Osamu Tezuka: Movies Into Manga

Date: 18-24 September 2008

Venue: Barbican

More info on the Barbican website

Alex Fitch talks to Helen McCarthy, author of Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation and The Animé Movie Guide about the work of manga and animé pioneer Osamu Tezuka, whose work is featured in a season of live-action and animated short films and full-length movies at The Barbican centre in London from September 18 to 24.

Alex Fitch: The style of Tezuka’s early animated cartoons is very different to his manga – it is very 1960s. Disney cartoons of the time such as The Aristocats and 101 Dalmatians have this flat animation that is very calligraphic with hard outlines and he seems to be responding to that.

Helen McCarthy: It’s very much the graphic style of the time. If you look at a wide range of graphics – fabric design, furniture design etc – of the 1960s in general, there is a spirit that runs through it and Tezuka was very much a part of that zeitgeist.

AF: Where would his short experimental cartoons have been shown?

HM: Most of them were made for festivals or as ‘calling cards’. Obviously, success on the festival circuit is a good thing for an animator because it shows what kind of quality you’re likely to be able to deliver, so Tezuka went on making shorts. I think that if he had made nothing other than his short films he would still have a considerable international reputation as an animator but as time went on, his short films became more of an indulgence and less a part of his career.

AF: When did animé become big in Japan?

HM: Animé really boomed when TV arrived but it was big in Japan before that. A company called Toei Doga made animated classics – cartoon films for children – that were beautifully made, expensively produced and gorgeously filmed. They made two or three a year and kids would get taken to them at holiday times and it would be a big treat to go to the cinema. It’s the Hayao Miyazaki model of child film-going: Let them see only one a year and make it a good one! But Tezuka looked at how TV was spreading through Japan, and he looked at the cartoons coming from America, from Hanna-Barbera and from the studios at the cheap end of the market. An old friend of his – Shinichi Sakai – said to him: ‘We could do that… We could make Japanese content that’s cheap and fast for TV and then we could sell it back to America!’ Tezuka was wholly in agreement with that idea and so he made Astro Boy specifically with the aim of selling it to America, and did so enormously successfully!

AF: How long was the gap between it first being shown in Japan and being translated?

HM: Exactly six months. It was screened on New Year’s Day, 1963, in Japan and it hit the American airwaves at the end of June.

AF: We think of animé being translated into English for Americans as a fairly recent phenomenon, but presumably there was such an appetite for cartoons in America at that time that they were looking for anything they could show and dub with American voices?

HM: Absolutely, and of course animation lends itself beautifully to that, particularly very cheap limited animation because you don’t have to worry so much about lip-synching. Cheap TV animation is a godsend to anyone who wants to dub product. Tezuka was fortunate and so was the American industry in that they had a guy called Fred Ladd who was running a studio that could dub and turn around cartoons very quickly; and Ladd understood what the American audience would or wouldn’t take to… Many people vilified Ladd for the amount of material he hacked out of Astro Boy and other cartoons but you have to remember he was a product of his time. He was working at a time when the mass audience in America was not as sophisticated as it is today and would not have responded well to the original uncut animation. Ladd really had a tough job mediating animé for an earlier American audience and that he did it remarkably well is shown by the fact that people still watch and love Astro Boy and that many, many Americans who had never heard of animé would tell you that it’s their favourite cartoon!

AF: Why do you think people didn’t appreciate that these cartoons were coming from Japan – that they just put them in the category of ‘TV animation for kids’?

HM: Well, if you saw them dubbed you wouldn’t know where in the world they had been made. Unless you were a real animation buff you wouldn’t particularly pick them out as Japanese films in the same way you might see a dubbed beautiful Polish film with nothing to tell you it’s Polish. Would you be able to tell?

AF: Things like Astro Boy very much had a style that looks like classic Japanese animation to us now…

HM: It does now, but back then it looked exactly liked American animation because American animation wasn’t that well established, TV hadn’t been going in America that long… When you turned on the TV in America or France or the United Arab Republic and saw animation there in your language, that’s what you thought was American or French or Arab animation – there are an awful lot of people in The Gulf who think that Astro Boy is from their part of the world!

AF: What was the balance between animation and manga in Tezuka’s 60s output?

HM: He did them both full-time, 24 hours a day! Tezuka was a phenomenal worker, his work rate was quite insane! I did some maths and assuming he started work at age 17 and worked until the day before he died at the age of 60, he had to have produced 10 pages of manga as well as 20 pages of animation script every day! He also had to run his studio, produce his advertising, do all his other interests and somehow find time to see his family… Luckily his studio was right next to his house for most of his life, otherwise his kids wouldn’t have recognised him! In 1961 alone, Tezuka made $3 million from his manga and he spent it all on making animation!

