Original subtitles

The Japanese film industry

lost its audience in the 1960s.

Before that, movies had been...

at the forefront of fashion.

It had been fashionable to emulate movie stars.

But in the 1960s,

people weren't going to movies. It was the television age.

Event halls also began to appear in those days.

These were not movie theaters,

but spaces to feature the art of young people.

For the first event at one such hall,

my friends and I were asked to screen our art films.

Since none of us had money

to make feature-length films,

we made short films one or two minutes long.

Since I was showing my shorts in these halls,

I didn't feel, as many then did, that certain work was beneath me,

so producers of TV commercials came calling.

"You make short films,

just a minute or two long, just like we do.

Would you make commercials for us?"

When given offers to make TVcommercials,

directors and cameramen at major studios like Toho or Toei

were insulted and flatly rejected them.

They felt that commercials had no meaning.

They were for selling things

and not fit for a respectable artist,

so no one in the industry made commercials.

None of my friends did either.

But I thought of commercials as films.

And since Japan was in its economic boom,

commercials had huge budgets.

Movie budgets had been shrinking,

so everything on-screen looked shabby.

But in a commercial, you could shoot a glorious blue sky.

It may have had no meaning,

but being able to show a beautiful blue sky

seemed wonderful on an artistic level.

I love Japanese cinema... Ozu and Kurosawa...

so of course I hoped that my first Japanese feature

would be a masterpiece.

In fact, I'd already written a script for it called Hanagatami,

the first script I cowrote with Chiho Katsura.

It has yet to be produced.

Around that time in America,

Steven Spielberg made Jaws,

and one or two people in Japan thought

that a filmmaker considered an "amateur" by Japan's film industry

should perhaps make a movie as well.

So I was asked to write a script for a film...

that would be entertaining and a huge success like Jaws.

I always discuss important matters with children.

Adults can only think about things they understand,

so everything stays on that boring human level.

At that level, a hit movie about shark attacks

leads to one about bear attacks. That's the best they can do.

But children come up with things that can't be explained.

They like the strange and mysterious.

The power of cinema isn't in the explainable,

but in the strange and inexplicable.

So I asked my daughter, who was about 10 at the time...

"If Daddy were to make a Japanese movie,

what would be an interesting story?"

She said, " Don't bother. Japanese movies are boring."

I said, "But if I were to make one,

and I can't make a movie like Jaws in Japan,

what kind of movie would be as exciting?"

At the time, my daughter...

was just beginning her voyage into womanhood.

First of all, ever since I was a small child,

all our family ever talked about was movies.

If the topic was movie stories and characters,

we could understand each other despite the generation gap.

She was seated before a mirror after a bath, combing her long hair.

She said, "Daddy, it would be scary

if my reflection in that mirror began attacking me."

I thought, " Yes, that would be strange and interesting. "

It's not all that strange for ants or bears to attack people,

but to be attacked by your reflection in a mirror

is a fantasy that could only happen in a movie.

That would be very interesting,

like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

We would sleep on futons

at my grandparents' home in the country.

In Tokyo I would sleep in a bed,

so there was no need to set up a futon or put it away.

But in the country, futons also had to be hung outside and aired,

and they were heavy for a child like me.

I'd try to get one out of the closet,

and I'd collapse under its weight.

The experience was a little frightening.

It felt like some futon monster attacking me.

So that was used in the film

in the scene where futons attack one of the girls.

Also, there was a large clock there,

like a grandfather clock,

with creaking gears and a gong sounding the hour.

That was also very frightening to me as a child.

When I had to use the bathroom late at night,

I'd sneak by the clock without looking.

She said, "When I visited Grandpa's house last summer,

there was no refrigerator,

so to chill a watermelon,

he used a rope and dropped it down a deep well.

When he pulled it up later,

it seemed like a human head about to attack me. "

"I see," I replied and asked her for more.

I was studying piano at the time,

and whenever I saw a film, I loved to come home

and play the music on the piano.

I didn't have the sheet music, so I'd play by ear.

That was my favorite diversion.

But my classical piano teacher insisted on the proper fingering.

As I happily played the tunes,

she would correct my fingering

by slapping my hands, and that memory stayed with me.

