information Age: learning how to sift information, and boil it down to its essentials. (Excuse my mixed metaphor!)
So, let me offer here "The Two Minute Crash Course on Interviews." Everything you need to know about interviews, in just two minutes reading time. (Three, if you're a slow reader.)
It divides, predictably, into Before, During, and After.
Before You Go On a Job Interview:
1) Do an inventory of your skills, knowledges, and traits, before you go to any interview. Figure out what makes you different from 19 other people who might be applying for that same job.
2) When you're ready to go out on job interviews, don't just look for places that have known vacancies. Approach any organization that interests you, even if you have to walk in off the street.
3) Research your 'targets' ahead of time, thoroughly, in a library or on the Web.
Once you've chosen your target(s), use every personal contact you have, rather than resumes, to get in to see the-person-who-has-the-power to hire you for the job you are interested in (that's not likely to be the human resources department).
During the Job Interview:
1) Always remember you are coming to the interview as a potential resource person for this employer, not as a job beggar. Keep in mind that the only purpose of a first interview is to be invited back for a second interview.
2) Know what you want to ask about the place, and the job. Plan on doing 50% of the talking, and let the employer talk 50% of the time (or more).
3) Realize that the employer has many fears about this whole hiring process, and that some fear is beneath every question the employer asks. (Figuring out what fear is behind every question can help you answer the questions most helpfully.)
Never bad-mouth a previous employer or a previous place where you worked.
Your answer (to any question) should be no longer than two minutes; it can be as short as twenty seconds. Don't run on and on!
4) Take into the interview room with you any evidence you have of past accomplishments. (An artist, for example, has his or her portfolio. A computer programmer has a printout of programs they have written.) You'll know whether to use this evidence or not.
No matter how many thousands of questions an interviewer could theoretically ask you, they all boil down to just five:
1. | Why are you here? What is it about this place that attracted you? |
2. | What can you do for us? What do you have to contribute to what we do? |
3. | What distinguishes you from 19 other people who can do this same job? See your homework, above. |
4. | Will you fit in? Will you get along with, or irritate, all my other employees? And: |
5. | Can I afford you? Never do salary negotiation until – in the second, or third interview – they have definitely said they want you. Always let the employer name a figure first. |
After the Job Interview:
Always write a thank you note the same day, and send it to the employer. Always. (Get their card, while you're there.) Also send one to any secretary or receptionist who helped you.
Being able to do the job well will not necessarily get you hired. The person who gets hired is often the one who knows the most about how to get hired. |
Hopefully, this crash course has helped make you that person.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)