Sometimes when you watch children, you feel that they show emotions that you, as an adult, can relate to.
— Hirokazu Kore-eda
With 'Nobody Knows,' I consciously set out to make a fiction film, which is a different approach from 'Distance,' but I still applied a lot of the things I learned from making 'Distance': for example, how to use the camera in relation to the children and how to create the right atmosphere on set.
I would say that 'After the Storm' is much more informed by my personal life than my other movies.
We learn many things from children, always.
Yes, a family is interesting. You can get a lot of drama in the conflicts there. It's like the sea. It seems calm, but inside there is conflict.
Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.
When making documentaries, the most important thing I learned was to listen, observe gestures and facial expressions.
A film is not a vehicle to accuse, or to relay a specific message. If we reduce a film to this, we lose all hope for cinema to ignite a richer conversation.
The Japanese don't have a specific religion, but a spirituality. A cap, shoes, and a table have a spirituality. When you eat an apple, you don't say you eat it: you say, 'I am receiving it.' Kind of like you are thanking the food.
I am very happy that Japanese film can cross borders.
My mother used to work in a bank in Tokyo. It was a busy district, and after work, she used to go and watch films.
I've been a fan of Yoshida Akimi's manga for a long time; she's one of a few women's manga writers that I always read.
I believe that any auteur categorised in terms of an -ist or an -ism wouldn't be able to capture the complex essence of human nature.
The vividness of children is easier to see when they're completely left to their own devices.
A lot of people, especially Japanese, come to the theater to have a good cry.
It is righteous to receive state subsidies to make films that criticise the state - I want Japanese people to accept such European values.
In the eighties, there was a huge shift in the humor of Japanese television. Up until then, the humor was garnered by people who said humorous things, but in the '80s, it was garnered by people who were being laughed at while the audience watches and watches.
I wanted to make 'Nobody Knows,' a kind of summation of the experiences I gained from making my first three films, the good ones as well as the bad ones.
I don't really like something serious depicted in a serious way; that's not my style.
We can see loss as something missing, but that missing space can be filled with something else, and that creates healing.
Maybe family is an eternal subject for me.
When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.
There's a difference between people being free and the atmosphere of 'freedom.'
Reflecting on the past, where the film industry became united with 'national interest' and 'national policy,' I tend to think that keeping a clear distance from government authority is the right thing to do.
My grandfather had Alzheimer's. He would eat everything and anything that was around; then he wouldn't remember that he ate it and would demand to be fed again.
Japanese society doesn't have a god - no absolute presence.
When I have been told that my films remind people of Ozu, I have never been too convinced.
I have been told that... time doesn't flow in a straight line in my films. It goes round in a circle. Sometimes people comment that the films remind them of Ozu. Maybe that's right. But in Japan, nobody comments on how time passes in my films. So perhaps that is a different way of thinking.
I never want to be the all-knowing god of the story, manipulating what's to happen or the action.
I'm so entranced by what unfolds in front of the camera. It seems wonderfully out of my control.
All my mother ever wanted to talk about was what she hated about my father and the times he cheated on her when he was younger. It really irritated me, and I told them they had to sort things out between themselves. Looking back on that, I see that it was really cold of me as a son.
Fast cutting, loud music, blood spewing everywhere, and gunshots permeating the scenes does not necessarily make for a shocking movie.
Privacy is not really a concept in Japan.
Tokyo is wonderful for distribution of international films, a lot of Iranian films, Taiwanese films. But most of the art films are from Europe and Asia.
When you make a documentary, you have to adapt to what reality imposes upon you.
I particularly relate to the films of Mikio Naruse and Shinichi Kamoshita, a person whose work I watched very much as a child, a director of family dramas for television.
In terms of film festivals, Cannes is the greatest launch pad.
I think a lot of Japanese morals are built around what the dead would think of us.
When I am 60 or 70, I am sure I can still continue to make films on families.
When I watch an actress say a line, I watch how they deliver the lines with gestures.
I have never made a film to praise or to criticize something. That kind of filmmaking is nothing but propaganda.
There was a time when I thought Kim Novak was the sexiest woman in the world.
Directing while overcoming differences of language and culture is a stimulating challenge.
You only get back what you are prepared to put in.
It's definitely good to have a hit from time to time, though not too often. If you have a few hits in a row, people start to think every film you make will be a hit, which is a big mistake.
When I make films, I don't think of any other directors or their work in terms of the rhythm of the editing or the tenor of the performances.
As the Japanese family gets more and more atomized, grandparents don't live with the nuclear family, so parents of children can't consult with their own parents about how to raise their children and rely on that to help raise them.
I'm less interested in death itself than in people whose lives are touched by it.
If my films did better at the box office in Japan, it would be easier to get them made.
I watch 'Electronic Boy' faithfully every week - not because I like the show but because I'm interested in where the smartest T.V. producers and directors are going, what direction they are headed in.