One day, my fingers got caught between the keys,

and I started to dislike playing.

It felt as if the piano was attacking me.

That impression stayed with me.

Also, because my teacher corrected my fingering so much,

when my fingernails got caught on the keyboard,

I'd imagine that the piano was snapping at my fingers.

I was unconsciously storing all those thoughts in my memory,

and they came out later as ideas for the film.

When people join forces to do something,

a team of seven is ideal.

It's a long-standing tradition in Japan

to have seven members on a team.

Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai is a good example.

During the war we had seven-man work teams.

When American warplanes bombed us,

the seven-member teams would go

and extinguish the fires.

So the idea of seven girls came naturally to me,

and I wrote about them getting eaten by a house.

Obayashi told me

that Toho had asked him to make a horror film

and that Chigumi had given him some ideas.

He said Chigumi had suggested

a story about a house that eats girls.

I thought of the British writer Walter de la Mare.

He'd written a very short story

about an old woman who lives in a house.

Her granddaughters visit her one by one.

The old woman is always knitting,

and her granddaughters come visit one at a time.

There's a long wooden trunk in the house,

like a chest for storing clothes,

and each granddaughter ends up in that chest.

All of them disappear. I think it was that sort of story.

Having the house eat them for no reason is ridiculous,

so I added...

that the house was haunted

by the spirit of an old woman

who'd died in the house.

She'd waited there for her lover,

who'd never returned from the war.

These girls, born after the war...

and therefore unaware of how precious peace is,

come to the house on summer vacation.

The old woman's bitterness about the war turns into an evil spirit

and devours the girls.

That was the story I wrote.

And because I'm from Hiroshima,

I'd been affected by the atomic bomb,

so that naturally became a theme.

All of my close childhood friends died...

because of the bomb,

so I wanted to write a fantasy

with the atomic bomb as a theme.

I was ready to go along with any idea he had.

I said right off, "That's a great idea."

I even had the characters' names ready:

One girl would be called Melody,

and the girl who eats a lot would be called Mac, from "stomach."

One would be called Kung Fu, which was popular then.

All that was in place before we began on the script,

so writing it

was relatively easy.

We just had to put those ideas in some kind of order.

I'd never had such an easy preliminary meeting.

He simply said, "Just work with these ideas."

Since Katsura and I had already worked closely

on the script for Hanagatami,

we knew each other well.

We'd both seen

almost every important horror film ever made,

so we could communicate like,

"Remember that shot in that movie?" "Oh, right, sure."

The writing process was fun and easy.

I don't think of House as a horror film.

Horror movies are more suspenseful.

House is a fantasy film about young girls.

For us, "horror" didn't refer to a movie genre.

For us, it had to do with human psychology.

The term "horror movie" didn't exist when we were growing up.

We made House as a ghost-and-fantasy film.

In order to present

an exaggerated and beautiful world of fantasy,

rather than ordinary reality,

we used a ghost-story setting.

That was our thinking.

Music too beautiful or sweet for a regular movie,

or imagery that looked too pretty or fake,

were made acceptable

by the context of a ghost story.

That was our generation's version of a horror film.

I wrote the script at the very beginning

and handed it to Obayashi, and that was that.

Then, until the movie was completed,

I wasn't involved at all.

I just wondered if it would even get made.

I never thought it would get made.

That's why I gave it the English title House.

A foreign title for a Japanese film was taboo back then.

I was probably the first to do that.

But I thought, "Why not?"

You see it on this first version of the script.

No Japanese director would name his film like that.

Back then, projects would be in development for months

because studios just didn't have the resources.

House was green-lighted in just three hours.

The studio exec said, "I knew you'd come through, Obayashi!

You're amazing! A regular Spielberg!

It only took us three hours to green-light it.

It's a brilliant, truly original story."

I asked, " So production will start right away?"

He replied, "Unfortunately, no.

None of our directors wants to do it.

They all want to make a film

and are waiting for their turn,

but when I showed them the treatment for House,

every one of them said

that making such a ludicrous film

would end their career.

Without a director, we can't make it."

I said, "Why don't I do it?"

He said, "lmpossible. You don't work for Toho,

so you can't make this film. "

I asked, "But Toho has definitely given it the go-ahead?

