LOS ANGELES — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son,” the Jury Award winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a powerful melodrama that pulls heartstrings without ever spilling over into bathos. Its trenchant themes and compelling emotion are undoubtedly what led Cannes jury head Steven Spielberg to acquire remake writes for the film on behalf of Dream Works.
Masaharu Fukuyama stars as a successful architect who, with his wife, learns their 6-year-old son was accidentally switched at birth. As he tries to correct the mistake he begins to look inward, examining his own flaws as a parent.
Hirokazu Kore-eda sat down with ARTINFO recently to talk about working with Fukuyama, one of Japan’s biggest stars, and his country’s identity crisis in a floundering economy.
Tell us about working with Fukuyama. He’s a huge star and it’s a surprise to see him in this type of movie.
Fukuyama has only been in major studio films where he’s the big star, so I had no idea that he would even be interested in my films that tend to be much smaller. It was interesting the way he approached it. Instead of saying, “I want to be a big star in your film, write something for me.” The way he said it was, “I would love to be a resident in one of your films. I don’t have to be necessarily the lead, I could be the lead, but I just want to be in one of your films.” I thought it was very modest of him, but very like him.
And your work with the children is sublime. What’s the secret to getting performances of that caliber?
Ever since I shot “Nobody Knows,” the style I’ve been taking with kids is that I don’t give them a script and I don’t explain the story to them. That process really begins in the audition stage where instead of having them read lines, I’ll verbally interact with them. The boy who plays Keita, he would come to sit and play around on set and almost as a kind of extension to it just kind of flow into the performance. What I try to do more often than not is not have me explain things directly but to have the actors that are performing their fathers and mothers be the ones explaining.
Although it’s not an autobiographical movie, I understand it was inspired by the birth of your first child.
Obviously when you have kids you learn about your kids, but what was unexpected for me was when I had a kid it began to make me think a lot more about my own father, who has passed away. But I began to sort of remember back to my childhood and the relationship I had with my own father, which was not particularly healthy. But in trying to figure out what kind of father I want to be to my own daughter, I realize that I can’t really get to that if I don’t first process and digest the relationship that I had with my father.
One of the main questions raised by the movie is what constitutes family. What have you concluded?
In presenting this duality between nurture versus nature, I don’t believe that I’ve tried to give an answer, nor do I actually have one. I think a valuable lesson is to certainly realize the time with your child is very, very precious, but that isn’t to deny the importance of blood entirely. In Japan today, despite all the changes, adoption still hasn’t taken root there, it’s not very common. Japan as a nation does still value bloodlines quite a bit and couldn’t possibly deny, conservative though it may seem, that value on the blood isn’t important in some way.
The film is also about identity. How does it reflect broader questions about the crisis in Japan?
I think that notion of identifying oneself with the economic growth that Japan experienced for a time, that’s dead. Even myself, I found employment during the economic bubble days. Now young people are coming into the job market and they’re having a lot of trouble finding employment. So you have all these people who no longer identify with the company and economic growth, and so you have all these splintered individuals who are now being coopted by the nationalism movement.
How has 10 years of recession affected national identity?
Japan used to be very much a corporate culture where everybody is part of a greater whole, and that whole was a corporation, that’s who you dedicate your life to. That’s crumbled and now we have a lot of people that are trying to figure out where they belong. But in Japan, individualism never really took off the way it did in the U.S. They don’t have that strong chord that supports them. So what happens is nationalism begins to take advantage of them and bring them into their fold. That’s the danger Japan faces today.
