Director Koji Fukada Doesn’t Believe in Bad Guys
When Japanese director Koji Fukada received the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Akira Kurosawa Award at the age of 42 in 2022, he bashfully suggested that the career achievement prize might be coming a little too soon. Past recipients had included Steven Spielberg, Yoji Yamada and Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien; and the other honoree that night, with whom he shared a stage, was five-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu. Fukada said he would be donating the cash prize that came with the honor to a local organization he had co-founded that provides mental health and legal support to freelance film workers in Japan — and he vowed to keep striving to make good on the faith placed in his talent.
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Fukada had already consistently distinguished himself at major film festivals — his breakthrough family comedy Hospitalité won Tokyo’s top prize in 2010, and his harrowing dramatic thriller Harmonium took home the jury prize from Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2016 — but for his latest feature, Nagi Notes, Cannes has elevated him into its main competition for the first time, giving him a shot at the kind of glory befitting an Akira Kurosawa Award winner. He joins compatriots Hirokazu Kore-eda (Sheep in the Box) and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden) in the Palme d’Or race — the first time in 25 years that three Japanese filmmakers have competed for Cannes’ top prize in a single edition.
Nagi Notes follows two middle-aged women — Yuri (played by Shizuka Ishibashi) and Yoriko (Takako Matsu) — who reunite in the rural Japanese town of the film’s title over a few days in spring. Yuri is the ex-wife of Yoriko’s brother, but the two women have remained close. Yoriko toils in anonymity in Nagi as a sculptor of human figures hewn from raw blocks of wood. Yuri is an architect at a large Tokyo firm, but she’s come to visit Yoriko after finding herself at an impasse both professionally and personally. Fukada films rural Japanese life in Nagi with evident affection, and as the women reconnect and interact with a handful of other locals, memories and tensions build to the point of an unexpected reckoning.
Ahead of Nagi Notes’ Cannes premiere — and Fukada’s first walk up the Palais steps as a competition director — THR connected with him in Tokyo to discuss the creative origins of his new feature, what 10 months in rural Nagi taught him about a town’s hidden lives, and why he’s grown convinced — like his hero Hayao Miyazaki — that “bad guys” don’t belong in movies.
This is your second time adapting a work by playwright Oriza Hirata for the screen, following Sayonara (2015). How did this follow-up collaboration come about?
In this case, he just got in touch with me. His play Tokyo Notes takes place entirely within an art museum, and he told me that there’s actually a really nice art museum in this town called Nagi, and he wondered whether I might be able to adapt his play, but set it in this museum in rural Japan instead of Tokyo. That sounded like an interesting idea, so I went to Nagi — about a six-hour ride from Tokyo by bullet train — and that’s where it all started, in 2017. I visited the museum there, and it really was a wonderful building and an impressive arts institution — a great setting. But I also found Nagi to be a unique and fascinating town, and I started to think it would be a bit of a waste to tell this story without leaving the museum. So I moved away from the original play and started coming up with this idea for a story set in Nagi itself, which became Nagi Notes.
I understand you later did a longer artist-in-residency stay in Nagi. What were your impressions of the place, and how did they feed your story?
I ended up spending about 10 months there, speaking with local residents and building my story more or less from scratch. First off, it’s a very interesting place. The art museum has this very modern and unique design and it’s just plopped there in the middle of this rural landscape, which makes for quite an unusual image. The museum has been there for nearly 30 years now, and it’s had an effect on the population of Nagi. They’re very proud of it, and the people there have become very culturally and artistically aware. Then, of course, as in the film, there is also a large military facility — a Japanese Self-Defense Forces base. This is a contrasting aspect of the town’s character. It made me wonder why the base was there, of all places, and the relationship between Tokyo and this rural part of Japan.
The film presents two versions of the artist and the artist’s life. We get the solitary sculptor who is devoted to her craft in a very pure sort of way. Yuri, by contrast, is a successful big-city architect. But she admits to feeling somewhat compromised, and she often complies when they ask her to simply imitate the style of better-known architects. Tell me about your interest in this dichotomy and how you arrived at it.
Funnily enough, the idea of having an architect and a sculptor came to me quite early on. Initially, it was just instinct, but as I got to know Nagi, these two people and their pursuits turned out to be well-suited to the setting. I don’t know how common wood sculpture is in other countries, but in Tokyo, it’s a craft that’s kind of impossible to pursue. Very few people have enough space in their small homes or apartments to do that kind of work, and there’s the issue of noise and complaints from neighbors. High-quality wood is also very expensive. But in Nagi, space is abundant, and you can get beautiful wood cheaply or even for free just by foraging in the surrounding forests.
Architecture is kind of the opposite. It’s an art form that can’t be realized alone. No matter how much you love architecture, you can never really just do it by yourself, for the love of the craft. Filmmaking is much the same as architecture. I think I came to these two because I found myself empathizing with Yuri, while at the same time longing for the way Yoriko is able to work — how attractive it would be to live that very pure version of the solitary art life.
Knowing your filmography, I had some apprehension near the start of Nagi Notes. Thinking back to films like Harmonium or Love Life, I worried that something truly terrible might be about to befall one of the sweet kids or lead characters. But it quickly becomes clear that this is a gentler, subtler, softer sort of film. Was that your intention from the outset?
This time, from the outset, I knew I didn’t want to make something tragic. There are various reasons for that. One of them is that when people in Japan look at rural life from a city perspective, we tend to take quite a negative view — there’s a tendency to see them as backward, insular, or even a little spooky. But I didn’t want to go down that road. That was the first reason.
The second reason is that things like children going missing or terrible acts of violence are not the only tragedies that we encounter in life. For me, there is a bigger tragedy that exists for all of us, and that is the tragedy of loneliness, and it’s something that we all suffer. In the film, Yuri has gotten divorced and she’s found herself stuck in her work and her career — and now, she suddenly finds herself having to face up to this loneliness, and it’s the biggest tragedy of her life so far. Yoriko, on the other hand, works totally alone, in a place full of empty land — and maybe because of that, she has accepted loneliness. I think that’s what Yuri finds so attractive about Yoriko’s way of life. I wanted to show this contrast.
I was also struck by how there are really no bad people in the movie. What was it like working in that register?
I didn’t find that particularly challenging. I think that everything is relative when it comes to human beings. I don’t think there are any good or bad characters. In certain situations, people can appear good or bad — and in this case, it’s just that there were no moments in the film where anybody appeared bad. I quite often say that one of my favorite filmmakers is Éric Rohmer. In his films, there are no baddies, and yet the stories work so well. Hayao Miyazaki here in Japan is another hero of mine. He’s shaped the way I see the world since I was a child. In the 1980s, he stopped having villains in his films. In every film after Castle in the Sky [1986], there are no bad guys.
The film ends on a most ambiguous note, so I was curious whether you had a resolved answer as to what Yuri is going to reveal about who she really is in the moments or days after the film’s end point.
Yuri’s future is not decided. For me, the most important thing about a film is to give space, or to create blanks that the audience can fill in for themselves — not to force my ideas or a message onto the audience. I’ve left space for the audience to wonder what happens to Yuri and to Yoriko. That’s the best way I know to prevent a film from falling into propaganda. Yuri’s future is a blank space, like all of ours. I do wish I could see how that sculpture turns out, though.
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