AF: In terms of the flatness of some of his animation you’ve compared it to Terry Gilliam’s work a decade later and I can see a link with the work of Stone & Parker in South Park and even recent Japanese animation such as Mamoru Oshii’s The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters and the last couple of episodes of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent…

HM: That comes from Kamishibai; it actually means ‘Paper Theatre’ and it’s kind of a cross between the cut-outs in Victorian cardboard theatres – where children move characters on sticks in from the sides – and Punch and Judy shows. Kamishibai started around 1910, the same time as animé, and you could almost see it as animé being performed live in the streets. Essentially it was a selling tool for sweets! Guys would go around villages with sweets and snacks on a push bike and when they got to the village or town square or even a suburb in Tokyo they’d knock these wooden clappers together and everyone would come rushing out because they knew they were there with snacks, not only kids but also adults. In order to lure them out every time, the Kamishibai man would sell his snacks and then say, ‘You’re all my good customers, so I’m going to tell you a story…’, and he would unfold this small wooden frame and put in a pile of papers with bits of painting on them and by pulling out the papers one at a time, so that you could see the different pictures, he told and performed the story. He would give you a thrilling, cliff-hanging performance -it was always a serial – and he would say: ‘I’ll be back next week, come and buy some more sweets and I’ll tell you more!’ Kamishibai was so popular in Japan that when television came along, people called it ‘Electric Kamishibai‘… Of course, TV practically killed Kamishibai, but it was performed right through the Second World War – it was performed in bomb shelters to distract frightened children and adults while there were air raids going on overhead. Tezuka, like a lot of Japanese children, watched Kamishibai as a kid and while he was working on his animé in later life, Kamishibai went through a bit of a revival as Japan, like a lot of countries, realised they’d thrown a lot of cultural babies out with the bathwater! There’s a Kamishibai tour of the UK during my Tezuka festival – we were very lucky that the dates coincided…

AF: The work that introduced Tezuka to a lot of new audiences – albeit after his death – was the animated adaptation of his book Metropolis / Metoroporisu, which admittedly is more of a remake of the Fritz Lang film done in Tezuka’s style rather than a faithful adaptation of his manga.

HM: It’s a wonderful film! The score for Metropolis alone is beautiful, it’s a beautiful jazz and blues score…

AF: … as in the apocalyptic scene accompanied by a gospel song by Ray Charles – it’s a brilliant counterpoint to the action…

HM:Yes, the destruction of the city while ‘I can’t stop loving you’ plays over it! It’s not my favourite animé but it’s pretty close! I’ve got a new book out at the moment called 500 Essential Animé Movies (Ilex press). It’s a fun book, because although they made me stick to short series and features – so I had to leave out a lot of long series that I really love – I got to write top 10s and Metropolis is in one of my top 10 lists.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Format:Cinema

Release date: 26 September 2008

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor Universal

Director: Paul WS Anderson

Writers: Paul WS Anderson, Robert Thom, Charles B Griffith, Ib Melchior

Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane

USA 2008

89 mins

Alex Fitch talks to Paul WS Anderson about Death Race, a slick B-movie revolving around a car race set in a prison, produced by Roger Corman and loosely based on Death Race 2000 (1975), also produced by Corman.

Alex Fitch: The new Death Race seems to be very much about now, as much as the original Death Race 2000 was very much about the 1970s. At the moment there’s a craze for these souped-up racer films such as Taxi and 2 Fast 2 Furious – were you trying to work within the boundaries of that genre or trying to subvert it?

Paul WS Anderson: I think Death Race is a lot more subversive than a traditional car action movie; the studio keeps referring to the film as the movie that no major movie studio should have made! I think that’s true because it’s both very violent and very anti-authoritarian. It’s also a throwback to the way movies were made in the 70s and 80s – it’s got a gritty visceral feel that harkens back to Mad Max II, Bullitt and Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway rather than the movies you referenced, as those movies are 12 certificate pieces of frippery full of computer-generated images! There isn’t a single CG stunt in Death Race – every time you see a car crash it’s was all done practically.

AF: As a filmmaker, do you get a vicarious thrill thinking, ‘I’m going to have a chance to destroy a lot of cars in this movie!’?

PA: I would like to say it’s a pleasure, but it was in fact incredibly difficult. My orders to the crew were: ‘I want to put the most spectacular car stunts we can on film and I want to do it for real.’ And in order to pull that off and not kill anybody, it took about a year’s worth of pre-production, building the cars and building the camera rigs, so we could get the cameras close enough to film all of the action without killing the camera crew. It would have been much easier to film the actors and put some CG cars in afterwards, but we wanted to make a movie that offered the same thrill to audiences that I had when I walked out of Mad Max II, compared to Speed Racer, which was all CGI cars and tracks and stunts.

AF: Presumably that’s why the cars in this film are much more industrial than the ones in the original as they had to withstand the stunts.

PA: Absolutely. The original Death Race 2000 was a low-budget movie and it was amazing what they did with the money they spent, but they were basically VW Beetles in the original with a different shell put on top. They could never crunch together because they only had one of each and didn’t want to damage them or drive them faster than 42mph!

AF: The timing of the remake couldn’t be better – when the original Death Race came out, they were in the middle of an oil crisis, petrol stations were closing, they were at the end of an unpopular war and the most unpopular president in a generation was just leaving office, and here we are in 2008 and things seem exactly the same!

