FEATURE| Lily Franky and Daihachi Yoshida, director of the film "A Beautiful Star," discuss "UFOs and Yukio Mishima.
Lily Franky and Daihachi Yoshida, director of the film "A Beautiful Star," discuss "UFOs and Yukio Mishima.
The movie "A Beautiful Star," which is currently in theaters, is a film marked by as many breathtaking and special moments as it is by numerous laugh-out-loud scenes. These special moments may be "true things that seem to be lies" or "lies that seem to be true" lurking in places we have avoided in our daily lives by labeling them as "radio-oriented" or "spiritual" or the like. In adapting such an acrobatic and delicate story based on Yukio Mishima's unique science fiction novel, director Daihachi Yoshida could not imagine anyone other than Lily Franky in the leading role.
For both Lily Franky, who in recent years has built up a fulfilling career as an actor, and Daihachi Yoshida, who won a total of film awards for "Kirishima, Bukkatsu Yamerutteyo," "A Beautiful Star" is a masterpiece that deserves to be called a new masterpiece. Born in 1963 and now 53 years old, we sat down with these two filmmakers for an in-depth discussion about UFOs, the original author Yukio Mishima, and the power of "life-changing movies" that many Japanese films have lost. The interviewer was Ishimasa Uno.
The film is about a father, Shigeichiro (Lily Franky), a weathercaster who "never gets it right"; a son, Kazuo (Kazuya Kamenashi), an ambitious freelancer; a daughter, Akiko (Ai Hashimoto), a college student who is too beautiful to be noticed by others; and a mother, Iyoko (Tomoko Nakajima), a housewife who is bored with her empty space in her heart. (Tomoko Nakajima). One day, the Osugi family suddenly awakens as Martians, Mercenaries, Venusians, and Earthlings. They are entrusted with a mission to save the "beautiful planet Earth. Once awakened, they struggle to live, but eventually they cause a public uproar, and each of them is hurt. Why did they wake up? Are they really awake?
A man appears before the family and asks them if the earth is worth saving.
A film version of the work, which had not been realized for more than a decade.
This is the first time that Lily-san has appeared in one of Director Yoshida's films; had the two of you never met before?
Yoshida.We once stood next to each other at a film award ceremony or something, didn't we?
lilyI remember having only a brief conversation at that time, something like, "We are the same age, aren't we?
Despite this, I heard that Director Yoshida used Lily-san to write the script from the beginning.
Yoshida.Over the past 10 years, I have repeatedly tried to make a film version of "A Beautiful Star. Each time, I have been rejected by various places, and the project has failed many times.
Well, it is a difficult project that tends to be aborted (laughs).
Yoshida.Yes (laughs). But when this project was launched, it was a little different from the previous ones. I had the feeling that this door might not be locked. When I finally started to write the script in earnest, the first person who came to mind was Lily.
In fact, for the past 10 years, I had never come up with the right answer as to who should play the main character, Shuichiro. In the original story, the main character is 52 years old, and it was only then that I realized, "Oh, he is the same age as me.
Then, as I mentioned earlier, I had a memory of exchanging words with Lily, saying, "We are the same age, aren't we? I thought I would do whatever I could to write a script that Lily would like, and I wanted her to be in it.
lilyI have watched Yoshida-san's movies in order from the first one, and have more than half of his DVDs. Even before I knew that we were the same age, I had a feeling that he must have the same likes as me. From the way he chose the source material to the way he directed the film, there was something in common.
In my mind, Yukiko Motoya ("FUNUKE Show Some Love, You Losers!"), Rieko Nishihara ("Permanent Nobara"), and now Yukio Mishima all have the same underlying smell. It is like looking at a person's bookshelf or CD cabinet, including the music used. It is as if I am looking at his bookshelf or CD shelf, including the music used there.
I can say this now that I have actually seen "A Beautiful Star," but this film became such a wonderful work because Director Yoshida shot it with Lily in the lead role, but I can't imagine it being anything other than that combination, or it would have been a disaster if it had been anything other than that (laughs).
lilyAh (laughs).
Longing for dangerous or dangerous elements.
If I may put it crudely, this is about "radio-kei" people, isn't it? And, aside from the period when Yukio Mishima wrote this novel, the use of terms like "radio-kei" in the world of subcultures has attracted attention, and at the same time, I think it is a part of the main culture that has been labeled and separated from the rest of the main culture since the 1990s.
lilyYou mean after Mr. Takashi Nemoto.
That's right. However, both Director Yoshida and Ms. Lily know firsthand the period before that, when there were many dangerous and dangerous people in the subculture and new wave areas up to the 80s, which were connected to their own. I think it was because of that sense that he was able to make "Beautiful Star" such a wonderful work.
lilyI don't want to be like that, and I don't want them near me, but I have a strange admiration for them. I don't want to be like them and I don't want them near me, but I have a strange admiration for them. Up until the 80's, there were many such people.