May I announce that?"

He said, " That's fine. We'll simply say we couldn't make it."

So I made up new business cards.

I designed this picture on the cover too.

Japanese movie posters just didn't look like this.

"How stupid," everyone said,

just from the picture of a house with a huge tongue sticking out.

I put this picture on my business cards

and handed them out, saying, "Toho will be making House."

Ten years before that, my short film called Emotion

had been shown at 60 percent of Japanese universities,

as well as in event halls, and it became a big hit.

People who had seen it then as young adults

were by then working for magazines, record companies,

department stores, and various other places

as adults in their 30s.

They said, "That same director, Obayashi,

is going to make a film called House.

Let's help him out."

Though Toho was still waffling, a department store held

a House fashion show with seven models.

It came out as a manga in a popular boys' comic magazine,

as well as in a girls' comic magazine.

There was also a novelization.

A record company also went ahead

and made a sound-track album.

It was turned into a radio drama.

House appeared in various media in the two years

it took to get the film made.

But over those two years,

anticipation for the film was building.

I compiled ten full files during those two years.

Every day, in all kinds of publications,

you'd find an article about a Toho film called House.

Everyone was looking forward to seeing it.

And the radio drama,

which aired late at night,

drew a huge audience and was widely discussed.

Obayashi made all those things happen

as part of his relentless campaign

to pressure Toho.

In the end, Toho couldn't put it off any longer,

and that definitely came about...

because of Obayashi's sheer energy and his...

Well, his energy was enough.

Asei Kobayashi, who wrote the music for House, was about my age.

He'd been very successful writing music for commercials.

He'd never worked in film before,

but all of us in commercials

had great admiration for cinema,

and we all wanted to work in film.

"When you make a movie someday, let me write the music."

He'd been telling me that for over 10 years.

So when I was about to make House, I told him...

"I want you to score this film."

But when people work on their first film,

they have their own "dream movie" in their heads.

Kobayashi wanted this to be a very serious film,

a literary-artistic film in the tradition of Japanese cinema.

He wanted that as his first film score.

He'd have been happy to work on Hanagatami,

but he ridiculed House, just like everyone else.

He was a roly-poly guy, and he said, "I'll act in your movie,

but there's no way I'll score a movie like House."

I said, "Hold on a minute.

The most important thing in a film like this is beautiful music.

Masterpieces in this ghost-and-fantasy genre

have all had the most beautiful music.

They're like gothic novels,

so they need to have gothic elegance."

So he agreed to work on the project

and wrote the piano pieces in the film,

but he said, " I'm too old.

You need someone younger for a film like this."

There was a band at that time,

still relatively unknown, called Godiego.

Mickie Yoshino was the piano player

in this young band.

Kobayashi said, "I want to bring Godiego on board.

Can I have them write the music using my themes?" I said okay.

But production didn't start for two years.

During that period, Godiego came up with lots of ideas,

so we decided to go ahead with a sound-track album.

So a year before the film itself,

the sound-track album wound up being released.

Kobayashi wrote this piece...

It has a classical flavor.

It expresses the fantasy aspect

of the ghost-and-fantasy genre.

But the piece was arranged...

by the young guys in Godiego.

And since the music came out a year early,

we had it played in the radio drama and in department stores.

When the shoot began, we played it on the set all day.

The seven lead actresses were all novices.

I only cast people I knew from my commercials and indie films.

The girl who played Gorgeous was a working actress,

but she was still new at it.

When I tried to give them verbal direction,

their acting was amateurish, like in a school play.

But when I put on the sound track

and the music suddenly changed from a major to a minor chord...

the girls would be walking along cheerfully

and then turn melancholy as the chord changed.

They belonged to a younger generation that found it easier

to express emotion through chords, melodies, and rhythms

than through words.

So instead of talking,

I decided to use music to direct their movements.

That's how I drew performances out of them.

Film critics belittled their acting for that reason,

but young audiences found it interesting

that the girls moved as if they were dancing.

To get that out of the girls, although I was almost 40 then,

I'd skip hand in hand with them in the studio every day.

And I too, as the director, was ridiculed for doing that.

I got along with the girls very well because of the music.