PA: It’s definitely a dystopian view of the near future of North America and that’s what audiences have related to. In our Death Race, the year the movie is set in is kind of vague – whether it’s five years in the future, 10 years in the future…

AF: The satire in the original is a lot more focused on recent targets, while here you’re commenting on the nature of reality television and the way the internet perhaps leads people towards entertainment that is more barbaric.

PA: Definitely. Roger’s movie was a more overtly satirical movie, which was not the movie we wanted to make. I didn’t want to make an obvious comedy satire. He was explicit; in our movie the criticism of reality television and the internet is more implicit.

AF: Is this a project you had been wanting to do for a while?

PA: This is the very definition of a labour of love for me! Not only did the original movie leave a huge impression on me, but also the movies that were directly inspired by it. George Miller has been very forthright in saying he was heavily influenced by Death Race 2000 in his movies and his films made a huge impression on me as a movie-goer and a filmmaker. I’ve literally been working on this movie for the last 13 years off and on. I originally met Roger (Corman) because he released my very first film Shopping in North America – he was a judge at the Tokyo film festival where he saw it. He didn’t actually release it until after my second movie Mortal Kombat, which 13 years ago was the number one movie in America. So I then had lunch with Roger and he said, ‘Great kid, you’ve got a number one movie, what are you going to do next?’ and I said, ‘Well, I want to re-imagine one of your movies, Death Race‘ and he said, ‘That’s great! We’ll make it your next movie!’ It’s a typical Hollywood development story: we cut to 13 years later and we finally made it!

AF: A film called Death Race 2020 was nearly made in the 90s – was that the version you were originally attached to?

PA: Yes, I’m like the caretaker in The Shining, I’ve always been there! It was my idea to remake the original and I feel a bit like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill! It’s been a long journey… Roger has always stood by me and for 13 years, he’s helped steer the movie, which is great because he made the original Death Race and 33 years later he gets to make the new one as well. He made the one for $200,000 and the one that cost a lot more!

AF: If you had made Death Race in the 90s I assume it would have been a very different film.

PA: Absolutely. I’ve done my arc of CG movies – when I did Mortal Kombat I was very enamoured with computer-generated images – but now I’m very excited by doing a movie with no CG images in it. The Death Race I might have made 13 years ago would have been a very different movie to the one I’ve made now. I’m glad it has taken this long because I think I’ve made a better movie. The kind of movie I wanted to make has changed, and the world is more ready for dystopian world views now, more like the ones we had in the 1970s than in the feel-good 90s!

AF: Are you a fan of Roger’s movies in general?

PA: I’m a huge fan of Roger’s movies and who Roger is – he’s given some of the best filmmakers working in Hollywood their first break and he’s the man who’s made a hundred movies and never lost a dime on any of them! He’s made so much money making these movies, but he’s still so passionate. I had lunch with him a few months ago and asked if he’d like to come up to the cutting room to see the rough cut of the movie and he said, ‘I’d love to, but I’ve got to go back to my cutting room now!’ because he was making a low-budget movie for the Sci-Fi Channel – it’s very inspiring.

AF: As well as Mad Max, the original Death Race influenced computer games such as Carmageddon and Grand Theft Auto. In the film, racers have to drive over tokens in the road, and it was the first time I’d seen something like that in a film rather than a game. I was wondering if it was some sort of comment on the overlap between games and film iconography?

PA: I’m sure those games were influenced by Death Race 2000, so in a way it’s coming full circle. But the idea of power-ups definitely came from games – I can’t point to one in particular we took the idea from. I’m a game player and for me, the kind of imagery that appears in games is a valid form of modern culture, so it’s something I would always consider putting in movies. I was also very aware that the problem with a lot of car race movies is that after you’ve been around the track a couple of times, it becomes a little boring! Every race scene had to be different and that’s a concept that came from video games where you complete one level, and then progress to the next level where things become a little more difficult.

AF: One interesting aspect of your films is that they combine genres – sci-fi and horror, sci-fi and action, etc – and that’s something that’s often used as a definition of cult films. In mainstream films you have to stick to one genre and not break the rules. Is that something you’ve become aware of throughout your career?

PA: I don’t know that the level of box office of my films can really be called cult! I think when a movie makes close to $200 million worldwide, it’s kind of beyond a cult level!

AF: But you know what I’m getting at: the way that ‘cult’ has become a genre in its own right, even if it breaks box office records, just as, for example, ‘indie’ is used to describe films that have a more skewed way of telling a story than ‘mainstream’ films.

PA: I think if you’re making genre movies, your audience is very sophisticated because they’ve seen everything – especially now when you can watch so many movies on DVD, or on TV, or download them. So if you’re going to present something fresh and interesting to audiences or subvert expectations, I think that’s where combining genres can sometimes help – for example, you think you’re watching an action movie and suddenly it has a very scary moment in it… I think it becomes harder and harder to take a genre audience by surprise and maybe that’s one of the reasons why the movies I’ve made have combined elements from different genres and been successful.

AF: How much of a challenge is it to make films that audiences find unexpected?

