By Yun-hua Chen.
I felt that my job was to interfere with that as little as possible.”
–Shuntaro Uchida
Ten-year-old Kozue (Karin) feels out of place at school. She doesn’t have any peer to talk to and likes tossing randomly procured objects into the school’s incinerator. The university student Jinta (Taiki Shinozuka) comes to the school to promote a shadow play performance, and the door to an unknown world opens for her through someone equally taciturn, yet more invisibly eccentric. Director Shuntaro Uchida’s debut feature film, adapted from a short story by Japanese author Kaori Ekuni, is a tender and poetic tale of a child’s stretched sense of time spent daydreaming, her full concentration on the beauty of small things, and the unexpected unfolding of a world of adulthood, with its unfamiliar sense of sensuality and cruelty. In a muted and subdued tone and gentle colour scheme, Shuntaro Uchida portrays a childhood where Kuzue observes daily troubles at home almost like a transcendent outsider, someone who waits for something to happen but just not sure what.
Incinerator won the Jury Prize in the Proxima competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Can start by talking about the incinerator, the relationship between fire, light and shadow?
The title is based on the story in the book. The incinerator turns the story into a form of symbolism. I imagined that from the beginning. In this work, the play of shadows is central to the film. Light and shadow are very cinematic, and it is one of the parts that makes this film slightly different. Together with my director of photography Shin Yonekura, we came up with the idea of how to shoot the film.
The shadow puppetry piece was based on a puppetry story that really exists. I thought that shadow puppetry itself was very cinematic. We wondered whether shadow puppetry could be performed in cinema, and considered using the hands themselves to create shadow puppets. When I felt that it was cinematic, I thought this was the right path to follow.
I was very conscious of using natural light. There are things that become more visible through it. Outside, of course, we used natural light. Indoors too, whether at sunset or in the morning, the atmosphere rises very strongly through the lighting, and I also love that wonderful quality of light. But as much as possible, I wanted to use natural light, natural sunsets and so on, because I wanted it to have a nostalgic quality, something that might make you remember that time. So I was conscious of making it as natural as possible – not artificial, not false, but as natural as I could.
It is almost like accessing someone’s memory. When we see natural light, all of us feel a very nostalgic effect, and that was something he was trying to achieve. He was also trying to evoke a way for the film to access people’s hearts with a real feeling. He was trying to remind people with a real feeling, so that the film could reach everyone’s heart. Natural light was truly an important part of this film.
How was the process of adapting the short story?
It was a wonderful original story in which what was not depicted, or rather, what was deliberately left undepicted, made the imagination expand more and more into those blank spaces. Of course, I mentioned various things earlier, but to that I added my own creative elements.
The short story is only about 20 pages long, but it was a really powerful original story. The author left many parts open, so not everything was written out clearly. I received a great deal of inspiration from those spaces, and the imagination kept expanding from them. The film was created from that 20-page short story.
The sense of time is also important. Film is a medium of time, and in this film the sense of time is very strong; it conveys a child’s sense of time.
By adding the stories of the parents and the family, there is also time spent with the family. And then there is the time of a child alone. It is not only the time of a child alone; there is also the family within the family, and then the child goes outside, meets someone, goes to school. I was conscious of those essential things as I developed the story. I was thinking about how to make the flow of time felt in the film, and I kept that in mind while making it.
The locations in the film are very special. The school has an almost ghostly atmosphere. How did you find those locations?
I wanted places that were close to my own childhood. I grew up in Tokyo, but I looked for places near Tokyo and Sagamihara, places that felt close to me. I also discussed this with the producer, Takuma Nagao, and we deliberately chose places that were close to the director’s own past, places that felt familiar. They were not the exact same places, but we were conscious of choosing locations with that feeling.
How did you find the cast? The child actor has a really unique performance.
It was an audition for the role, of course, and many people came in as if they had prepared to become someone else. But Karin-san was the only one who simply came as she was. She was more natural than anyone else. She was more herself than anyone else. That was overwhelming.
In this film, I wanted her to appear exactly as she was, in her own spirit, especially because at that time she was the same age as the character. I wanted her to express that directly in the film. We held auditions together with the producer team, and everyone agreed that she was good.
How did she understand her role in the film? Because the emotions are very complex.
She had already thought very clearly about it herself, so I felt that my job was to interfere with that as little as possible, and to keep it as natural as possible. Of course, there are minimum requirements, such as where to stand and how to move, but I tried to interfere as little as I could. There were, of course, various things we had to adjust, but I thought that was the way she would feel most alive, and that was how I approached the shoot.
Was the young university student Jinta played by the Japanese idol Taiki Shinozuka also chosen through casting?
Yes, he was also chosen through audition. Many people came, but he was chosen from among them in the same way. We were very unsure during casting about what Jinta should be like when visualised on screen. But when Taiki Shinozuka came in and simply stood there, I felt a great strength from him. I felt that he really had his feet planted firmly on the ground, and I thought that if it was him, he could properly guide the 10-year-old Kozue.
How do you think about the social questions embedded in the film?
I was not particularly conscious of that. I feel that it naturally became that way from the original work. More than that, what I found important in this film was that people of all ages and genders appear, from children to grandfathers and grandmothers. I was more interested in that, and I was inspired by older films, or perhaps more by those kinds of films than by contemporary cinema. I was looking back on myself. So there are scenes very close to me, and I tried to make them as truthful as possible. There were things I had experienced myself, and those things are, in a sense, reflected and re-shot in the film.
How did it feel to make your debut feature, moving from short films to a feature-length?
It was difficult. But as I said earlier, I imagined those blank spaces in the original work. I struggled a great deal with how to connect the film from beginning to end. I worried about that constantly.
It was not that making a long film itself was difficult. Perhaps I could even make a two-hour film. In that sense, it was not the length itself that was challenging. There is no fundamental difference between a short film and a long film. As an art form, it does not change.
How was the premiere screening?
When the screen went black and the cast names first appeared in the end credits, applause began, and I was surprised. In Japan, at least in my limited experience, that does not often happen in the middle of the credits. I was surprised, and the audience applauded warmly. I felt that the audience had entered deeply into the situation.
Can you talk about your use of sound and music?
I will start with the use of sound. This was really thanks to Izumi Matsuno, who was in charge of sound recording. He was truly wonderful and made many suggestions. I went to Matsuno-san’s atelier, to the editing room, and we thought about the sound together. He offered many ideas. Matsuno-san’s contribution was enormous. He incorporated things I suggested as well.
As for the music, I worked with Riki Hidaka, someone I had already respected very much. He created truly wonderful music together with me through our conversations. I think sound is also one part of the film’s design. That was extremely important for this film. We watch the film together with the images, of course, but I believe the power of sound is more than sufficient in itself.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar and critic and associate editor of Film International Online. Currently, she serves on the board of the German Film Critics Association.