Toho said they couldn't do the casting.

Since there were only nicknames like Fantasy, Gorgeous, and Melody,

the studio just gave up.

Fortunately, after the movie was green-lighted,

there was a two-year waiting period.

It's a luxury to have two years of prep time.

During that time I must have made over 200 commercials.

Among the girls in those commercials,

I found one who would be great for the role of Melody,

another for the role of Sweet, and so on.

I told the girls I found

over those two years,

"When I finally make House, I'll cast you in these roles. "

The only professional actress among them was Kimiko lkegami.

As for Yoko Minamida,

she'd left Daiei and was working for Nikkatsu.

She was one of the top actresses in Japanese cinema,

but few films were being made for actresses of her caliber,

so she was working in TV and theater

because she couldn't find film projects.

In the Japanese film industry, unlike in America,

once an actress plays a mother, she's never cast as a young girl again.

There was a rigid age restriction

whereby an actress could only play a role close to her age.

In American movies, you see older actors playing young men,

and young actors playing old men, but not in Japanese films.

Minamida was still young when I asked her,

"The role is of an old woman. Will you do it?"

She replied, " Yes, I will.

But once I do, I'll never be cast as an ingenue again,

so this is a big deal."

It took courage for her to accept that role.

That courage had a big influence

on lkegami, who played Gorgeous,

when she had to show her breasts in a scene.

It was the first time for lkegami, and she was very young.

She was hesitating, and Minamida said to her,

"Being an actress...

means being naked and baring your soul,

but you can't see the soul, so it means baring your body.

You just wear costumes over it,

but when you're naked, you're really an actress.

Here, let me show you."

She undressed, and the younger actress did the same.

Minamida's nude scene wasn't in the script,

but I said, " You have beautiful breasts. Let's shoot you in the nude too."

And we wound up shooting her in the nude.

We became lifelong friends. She passed on last year.

This was basically a movie I made with my friends.

I played the girl shining shoes,

and the production designer played my boss, who's shining shoes too.

He was my father's right-hand man on all his films.

Kiyohiko Ozaki and I were horse-riding friends back then.

He was famous in Japan

as a country-western singer.

So I basically asked my friends to be in the film.

It was kind of a scandal

that it was made right on Toho's lot.

Soundstages at major studios could only be used

by their regular salaried employees.

So an outsider coming in to make a film

on Toho's huge soundstage... which Toho couldn't afford to use...

was a big deal.

But that didn't happen overnight.

I'd been using that soundstage for four years

to make commercials,

and I'd already developed a rapport with the crew.

I didn't care if I was ridiculed.

I wanted to make a film unlike any Japanese film before it.

So I had to be selective about how I shot scenes.

"Should I shoot this scene like this?

Wait, Kurosawa did something like that.

No, Ozu did something similar.

If Kurosawa or Ozu were to see it,

what kind of direction would offend them most?

I've got it. That's how I'll do it."

That was my thinking as I made House.

In Japan we didn't have a true "director of photography."

The cameraman, Yoshitaka Sakamoto, had been working on my commercials.

He was only 19 when he started.

So I took him with me to Toho,

and he worked like a"classic" director of photography

and did his own lighting.

A director of photography handles lighting

and leaves the camera operator to man the camera.

Under the Japanese system... for example with Daisaku Kimura,

who is "Japanese" in the best sense of the word...

the cameraman dons his headband and insists on running the camera.

But Sakamoto was different.

He didn't care about manning the camera, but he wanted to control the lighting.

But neither the lighting department...

nor the camera department would cooperate.

So what I did was...

since it's the director's job, to talk to everyone like this:

"Hey, So-and-so, don't fall from up there."

Or " Hey, So-and-so, let's use your lights

to cook these nice fish cakes.

If you could sear them lightly, they'd be great for lunch."

I made that sort of silly small talk.

Then a screw fell out of my glasses,

and a lens came loose.

I couldn't find another tiny screw like that.

So for the rest of that day

I wore sunglasses with one lens missing.

Later we gathered in the staff room

for beer and sake to toast the first day of the shoot,

but the eight guys from lighting weren't there.

In the power dynamics of the crew, lighting is the most powerful.