Yoshida.I am aware that I am an ordinary person, and that is what attracts me. In my case, especially through new wave and punk. For example, I can't imagine myself becoming a junkie like Sid Vicious and killing my girlfriend, but I still sometimes want to listen to "My Way" (by Sid Vicious) at full volume, and I felt I had to put that kind of feeling to rest somewhere. At my age. At my age.
I see.
Yoshida.On the other hand, when I was in my 30s and 40s, I felt that I had to "do better" because I had gone through such things in my teens and 20s. I was trying to do the work that I should be doing. But when you reach 50, you start to think, "I've had enough of trying to fix myself up and do things properly" (laughs). (Laughs.) I probably don't have that long ahead of me, so I thought it would be okay to make a work with such a sense of detachment.
Therefore, it was very meaningful for me to meet Lily, who was of the same generation and in the same cultural environment to some extent, at a time like this.
lilyIn my case, I never intended to be an outlaw at all, but I found myself becoming one. In that sense, the role of Shigekichiro is one that I have never played before. I had never played a role with a proper social status before.
Indeed. At least at the beginning of this story, you play a very formal role as a weather forecaster who has had a corner on a TV news program for many years (laughs).
lilyYes. For me, both the weatherman with a family and the Martian are equally distant fantasies in the sense that I have never played these roles before (laughs). Unlike the roles I have played in the past, such as a murderer, a homeless man, or a strange university professor, I felt as if I could jump right into the role.
Lily-san saw a killer and Director Yoshida saw a UFO.
Lily, have you ever seen UFOs or had any other so-called paranormal experiences?
lilyI think there are both UFOs and ghosts.
I've never seen it, but do you believe it?
lilyIt's often better to assume that there is one, which explains a lot. Oh, but if it was a killer, I've seen it.
Huh? How did you know it was a murderer?
lilyWhen I was in elementary school, my grandma, me, and my mom slept in one room, in the shape of a river. It was summer, so we had the windows open and the screen door open, and we hung mosquito nets on the bed. When I woke up in the middle of the night, there was an old man in work clothes behind the screen door with a sickle in one hand and he was huffing and puffing.
(Laughter).
lilyI closed my eyes and tried to convince myself that it was a dream, but when I looked at the window again a few minutes later, the old man was trying to open our screen door, huffing and puffing. Still, we were somehow separated by a mosquito net, so I tried desperately to go back to sleep ....... But when I told my grandma about it in the morning, she didn't take me up on it at all.
Yoshida.In fact, was there an incident nearby or something?
lilyNo, it seems there was no such story, but isn't it too vivid to be a dream? In general, such a Yokomizo Seishi-like scene is too realistic for elementary school students to even fantasize about it unless they actually saw it.
Yoshida.I have seen a UFO, seven or eight years ago.
It is rather recent, isn't it?
Yoshida.I was on the beach in Kujukuri with a friend when we saw a light over the ocean that was clearly moving in a strange way. At first it was moving horizontally out to sea, but then it suddenly started to rise. At that time, rather than getting excited, I got very scared and went back to the car. So the next day, I called my friend. She lived near the site, so I asked her, "Did anything happen since yesterday?" I said, "Did anything happen since yesterday? The other person just mumbled something like, "That was probably a fishing boat. I said, "What? Something's not right. I said, "What's wrong?
lilyIsn't that exactly what happened in this movie? The next day, when he asks his mistress, the girl he was with, what was going on at that time, the other person says he doesn't know. (*The character of Lily has a mistress in the play.)
Yoshida.That's right. That place was from that experience. Oh, it was a male friend with me (laughs).
lilySeeing the light moving strangely on the beach is completely the same as the Ai (Hashimoto) episode.
Yoshida.Yes, it is the same there. But it's not that I became more attached to "A Beautiful Star" because of that experience; it's a completely separate thing for me. But since I had that experience, I thought I'd try to incorporate it into the adaptation.
lilyThat scene on the beach seemed awfully realistic to me. Oh, I see.
Yukio Mishima's fascination with a variety of people.
The interesting thing about "A Beautiful Star" this time is that even the most outrageous events are basically depicted within the context of realism. Until around the 1980s, there were UFO episodes in "From the North," for example, but these days, realism is realism and science fiction is science fiction, and the two are completely separated. This is especially true of Japanese works.
lilyAt that time, Mr. Kuramoto (Satoshi) really tried to call a UFO together in Furano, and that was the origin of that episode. After "Encounter with the Unknown," UFOs were not so far away from our daily lives.
Yoshida.Everyone watched Mr. Junichi Yaoi's programs and so on.
lilyYes, yes. And after that boom went away, people started to look at me funny when I still talked about UFOs and so on.
Yoshida.In terms of UFOs, the most significant for me was Katsuhiro Otomo's "Space Patrol Shigema" (included in the short story collection "Short Peace" published in 1979). The story is about a group of people who were drinking and playing mahjong while talking about how they were Martians and Mercenaries, and then, on the morning after an all-nighter, they stroll down to the ocean and see a UFO leaping out of the water. So when I first read Yukio Mishima's "A Beautiful Star," I thought, "Oh, this is 'Space Patrol Shigema'" (laughs).