PA: It’s a huge challenge. Sometimes I think genre filmmaking is not regarded with the esteem it deserves. People look down on it a little bit, but it’s much easier to make a drama than it is to make a genre movie because the audiences of genre movies are the most critical in the world. It would be much easier for me to make a film where I’m just filming two actors in a room!

AF: Talking about exceeding audience expectations, I was wondering if that’s what attracts you to computer game adaptations because they’re a form of narrative that perhaps film audiences aren’t used to?

PA: I think there are video game references in my work that are fresh to the world of cinema, such as the power-ups in Death Race. I think that’s a challenge when you make this kind of film, especially when you make a video game adaptation: you walk the thin line between satisfying the hardcore fans of the game you’re adapting and delivering a movie for a more mainstream audience that don’t know anything about it.

AF: When you were developing as a filmmaker, were there various genres that you wanted to tackle, either separately or at the same time, or did each project suggest a different genre approach? My favourite of your films, for example, is Event Horizon, which successfully mixes horror and sci-fi to an unexpected extent.

PA: I’ve always made the kind of movies I enjoyed when I was growing up, and I guess those movies combined those genres anyway. Alien, for example, is the best known horror/sci-fi movie and it is really effective. I’ve done it on a project by project basis – there’s no overall plan to a filmmaker’s career. With Death Race, I’ve kind of made three movies in one – it’s a prison movie, a car movie and also a war movie! With the heavy weaponry in the movie, it has more in common with Black Hawk Down than your average car race movie.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Read Alex Fitch’s feature on both versions of Death Race in our autumn print issue. The theme of the issue is cruel games, from sadistic power play in Korean thriller A Bloody Aria to fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Plus: interview with comic book master Charles Burns about the stunning animated film Fear(s) of the Dark and preview of the Raindance Festival. And don’t miss our fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is worth the price of the issue alone!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 July 2008

Venues: BFI Southbank, Renoir, The Gate (London) and key cities; Scotland July 18

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Canada 2006

90 mins

Guy Maddin season at the BFI Southbank

July 4-23

Programme

In the week before the British theatrical release of his new documentary My Winnipeg and the BFI retrospective of his films, Guy Maddin came to London to introduce some preview screenings of his work. Alex Fitch caught up with the director and they chatted about My Winnipeg, Guy’s interests and influences as a filmmaker and his career on screen so far.

Alex Fitch: My Winnipeg seems to be a mixture of the various styles you’ve developed in other movies. Parts of it – for example the ballet section – remind the viewer of Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary and other parts are autobiographical. Do you see it as a sort of culmination of your career so far?

Guy Maddin: Yeah, I just decided to kind of throw the kitchen sink at the viewers! I was commissioned to make this film and I’ve never made a long documentary before. I’d made a short one with Isabella Rossellini which I’d always called a docu-fantasia, because Isabella was talking about her father on his centennial, but I don’t think she was really worried about getting the facts right. What really mattered was that this was a documentary about her feelings about her father, so she conducted all the research she needed in her heart. So when I was commissioned to make a film about Winnipeg I realised I could do the same thing! But I was still worried about ‘the documentary’ and all the ridiculous disciplines it tends to require, all the apparent objectivity and higher shooting ratios and longer editing periods and discovering your true subject in the editing… All these are clichés about the process of making a documentary, and I was pretty terrified! So I thought, I’m just going to load up the arsenal with as many tricks as I have… But something prevented me from allowing them to be tricks; since I was talking about my Winnipeg, they had to ring true in my heart. So I ended up making – I think very intuitively – a movie about Winnipeg that really kept grabbing at the oddest, almost forgotten corners of my memory and finding things that mattered to me. Finally, I found myself not making a movie about Winnipeg after all but about home – everyone’s home – about home towns, family, nostalgia, memory or something! I think that’s why the movie’s been travelling way better than I ever thought it would. People in Sydney or London or Berlin are seeing the same things in it that Winnipeggers see in it. It’s strange…

AF:Someone famous once said it’s not so much that ‘History is written by the winners’ but rather ‘History is written by the writers’ and so you can take any kind of fact and weave it into your own personal narrative.

GM: That was a bit of a challenge. There are so many disparate and seemingly unrelated items of interest to me that I had to find a way of weaving them together. The editing process did take a long time, but sometimes I would just fluke upon a connection between two things during my improvised narrations. I would go to the recording studio for five or ten minutes each day and just talk for a while. Sometimes in the spirit of just keeping the talk going I would have to repeat things before thinking of the next thing to say and so things started taking on poetic symptoms. Every now and then when I was trying to force out an idea, I’d come up (to the studio) – and in desperation, to keep the ball rolling – I would make a throw that accidentally perfectly connected two scenes. Ultimately, after months of doing these improvised narrations, almost every scene in the movie spoons against the previous and the next or rhymes somehow with a scene elsewhere in the movie and they all kind of fit together. I’d like to feel that if there were such a thing as poetry or psychology accountants, they’d come in and do an audit and everything would add up horizontally, vertically, diagonally and we’d be congratulated for keeping such good books!