They're like the helmsman on a boat.

I thought I'd alienated them

and that things would be tense from then on.

Two hours later, all the lighting men showed up.

I said, "Sorry, we already started, since you guys were late. "

One of them opened up a tissue and said, "Is this yours?"

And there was the screw I'd lost.

Sorry, but this story makes me tear up.

I asked how they managed to find that tiny screw

on such a cluttered soundstage.

The lighting man whose name I'd called out earlier said

that no director at Toho had ever called him by name before

and that he'd been very moved,

so he resolved to find that screw,

even if it took all night.

Then the senior lighting men decided to help him,

and they found the tiny screw.

After that, the shoot went smoothly.

They built a lot of sets,

and it was great fun to go visit...

better than any amusement park.

It was like a miracle to me.

The soundstage doors were huge,

about 30 times bigger than me,

and when you opened them,

there was a set of the old woman's house,

and a set of a grassy field,

and beyond that was a set of the well,

with an amazing sunset in the background.

It was like a wonderland.

But the most exciting thing

was that the whole crew of pros, all of them adults,

seemed almost to be playing like children.

The production was...

according to crewmembers,

really exciting and lots of fun,

with everyone always smiling and laughing,

which was such a rare thing to see.

I did my part in various ways.

Besides directing, I wore a different outfit every day,

so that people would say

that the director wore the most interesting and fashionable clothes.

The film featured

inexperienced teenage girls,

so everything was fun for them, and they giggled all the time.

I'd sing with the girls,

or play piano or quiz games with them,

and we'd have races on the studio lot.

We were having so much fun that the veteran crewmembers

remembered they were there because they loved movies.

Although filmmaking had become their job,

making movies is really a kind of play, and we had fun.

At the time, Japanese cinema was all about realism,

and so was American cinema.

Everything was depicted realistically.

But what we wanted to convey was a cinematic reality,

and that reality was one of make-believe.

The special effects department at Toho

had been responsible for films like Godzilla,

so they were really good,

but we didn't use their special-effects director.

The cameraman and I oversaw the special effects

because we wanted the special effects to look fake.

It wasn't realism that I wanted people to see

but the passion, hard work, and innovation involved,

and the energy that all those things created.

I believe that an audience can appreciate

obvious composite shots or an actress suspended upside down.

Unless you make that sort of impression on the audience,

I don't think a film will have any impact or power.

A traditional Japanese director

would have complained, "I can't shoot this."

But Obayashi cheerfully set about shooting my script.

In his commercials,

he'd dealt with all kinds of fantastical images,

so he was skilled at shooting them.

It was all technical experimentation,

and my approach was to turn experimentation into expression.

I learned new things by experimenting,

like making composite shots

by combining a painted background with the actual set.

That technique was used to create the strange house.

By combining old and new techniques,

you could come up with interesting things.

In that sense, this movie was full of technical experiments.

It was also the first Japanese film

to incorporate television images.

For the underwater scene

where one of the girls dissolves,

I had to come up with some way to shoot that.

I had her suspended in the nude by a rope.

Then, from the opening in the roof,

buckets of blue paint were poured on her body

to create a bluescreen chroma key effect.

As the blue liquid covered her body,

those blue parts would seem to disappear,

and her body would seem to dissolve in the water.

We didn't have HD monitors back then,

so we used an old TV monitor with 525 scan lines.

We experimented like that every day,

so what the results would be was a mystery

even to experienced studio technicians, so that kept it interesting.

So it was a battle of sorts

to use techniques that served the film, rather than special effects per se,

and that was rooted in a spirit of creativity.

That's why I didn't create storyboards

to plan out the movie

and figure out how to shoot scenes and what techniques to use.

There's not one drawing in my copy of the script.

I would imagine in my mind, "If I shoot a reflection in the mirror

and then break the mirror,

I could make composites using the cracked pieces."

The set was where I'd come up with techniques.

Although I'd have some idea, I couldn't be sure

how a shot would look until I saw it on-screen.

Sometimes the result wasn't what I'd imagined,

but those unexpected results could surpass my imagination

and make for more interesting images.

To create culture using technology,

you have to be able to appreciate

unusual, unexpected results

and say, "That's really interesting!"

