The last is the album cover for Scott and Rivers, the J-Pop album that Rivers Cuomo, the singer for the American band Weezer (whose Pinkerton, by the way, was a favourite of mine which I listened to often in high school), recorded in 2013. The fact that his name happens to be « Starr » also brought back to me the idea of constellation.

He looks stylish in a Kimono, and seems used to the Japanese way of sitting. The second picture is a 1911 picture of Frederick Starr () sitting in the Japanese manner and wearing a Kimono. When I saw that, I immediately felt a visual connection between the two homophones in Japanese, « seiza »the japanese style of sitting and « seiza » the constellation. When you look at this vintage picture closely, you see that white dust is seared into the print.

The first is a self-portrait of Adolf de Meyer taken in 1900, when he really visited Japan (). Three pictures became the occasion for me to start conceiving the film. It’s because I made this film for the exhibition held about the 150 years of Franco-Japanese exchanges. Could you tell us more about those three characters and why you chose them ? Three characters from different countries and time periods interact. I used it as a symbol in the climactic scene of the film because I made what lurks in the gap between two companions from different countries and cultures into the theme of my film.Īnd while there is that kind of discrepancies, the one thing that will be completely synchronized will be between people watching my film sitting in the traditional japanese way, and the main characters waiting sitting in the same position ! On the stereo sound, from the left, you hear Geraldine Farrar singing on a 1916 recording, and on the right, Miura Tamaki singing on a 1917 recording. Some of the structural discrepancies, such as for instance the use of Puccini’s « One Fine Day » at the end, are intentional. First, I had the basic elements of what I wanted to shoot, then based on that I worked out the setting and details since I shot it this way, everything is off-kilter in very strange ways. When I write that, I feel that it is a very cool thing to say, but in reality, my script wasn’t ready until the actual day of shooting, and I added the entire narration in post-production. When you want to connect in your head what you see with something far removed from it, a new image comes to mind, and the experience of that image is the ideal. It just so happens that I’m writing this interview in Kyoto you can also get the sense of a microcosm in the stone garden of Ryoan-ji temple, and there’s a connexion.Įvoking something that isn’t there based on something on screen, making people imagine something where there’s nothing : that’s the kind of film that I yearn for. It was not possible to go to the moon, but I did know from Sen no Rikyuu, who delved deep into the spiritual world of the Tea Ceremony, that the alcove of a Japanese-style room can express a whole microcosm. In the case of this particular work, it would have been perfect if we could actually have filmed on the Moon’s surface, but for various circumstances due to budget and other things, we had to give the idea up. But the one thing I have learnt until now is that « the discrepancy creates the drama ». I haven’t received a formal education in so-called « dramatic film-making », and have basically made my films until now as a self-educated director.

Your film is based on a discrepancy between the set it is supposed to take place in, a lunar base, and what we see on screen, a simple Japanese-style room.

Microcosm japanese band