AF: A lot of themes in the movie seem to be about movement and rhythms. The confluence of the rivers, the way they flow into the town and the immigrants, the way they flow into the town and the way the railroad flows into the town… Nature and man’s imposition on nature is something that might dictate a more poetic narrative rather than straight storytelling.

GM: Yeah, and Winnipeg especially, being at the geographical centre of North America and the site of so many strange intersections including all sorts of mystical beliefs whether European or Aboriginal… I’m not much of a mystic when I’m not holding a camera but you’re always looking for something to haunt your screen when you’re a filmmaker and I found it in abundance in Winnipeg. The stories really had me half-believing in all the great mystics and the legends. I mention them because they actually create a really strong and eerie milieu for the stuff that happens within my family. I could never successfully disentangle a study of my home town from a study of my own home and family. I was pleased that the staining mystical powers bled right into my family and that all the occult ectoplasms prescribed to the city by Aboriginals and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also seemed to be in operation whenever my siblings and my mum sat down to eat dinner!

AF: How autobiographical are the recreations?

GM: They’re spot on!

AF: You show a younger version of yourself making films of your mother and family. So that actually happened?

GM: Yeah.

AF: So you might have, for example, those actual home movies as an extra on the DVD if you felt like exposing yourself that much to the world!

GM: I have hours of 8mm footage – it’s not even Super 8 yet – from when I was very young. I shot some of it; my older brother, Ross – who’s still alive – shot a bunch as well. He’s twelve years older than I am. My dead brother was an audiophile and created tonnes of sound sculptures which we were able to incorporate into the movie, so he has a posthumous credit of sound design or some sort of sound department credit anyway. I didn’t want to give him too good a credit – you don’t want to cheat the living out of their proper credits! The recreated family and conversations were spot on, as well as I could remember anyway – memory’s pretty unreliable.

AF: The new scenes, were they shot on film or digital? The reason I ask is because you mentioned alchemical processes earlier and film itself is obviously a very alchemical process – you open a shutter, expose some plastic to light and bathe it in chemicals in order to reveal the hidden image…

GM: …and you’d think I’d know that more than anyone! But I really thought that making a documentary was an opportunity for me to break free of my enslavement to film emulsion and work in HD. So I did buy an HD camera and I shot most of the movie with it and then I realised that these stories would sit a lot better in emulsions rather than pixels. They’re just made for emulsions… So I projected the finished edited film onto my fridge and shot it with a film camera and there the stories sit properly!

AF: The history of filmmaking is something that’s very important in your work. There’re all sorts of references to silent movie techniques… Were European silents something you were fond of when you were growing up?

GM: Not when I was growing up, but when I was a 20-something hipster I loved the look of those things. When I was daydreaming of becoming a filmmaker and for the life of me couldn’t light the basic three-light set-up. I had three shadows every time I’d light them, so I started unplugging them until I got down to one shadow. And it was an expressionist shadow and I realised the shadows were not only very evocative and loaded with atmosphere and dread but also the most inexpensive form of set decoration. Absence of light seemed to suggest far more than building a set could ever do! It was kind of a chicken / egg thing… I think my penchant for expressionist stuff came about from sheer inability to do classic filmmaking, and then of course that forced me to watch more silent film and I found more affinities with it. The approach of silent film is a little closer to fairy tale than naturalism. I like treating everything as more or less fairy tale anyway. That’s my way of finding myself inside of a book, I always pretend it is a fairy tale at first – whether it is or not – and then make adjustments later.

AF: In your first three films, you seemed to be touring Europe both in terms of style and narrative – Tales from the Gimli Hospital is about an Icelandic community, Careful is about a Swiss town, Archangel is about a group of Russians. Also, Archangel and Careful have very strong expressionist and constructivist influences, which culminate in my favourite of your shorts, The Heart of the World, which feels like a lost Russian silent movie!

GM: Yeah and that’s the only movie I’ve made that turned out exactly the way I planned it! It’s pretty lucky – that won’t happen again! I feel it’s because film, more than any other art form – it can be argued that Renaissance painting was like this too – is an industry as well as an art form. In its industrial haste, so many beautiful unexploited potentials were just left behind and it seems like such a shame not to go back and exploit them a bit more, even as ineptly as I do!

AF: I wouldn’t say that at all! Certainly the fact that your films use the language of the silents gives them a great visual aesthetic that stands out amongst all the CGI and the slickness that are crowding the movie theatres. It seems a shame that so few directors have a visual style any more, as if they have to fit in with everything else that’s out there.

GM: I’m so lucky… Like I said, whatever visual style I have – and I do have one – came about just from dumb tenacity to shoot in spite of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing and I’ll credit myself with recognising that that was producing something – something worth clinging onto with a lot of desperation! It’s evolving slowly but I’m not in any hurry; there’re still a million and one great stories to be told by this enchanting method, so why toss it out, the way the industry did the first time around?

AF: In the films you made from the late 90s onwards like The Saddest Music in the World and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and now the hidden history of Winnipeg you seem to be inventing a Canadian mythology.

GM: Yeah, definitely.

AF: Modern Canadian cinema seems to be somewhat ‘new’; it seems to be inventing its own history as if the hundred years that preceded it haven’t been documented enough so they need to cram it all in.

