Nouvelle Tsunami

I wrote a comment in the previous posting and decided it deserved to be reworked into its own blog entry.

I, and many others, have mentioned the increased involvement of foreign filmmakers and writers in Japanese films as of late. There have been many one-off ventures, big and small: Lost In Translation, The Last Samurai, Letters From Iwo Jima to name some recent examples.

There are foreign writers with scripts being helmed by Japanese directors: Eric Heisserer's based-on-a-true-story homicide script Inhuman is to be directed by Nakata Hideo and Max Mannix's Tokyo Sonata (see HAF project profile) is getting the deluxe Kurosawa Kiyoshi treatment, going before cameras this week (hope to report on that soon).

As you know, there are also a select few directors like John Williams (who runs his own production company 100 Meter Films) and Michael Arias who are longtime residents making films in Japanese. All three categories look to expand.

Within that, Nouvelle Tsunami refers to the growing wave of French directors who are coming over to make movies. The cultural bonds between France and Japan obviously run very deep, especially through fashion (Louis Vuitton, anyone?), cinema and manga.

Here are some of the latest projects:

Three-segment omnibus film Tokyo! (see Twitch article and Japanese official site) features two segments by French directors Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, in addition to star Korean director Bong Joon-ho. Carax's just wrapped shooting -- look for Tom Mes as an extra (production company Bitters End put out calls for bodies for all three shorts).


Regular reader Aceface mentioned that veteran French director Barbet Schroeder (born in Tehran?) is in pre-production on an adaptation of Edogawa Rampo's "Blind Beast," with location work here in Japan. It'll be hard to top Masumura's version, but he's welcome to try. Edit: Tokyograph informs us it's actually　Rampo's "Injû" / 『陰獣』 not "Môjû" / 『盲獣』 that Schroeder is making. There's some interesting facts about it in this October interview. Aceface provides recent Japanese link here. It will star Harada Kana (原田佳奈) from Babel, who's a rare case of an actress telling directors at home and abroad to cast her. Looks like it worked.

Then there's Japanophile Jean-Pierre Limosin's Young Yakuza (see here) documentary. I know there are some reviews out there, but has anybody seen this?

French filmmaker Yves Montmayeur told me he's going to shoot a documentary on the history of yakuza movies. His previous topics include Christopher Doyle, Korean cinema and Miike.

Finally, l'enfant terrible of French cinema Gaspar Noé (born in Argentina)is now shooting his long gestating project Enter the Void. The project started life in the late 90s and is finally before cameras in Tokyo. I found a translation of a blurb that appeared in the French ed. Premiere magazine: "After 5 years away from the screen, Gaspar Noé the director of Irreversible is awaited at the beginning of September in Japan to shoot Enter the Void. For the moment, the plot is still confused: it is known that it will be a very freely adaption of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" and that it will be focused on drugs trafficking. Noé considers the film "really psychedelic, beyond reality - like Ken Russell- and "Jacob's Ladder". The team and the production are ready, but there's a continuous problem: the casting is still not defined!" There is also a French-language site with a dedicated news page for the film.

Anything I'm missing? Let us know.

À votre santé!