Heh.
Yoshida.And later I heard that Otomo also mentioned that he was influenced by Yukio Mishima's "A Beautiful Star. Oh, he said he was not mistaken.
By the way, what was Yukio Mishima like for you two?
lilyWhen I was in high school, I read some of his best works, but when I came to Tokyo and entered art school, there were many hardcore punks around me. At the time, Yukio Mishima was the best writer for them. I was somewhat inspired by that.
Yukio Mishima committed suicide in 1970.
lily7 years old. So, for our generation, only the name was vividly etched in our minds even before we read the book. I don't remember if I saw the news that day or not, but after that, I saw endless Mishima-related topics and pictures on TV.
Yoshida.Many overseas musicians were also Mishima fans. Jean-Jacques Burnel of the Stranglers even wrote a song called "Death And Night And Blood(Yukio). Rather, for me, the entrance to Yukio Mishima came from that kind of music.
David Bowie's love of Mishima is also well known.
lilyEspecially in the 80's, overseas people were more enthusiastic about Mishima.
In Japan, there was an atmosphere of reluctance to publicly declare one's fan status due to political and ideological backgrounds.
lilyThere was also the issue of homosexuality. You remember "Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters" (directed by Paul Schrader in 1985) with Ken Ogata and Julie (Kenji Sawada), which was never released in Japan? I first saw it in a sauna in Kokura.
Huh?
lilyAt the time I wondered why they were playing such a movie video in such a place, but now that I think about it, it must have been a haunt, that sauna.
I see!
lilyIt's a work that is not often seen, though, so I watched it carefully all the way through in the sauna. For me, I have always had the image of Mishima as a pop star, a trickster, and a cool person who unexpectedly came across in various places like that.
Yoshida.Although political prejudice is inevitably attached to him because of the manner in which he died. To be honest, until I read "A Beautiful Star," I had a bit of a negative attitude toward him. But as I got to know him, I came to sympathize with him and his way of life.
The novel "A Beautiful Star" was also a work that was written under the influence of the atmosphere of the time. Mishima is often talked about from an aesthetic point of view, but I think he was a writer who was always willing to get his hands in the raw and get his hands dirty. This is the kind of attitude that I tried to keep in mind when making this film.
Japanese films that are not made from marketing.
lilyI had to read each draft of the script until the final draft was ready, and I had never seen a script that changed so drastically in content from one draft to the next. Not only did the lines change, but the meaning of the scenes changed, the content of the discussions changed, and my mistress changed as well (laughs). That's how passionate Mr. Yoshida was about this project.
Yoshida.During the period when I was working on the script, I was so unusually focused that I could tell I was going a little crazy.
lilyI am sure that when we were college students, we saw films made by adults who had gone a little crazy and thought they were funny or crazy, and that led us to the path we have taken ever since.
Recently, especially in Japanese films, there are many films where the makers have researched the audience so much that they make films like this for young people and films like this for old people. In an age when people are avoiding exposure to such distractions, I would like young people to see films full of such distractions.
The first thing I remembered after watching this film was "Death to Tokimeki" by Yoshimitsu Morita, which I unintentionally tweeted right after the preview screening. It had been a long time since I had seen a Japanese film with that kind of crazy feeling.
lilyYes, yes. I want more young people today to have that kind of experience.
Yoshida.In fact, the only movie I have ever seen, before or since, was "Death to Tokimeki", which I saw in line for the opening night greeting. I was a big fan of Julie at the time. Come to think of it, Kamenashi (Kazuya), who played Kazuo in this film, looks a bit like Julie back then.
lilyYes, there is. Also, "Death to Tokimeki" reminds me of Naoki Sugiura. I went to see the movie for Julie, but the film was so cool that I was surprised that even Naoki Sugiura, who played the father in "Album on the Shore," seemed cool (laughs).
Yoshida.When I thought of the story of a family of four, I couldn't help but think of "Album on the Shore" when I was making "Beautiful Stars".
lilyCome to think of it, the ending of this film is a bit like "Album on the Shore" in some ways.
Indeed! I could go on and on (laughs), but I think this "Beautiful Star" is another special work that will be talked about for many years to come, whether 20 or 30 years later in that way.
Yoshida & Lily(Laughter).
Photography cooperation_Meiji University Surugadai Campus Academy Common
'TheBeautiful Stars" Now on view nationwide
Director: Daihachi Yoshida
Cast: Lily Franky, Kazuya Kamenashi, Ai Hashimoto, Tomoko Nakajima, Kuranosuke Sasaki
Screenplay: Daihachi Yoshida, Shotaro Kai
Based on Yukio Mishima's "A Beautiful Star" (Shincho Bunko)
Music: Takuma Watanabe
Distributor: GAGA
