“Wakamusha” Dryden Theatre Teach-in
The North American premiere of “Wakamusha” was held at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman Museum in Rochester,
New York on Tuesday, May 28th from 7:30 pm (Wednesday, May 29th from 8:30 am Japan time).
Dryden Theatre is a movie theater attached to the world's oldest photography museum and one of the oldest film archives.
the George Eastman Museum, located in Rochester, New York. It has a seating capacity of 500!
Following the screening of “Sweating Small Stuff” in October last year,
this will be the second time that director Ryutaro Ninomiya's film has been screened there.
After the screening, we connected with New York online and held a teach-in.
We will report on the Q&A and feedback received during the teach-in!
[Q1] The title of the film is "Wakamusha," which is translated as "Young Warrior" to native English speakers.
What does this word mean in the historical context, and what does it mean in relation to the film?
[Director Ninomiya] - It means "Young Samurai," but it certainly also means "Warrior."
One of the things I wanted to convey in this film was that war and peaceful everyday life are actually just a fine line.
I wanted to depict the lives of young people who are struggling in this chaotic world.
[Q2] In your previous film, “Sweating Small Stuff”, you mainly focused on one young man,
but this time you portray three disaffected young men with different personalities. Do they represent different aspects of society?
[Director Ninomiya]: My main impulse was to depict the everyday life of any place, along with different aspects of society.
I wanted to make a film about young people with different personalities, each of whom has doubts about life,
influence each other, and live their lives.
[Q3] In the movie, Wataru says, "I'm full of prejudices. So much I hate myself."
How do you write a character who is drowning in self-hating so that the viewer can empathize with him?
[Director Ninomiya]: I believe that prejudice exists everywhere and in everyone, and I wanted to present that at the beginning of the story.
When making a film, I am very conscious of not wanting to make it into a beautiful story.
[Q4] In the second half of the story, Eiji says, "Misery is dramatic." As a storyteller,
do you use "misery" in your characters as a dramatic tool?
[Director Ninomiya] - In all movies and dramas, the story is driven by "misfortune" or "tragedy,"
so I wanted to present, through fiction, that this is reality.
[Q5] A lot of the shots in this film are shot away from eye level, at low or high angles, or leaving a lot of space for the background to overwhelm the characters. What was your strategy for choosing shots when shooting the film?
[Director Ninomiya]: In the feature films I made in the early days of my career, I mainly chose to shoot one scene, one take, with a handheld camera from the perspective of realism, but this time I wanted to tell this story in a world where the characters move around within a fixed frame and space captured by the camera. That was something I decided on from the very first letter of the script.
[Q6] At the end of the film, Wataru talks to the cafe owner about the impact people have on each other. Wataru finds it frightening, while the owner finds comfort in it. What do you personally think about this discussion? Could you please elaborate a bit?
[Director Ninomiya] - They seem to understand each other but they don't, they seem not to understand each other but they do. It's very ambiguous, but I think that's just how life is, and it's the scene I most wanted to depict in this film.
[Q7] It feels like the settings are a mixture of time periods and places; nature and man-made objects, cities and riverbanks, and even the nostalgic-sounding game music. Did you intentionally create contrasts like these to compose the scenes?
[Director Ninomiya]: I wasn't consciously thinking about contrast, but I wanted to make a story that could be relevant to any time or place.
Finding universal themes in the everyday lives of people everywhere may be one of the things I value when making films.
[Q8] How did you cast the characters?
Where did those characters come from?
[Director Ninomiya] - The moment I first met Ryota Bando, who plays Wataru, I knew I wanted to tell a story with this actor.
Rion Takahashi, who plays Eiji was a co-star of mine when I performed on stage as an actor,
and Naoya Shimizu, who plays Mitsunori, was chosen through an audition.
As for the characters, I divided my "darkness" into three parts and created each one, so all the characters were born from myself.
[Q9] Why did you choose that cemetery as the location?
Also, did you intentionally capture the timing of the trains passing by?
[Director Ninomiya] - That cemetery is the site of an execution ground from the Edo period, where hundreds of thousands of criminals were beheaded with swords. The "head" is an important motif in this story, so I first chose that cemetery as a location to symbolize that.
We shot the scene by calculating that the trains that pass by continuously pass by at just the right time so as not to overlap with important conversations. I think it was the perfect location to depict the gap between life and death.
[Q10] About the aspect. Is choosing the standard size an expression of someone watching as the fourth young warrior?
[Director Ninomiya] - The standard size was chosen by directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and my much-admired director Mikio Naruse, and I wanted to challenge myself with new expressions using this traditional screen size in Japanese cinema.
The teach-in, which began just after 9 p.m. local time, lasted over an hour and was a huge success. The attendees were impressed by the sensitivity of the New York cinephiles, who asked questions that touched on the character designs of the three main characters (who act as the director's alter egos) and the underlying theme of the film, which is "mutual influence," as well as questions about the aspect ratio and filming locations. The teach-in gave the audience a sense of accomplishment in the film's simultaneous global release.
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