GM:They haven’t! I guess because we’re smack dab up against the greatest self-mythologising culture ever, America – we’re loathe to self-mythologise. When Canadians are asked to define their identity, they say, ‘Well, we’re not American!’ And pressed to define what that means, they say, ‘Well, we don’t exaggerate, we don’t boast…’. But there’s no more sure-fire way to consign a historical figure or event to complete amnesiac oblivion than to present them in life-sized terms. So it’s nice to see other filmmakers’ work, but it was something I was prepared to do if no one else was going to do it – start self-mythologising… That doesn’t mean lying! If you asked the average American which one of the following really existed, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Joe Montana, they couldn’t tell you half the time! So apocryphal people are just as important as ones that really lived. They get boiled down to an essence that gets tasted in one’s lifetime and goes into the recipe of a national identity. I just want to do my bit for Canadians so they don’t have to say, ‘Well, we’re not American’.

AF:Also, because you’re nestling against a ‘sleeping elephant’, as someone once called America, Canadian cinema seems to be able to explore themes that American cinema seems to be terrified of, such as sexuality, for example. Your films, the films of Robert LePage, the films of David Cronenberg, seem to explore male sexuality in a way that American cinema won’t touch with a barge pole!

GM:Us Canadian mice can go right up the rear end of that elephant without them even noticing! It’s an advantage.

AF:In My Winnipeg for example, the scenes in the changing rooms… Is it something you feel just isn’t explored in cinema?

GM:Children are sexual beings, just think of your own childhood. In my case, I was far more sexual as a child than I am now; far more preoccupied from a very early age… I haven’t conducted an elaborate survey, but I just like movies that acknowledge that. There’s a great Canadian film called Léolo that gets right into that. I’m just trying to be honest. Nothing bothers me more than a movie about the innocence of children! What are they innocent of? They might be innocent of murder, but that’s about it! Children haven’t learned to repress yet or anything like that. They’re just teeming with wonderful luridity, from very early on! I was six, maybe, when for some reason I locked the bathroom door and urinated into a badminton birdie! It was very important that I do this! I’m not going to say how many times I did this, but…

AF:You marked that territory well!

GM:…it seemed to make sense to me somehow. While it was a rough draft or an incorrect model of the world, there was something telling me to do that…

AF:Another theme in your work is matriarchal figures. Obviously there’s Ann Savage playing a semi-fictionalised version of your mother in My Winnipeg, in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs there’s Shelley Duvall, in The Saddest Music there’s Isabella Rossellini… These strong female presences, is that something you’re trying to work out – some sort of childhood trauma – or just something you feel isn’t explored enough in cinema?

GM:Yeah, especially in indie film, which is still very male-dominated. I’m not going to start making feminist statements on behalf of women filmmakers, but it just feels good to see everybody represented fairly in movies. Bergman’s trick was to write autobiography and then ascribe his own autobiographical traits to one or two female characters; but I’ve been lucky enough, I’ve had one or two very strong female characters in my life and they seem to be bottomless sources of narrative material! My first few movies were very male-centred with very simple objects of desire wearing the skirts but in these recent pictures I’ve decided to zero in on what women really meant to me. They feel more fleshed out, it’s very satisfying.

AF:I suppose that in films like Cowards Bend the Knee and Sissy Boy Slap Party it’s the absence of a female presence that causes the guys to go crazy?

GM:Well, yeah! If you’re just lounging around the dock with your shirt off and a gob hat aslant over a sun-sleepy face, you’ll get yourself into some trouble! I found myself reading Euripides of all things… I never wanted to read Greek tragedy, I thought that would be like unrolling parchments and be a very arid activity, but gobbling up Euripides is like flipping through the pages of Mexican romance comics – really fun, fast-paced, crazy, violent stuff! Everything Quentin Tarantino should be is in Euripides! Not only that, it’s written 2,500 years ago but it’s about the relationship you just got out of – it’s incredible! There’re some great women characters in there and I’m in there! The male characters always seem to be me! In Medea, I’m Jason. I’ve gone out with Medea, I’ve gone out with Electra… It’s amazing how easily you can find yourself in these things.

AF:It’s interesting you should mention Medea, as Lars von Trier made a film version of the story for TV and I was wondering if you were a particular fan of his work, because the central leit-motif in My Winnipeg, having the train with back-projected images behind it, reminded me very much of Europa.

GM:Yeah, I had that in mind and then I realised that when I was trying to hypnotize people at the beginning of my movie some people might be reminded of Max von Sydow’s very hypnotic narration in Europa, but I’d already decided to do it anyway. It ended up being different. Von Trier really took the rear-screen projection a lot further, by incorporating characters in real world and ‘flat world’ and having them trade places and things like that. I do like rear-screen projection. It’s a simple way of opening up space – of acquiring cheap cinematic space.

Interview by Alex Fitch

For more on this see Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg and the interview with Cecilia Araneda, director of the Winnipeg Film Group.