Those are the special effects I want.

That's what special effects are to me.

I want to make the special effects a child would make.

That's how I do it "my way."

In this copy of the script,

the film crew

wrote all kinds of messages.

It's amusing to read them now.

You'd think they'd write about how well the movie turned out...

but most of the top Toho crew wrote things like...

"Please make a memorable masterpiece next time, "

or "I had fun, but the movie is awful nonsense. "

Most of the messages are like that: hopeful but honest.

One production designer, who became a close friend

and worked on my films until his death,

sent a telegram exemplifying this general feeling

to a Toho director named Tom Kotani, who was in America at the time:

"Unfortunately, House has become a big hit.

Children really love the movie."

He was devoted to me and worked hard on the sets

and showed the greatest affection for the film as a crewmember,

but even he felt

that the success of House meant the end of Japanese cinema.

Loved by a small audience,

appealing only to film buffs,

and a commercial flop...

that's what people in the industry wanted it to be.

But unfortunately it became a smash hit.

After the movie came out,

I ran into the producer, Yorihiko Yamada.

He was furious and told me,

"That big shot in Toho distribution said,

'It seems the movie's a hit.

But I didn't want to have a hit

with this sort of movie.'

He said that to my face, and it made me mad."

I remember Yamada's words even now.

We made this original and entertaining film for Toho,

and then this big shot tells the producer

he didn't want it to be a hit. That's just rude.

He should have been happy.

When it was released,

my friends were all in elementary school like me,

and they said, "Your dad's made a weird movie.

Finally... a movie we can watch. " They were really thrilled.

But their parents said,

"I don't want my child watching a movie like that. "

They all said that.

There was a clear split between kids'and parents'reactions,

and in my mind, I was thinking, "Yes!"

Those reactions were very interesting.

At that time, film critics

commanded a great deal of respect and authority,

and they seemed to have no idea how to review the film.

It was beyond their comprehension.

Was it a film or just a series of commercials?

Their reaction didn't really surprise me.

The reviews of the film seemed really malicious.

Most condemned it: "This is not a film."

It didn't even receive that many reviews.

I think reviews were often ten lines or less.

The rare review that filled a page or two

dismissed the film in absolute terms.

Katsura was angry

about the reaction from Sadao Yamane, one of Japan's leading critics.

"He trashed the movie and called it a piece of crap. "

It was that kind of film.

But I wasn't surprised at all.

I expected it to stir up those kinds of reactions.

That always happens when a new type of movie is born.

Something that not everyone understands,

that trips them up here and there

and stays on their minds,

marks the first stage in the birth of a new kind of film.

So it was interesting to see all kinds of reactions.

But I believed that it epitomized the essence of genuine cinema,

which I wanted to show...

to young people, who had stopped watching Japanese films.

I put my pride on the line

and made this film with faith in my love for cinema.

I was proud of the fact that with House I had made

a real "filmmaker's film" in the classic sense.

That's why I put "A Movie" at the beginning...

to indicate that this is what cinema is all about.

The movie won the hearts of young people.

Long lines formed at theaters, entirely of kids under 15,

which was unprecedented.

Those kids have now become film critics

or film directors.

Many of today's young directors and film critics write

that House set the course of their careers in cinema.

I think these people were

about 15 years old when they saw the movie.

The magazine Kinema Junpo

ran a feature article

on the ten favorite movies...

of today's young Japanese directors.

The number-one favorite

on some lists was House.

So while people of my generation and older

didn't understand the movie,

younger generations

found it very much to their liking.

I think certain older film critics saw something classic in House

that evoked the traditional magic and fascination of cinema.

Though the movie may seem violent,

I think they sensed something lovable about it.

They became the first supporters of my films.

Starting with I Are You, You Am Me, and Miss Lonely,

these critics, who were of my father's generation,

began to praise my movies enthusiastically,

as did my daughter's generation.

His films have won almost no awards.

But for audiences

who actually buy the tickets

and spend their time watching my father's films,

I think his films will stay in their hearts.

So rather than establishment awards, it's in people's choice awards...

which in my view are the most prestigious anyway...

that his films win top prizes.

That's the kind of director he is...

and I'm proud of that.