Guy Maddin learned his craft as part of a local filmmaking initiative, the Winnipeg Film Group, which exists both as an art-house cinema and as a resource for local filmmakers. Alex Fitch talked to Cecilia Araneda, executive director of the WFG, about the work of the organisation and Guy Maddin’s involvement with it.

Cecilia Araneda: There are proportionally a lot of independent filmmakers working in Winnipeg, and I do mean independent in the sense of artist-driven work. Winnipeg is a bit of a rarity in Canada in terms of its filmmaking context. Indeed, in English-language Canada, we believe that Winnipeg has the most distinct filmmaking community. Because Winnipeg does not have a film school, and for some other reasons likely related to the size of our city (big, but not too big) and its isolation from any other major metropolitan centre in Canada, the Winnipeg Film Group developed as different from other independent film co-ops in Canada and became a full centre supporting the entire cycle of film.

Alex Fitch: Why do you think Winnipeggian film has a distinct voice within Canadian cinema?

CA: Without access to a film school, filmmakers in Winnipeg just did what they thought was best and perhaps didn’t realise – or maybe they did and didn’t care – that they were breaking all standard conventions. Locally, film critics were brutal when they reviewed the works of our members produced in the 80s (we opened our Cinematheque in 1982, and of course prominently featured our members’ films) and the early 90s, because they weren’t following the standard conventions that are normally taught to filmmakers in film school. Before the ‘film industry’ reached Winnipeg, with corps of experienced film crafts people and technicians training students in making films ‘the right way’, the Film Group evolved an aesthetic approach that essentially affirmed that there is no one right way to make a film, and certainly no wrong way. The skill of filmmaking in Winnipeg was something that was handed down personally from filmmaker to filmmaker (John Paizs to Guy Maddin, Guy Maddin to Deco Dawson, for example). It often stuns people across the country to see just how influential and significant Winnipeg filmmakers remain, and how proportionally deep the talent pool is in relation to artistic cinema over the years, in spite of how small Winnipeg is and in spite of the absence of the many financial resources that are available in other centres.

AF:Is Guy’s output indicative of a local style?

CA: He is certainly among one of the most recognised independent filmmakers from Winnipeg, and his output could be said to be parallel in a way to that of Norma Bailey (Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1980). But Norma works in a completely different aesthetic school, focusing on narrative and documentary, and her movies are a staple of television programming. Guy and Norma are the only filmmakers that I can think of that have consistently worked for decades here in Manitoba at a high level. In the early days, if you wanted to make a film and if you wanted it screened at our film theatre (likely the only screening local filmmakers would have had here in the city), you would have hung out here at the Winnipeg Film Group. In an interview I did with Guy Maddin last year, he noted that he learned filmmaking by hanging out at the Film Group – as non-specific as that might sound (Guy studied Economics in University). Guy’s insistence on doing things his way – even a documentary commissioned by the Documentary Channel (My Winnipeg) – often in spite of compelling financial reasons, is, of course, what clearly stands out in my mind about him as a filmmaker. That, plus you always feel you know him a little more as a person with every film you watch, which is not necessarily true of other filmmakers in his category.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Related articles: Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg, interview with Guy Maddin.

Still from 5 Centimeters per Second

Screening as part of Anime Now

Date: 20-22 June 2008

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

With only one feature film, three shorts and one medium-length work to his name, Makoto Shinkai is a thirty-something animé director who has generated far more praise than his relative youth and short career would seem to deserve. Dubbed the new Hayao Miyazaki by the animé press, this is something of a misnomer as the two directors have very little in common other than creating films with greater emotional depth and a more singular vision than those of their peers. However, while Miyazaki works primarily in the nostalgic fantasy genre for a child / family audience, Shinkai makes thoughtful, austere films that tap into contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with technology and how it both connects and separates us from the people around us. While the director’s latest movie, 5 Centimeters per Second, is slightly underwhelming compared to his previous two films The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star, his films at their best show a director who has a genuinely affecting visual aesthetic that recalls the live action films of Andrei Tarkovsky. It is this sensitivity to form and place that have earned the director his reputation, cemented by the fact that his first two shorts were made by the director almost entirely by himself on a home computer.

Alex Fitch: What motivated the choice of doing She and Her Cat in black and white? Was it to convey the less complicated nature of the love between a pet and their owner or was it because cats have limited colour perception? Or was it simply because you wanted to work without colour?

Makoto Shinkai: I made She and Her Cat in black and white more out of necessity than design. I made the film in 1998 and at that time it was very difficult to make colour animation due to the lack of available technology. Colour used three times as much space in the computer and it would also make the process three times slower and as I was still working at the time, I needed to minimise what is a long and complex procedure. If you make a movie now, it doesn’t matter if it’s black and white or colour because the technology is able to deal with it.

You’ve made short films and a feature-length film and now your latest film 5 Centimeters per Second is a medium-length work at 63 minutes. Do you prefer working on films of shorter lengths or features? Or does it depend on the story you want to tell?

It does depend on what kind of story I want to tell. As it takes about a month or so to make a short film and at least a year to make a feature, it all depends on how much time I have to put into it and how long I am prepared to dedicate myself to the process. If it’s a light-hearted subject matter, I may want to spend less time on it so it really depends on my level of dedication to the subject. As for 5 Centimetres per Second, because it contains three short films which make up a medium-length film, it wasn’t a heavy decision. When the film was completed, I didn’t feel as satisfied at the end of the process and this has led me to work on a feature-length film for my next project.

In both Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, it’s technology that both enables and prohibits normal communication and it seems to be a metaphor for unspoken words in relationships. Do you think technology – from letter writing to video phones – is something that gives people a chance to express their true feelings by liberating them from direct confrontation? Or does it make communication more difficult due to the lack of body language?

I believe that it depends more on the circumstance if this kind of technology expresses your feelings. For Voices of a Distant Star, one of the reasons that I used mobile phone technology is that when I made it, texting on phones and sending e-mail by phone was starting to be popular in Japan. I was in a relationship at the time and used to send texts to my girlfriend. Although my texts arrived quickly, sometimes it took a long time for the replies to get back to me. In these instances, I wondered why it took such a long time to hear back and though we both lived relatively close by in Tokyo, I felt that her feelings might be far from mine. This experience drove me to include the use of mobile phone technology within the film.

Does the sense of isolation and the missed emotional opportunities in your films come from personal experience or particular genres you enjoyed reading / watching when you were younger?

I can’t pinpoint any particular experience to share with you and to be honest, this theme hasn’t come from watching any particular film. It is just something that has come out of myself.

In 5 Centimeters per Second, it’s difficulties with travelling and arranging meetings that makes the romance problematic; however, the method of travel – by train – seems inherently romantic. Is this something that particularly interests you, or speaking as someone who comes from a country that’s slightly obsessed with trains, am I reading too much into it?

This is a question that I get asked quite a lot by Japanese audiences too. I am not particularly interested in trains themselves and I don’t particularly enjoy drawing trains. People do point out that trains feature in my films quite prominently and what I tell them is that first of all, trains are part of everyday Japanese life and as the main characters in these films are in their teens they don’t have access to cars. Though I’m not interested in trains themselves, I am interested in scenes of trains travelling through cities or countryside. The box-shaped carriages moving through these scenes are beautiful to me and I am attracted by the idea of total strangers being taken to their destination in these boxes. I haven’t seen a level crossing in London yet but in Japan they are everywhere and I have always liked the idea of this divide between two sides that the crossings create. For much of my life, from high school to university to my working life, I used trains myself and have many memories from those days.

Long-distance relationships have their problems but seem increasingly common in the modern world, due to the ability of people meeting over the internet etc. Also, over the last half-century, more and more people have had to travel to do their jobs, making their relationships also long-distance. Are these themes that interest you or was it just the emotional content of the situations?

It’s the situations that these distant relationships create that interest me more than the distance itself.

Non-diagetic music seems very important in your films, culminating in the final section of 5 Centimeters per Second. Do you think music is something that is underused in animation in terms of either accentuating the narrative or working as the equivalent of narration from an unseen source?

I believe that the amount of music used in animation is similar to that used in live action films. In many movies, music can sometimes communicate something that the picture cannot and therefore can play a very important part. I appreciate that the use of music at the end of 5 Centimetres per Second is probably quite rare in that you won’t see it in many films and I had to question myself as to whether I should finish off with music at the climax. I am happy with the ending now but it was a tough decision to make. One of the reasons that I chose the song is because it was popular in Japan about ten years ago and I’m sure that many of us have had the experience of listening to music from the past and being reminded of times and places travelled previously. As it is such a famous song in Japan, I felt that the audience who heard it would be reminded of their own memories from ten years ago. Because I wanted this music to bring out the audience’s memories, I removed all dialogue and sound effects. Although the movie is only 60 minutes long, I included the song in the hope that their memories would help to create the experience of a feature film. As I didn’t think about other countries, I never really thought about how people around the world might react to the music and I am looking forward to hearing what other audiences think as it will be playing in London this summer.

Thinking of the conclusion of 5 Centimeters per Second, the powerful use of music recalls the heightened emotions in scenes accompanied by songs that are either performed by the characters or mimic the characters’ experiences in the films of PT Anderson (in particular Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love). Are you a fan of his work? Do you think too few filmmakers use music as a powerful enough tool in soundtracks?

Although I have heard of PT Anderson and his work, I have never seen his films.

In addition to filmmaking, you’ve also worked on interactive romance video games. Was the fact that other people could choose the outcome – be it happy or sad – something that appealed to you, so that you personally didn’t have to choose what happened to the characters?

As I don’t actually make the games, I can’t really answer this but if the question is do I like to make interactive films where the audience can choose the ending or not then I like to, as the director, decide how the outcome will be. I see that in Japan the effect of these games where you can choose the outcome has started to influence manga, novels and animé. The reason that I say this is that many of these novels for younger people take on the themes of parallel worlds and universes and The Place Promised in the Early Days also has a similar influence. Though the writer decides the ending, he pictures how the world might have been if the character had taken a different path and I am interested to see what the future holds in this area.

Introduction and interview by Alex Fitch, translation and English text by Hanako Miyata, Tim Williams and Justin Johnson.