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Before directing your first feature film, Boy’s Choir, you worked as an assistant director on several productions with director Sogo Ishii. How is your working relationship with him, and have you drawn much inspiration from him?

I first met Sogo Ishii when I was a high school student in the late 1970s, when he was twentytwo and I was nineteen. Video had not come out yet, and there was a popular boom in 8 mm independent films. Ishii was something of a ‘star director’ at that time. Anyway, I happened to be at a showing of Ishii’s 8 mm independent films, helping out as a volunteer; and I met Ishii at the end of the screening. I was quite nervous, but when we all went out for a drink afterwards I said to Ishii that I wanted to become a director in the future, and he told me to leave school and become his student. Four months later, I left my home and began to work as his apprentice.

Ishii was at that time co-directing Panic in High School with one of the major studios, and nobody really understood him there; he wanted to start out on his own, and I was his first apprentice. We ended up making Crazy Thunder Road, and the short films Shuffle and Burst City together.

As for what I have learnt from him, in those days Ishii’s themes involved a lot of violence, and of course I enjoyed that, but I learned more from Ishii’s attitude towards film in general. The biggest difference between Ishii and later directors is that film-makers before his generation learned by attending the film location and observing technique, whereas later generations of f ilm-makers are f ilm lovers who have learned by watching the films themselves. While earlier directors learned by becoming assistant directors and gaining their “know-how” on location; Ishii and I used to watch a lot of films together and I learnt that way.

This may be a strange comparison, but Quentin Tarantino…?

Yes, I agree, the situation is quite similar.

Before Ishii, the older generation of filmmakers were trained and always worked as film-makers, and there are many cases of people starting from the student movement and shif ting to f ilm-making. Af ter Ishii’s generation, there was a move towards “pure” film-making - film-makers would watch as many films as possible and grasp what they wanted to express. That is what I learned most from Ishii.

Film is my life. I love it. If I were to quit being a film director, I would probably open a cinema.

Sogo Ishii had other assistant directors apart from yourself – were they all selected for their own love of film?

No, I don’t think so. Although, I was his longest serving assistant director – the others after me came and went quite quickly.

Could you tell us about your relationship with writer Kenj i Aoki , with whom you collaborated on both Boy’s Choir and The Milkwoman?

When I was in my late twenties I was involved in TV documentaries. Kenji Aoki was an emerging documentary writer, and we met and started working on television programmes together, including Amazing 20th Century. That continued for seven years, and was the forerunner to Project X, which recreated various events from the 20th century with an element of human drama. We researched the stories together; he would write the script, and I would direct on location. I was keen to continue in that vein, but I thought that his talent was wasted on just documentaries; so we started working on films instead.

In Japan, more and more scripts are being written and directed by the same person. I’m against that. Stories should be written by writers, and directed by directors. In our case, you could say that Aoki is the brain, and I am the body. We want to be the Lennon and McCartney of the film world.

We do sometimes work separately, and Aoki sometimes works with other directors; but we like to work on at least one film together every few years. It takes him up to five years to complete a script – whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure – but it does mean that there is about a five year gap between our work together.

So it took about 4-5 years to create The Milkwoman?

It took about five years from conceiving the idea to completing the film, and about two years just to research, write and rewrite the script.

The Milkwoman is your second major film, after the well-received Boy’s Choir in 2000. How has the reaction to The Milkwoman in Japan been, and has this been different from the reaction to your first feature film?

The Milkwoman had a very f avour able response from the critics. It was popular with film lovers, and within the industry itself.

One of my aims was to present a film for people aged forty and over, who don’ t really come to the cinemas very often. That generation remembers the Golden Age of film, and I wanted to appeal to their tastes. They don’t visit the major cinema complexes, because there is nothing to suit them. When I reached forty, I went to the movies and found that there wasn’t really anything that someone of my age would want to see.

The films that this generation wants to see are not being made; they only exist in the archives, and that is strange. So I made this film hoping that older people would want to see it, and I think I achieved that aim.

The Milkwoman has received many prizes, and one difference between it and Boy’s Choir is that Boy’s Choir received 14 prizes in total, and they were all for the directing. When I made The Milkwoman, I wanted prizes to be awarded for both the directing and the acting. I was really aiming for Yuko Tanaka [the female lead] to win as an actor, for Aoki to win as the writer, and for Ittoku Kishibe [the male lead] to win as supporting actor. In the end, we won all of these. I strongly object to the idea that films are solely for the director. Films are not my own personal expression.

They are a form of expression, but for entertainment, not for expressing my own opinions.

I understand that you had some difficulty finding distributors for these two films, and chose to release them independently.

They weren’t actually independent films. They were small films, but went through a normal distributor. Both Boy’s Choir and The Milkwoman were difficult to distribute, but The Milkwoman was the more difficult of the two. Boy’s Choir was released in 2000, and The Milkwoman in 2005. In the five years in between, the number of films distributed to independent cinemas fell, and this was probably influenced by the larger cinema chains . There’s a big gap between the blockbusters and the small films which fail to attract an audience, and this has widened in those five years.

The distributors always want to know if the film was based on a famous novel, or if it has received an award at Cannes; but The Milkwoman is not an easy film to categorise. This makes the larger distributors hesitate to take on the film, because they don’t know how to sell it without a category. Ideally, the distributors should think about marketing and publicity strategies for each film according to its content, but their publicity departments don’t do that any more. In their place, a number of smaller companies have sprung up to take on this task; but it is still difficult to distribute films like this.

What was your inspiration for The Milkwoman?

I had a lot of inspiration for this film, and don’t really know where to start. Aoki’s original script was very literary, and didn’t fit into the traditional mould of any particular film genre – like the human mind, it’s rather more complicated than that . The Milkwoman depicts the deepest parts of the human heart.

I didn’t want to make this simply an ‘artistic’ movie; I wanted a style where anybody could watch the film and pick up the humour, or feel sensitive to the characters’ plight, and I took great care to achieve this.

Was there a particular reason that you chose to film The Milkwoman in Nagasaki?

The main reason was simply for the staircases, as I really wanted to capture the streets running up and down Nagasaki’s hills. Aoki’s script had no reference to any hills at all, and I wanted to include these as the main focus of interest. Every film has to have something at it’s core – Boy’s Choir had the choir, so that even if the film had failed, at least we could say that we had an excellent choir. So, when we made The Milkwoman, we thought that if we could focus on shots of the hills, that could help carry the film. The story is the concern of the scriptwriters, and the performance is the work of the actors. Finding the central focus from which the film will hang, that is the job of the director. I wanted to include those hilly streets regardless of all else, so we chose to film in Nagasaki.

Is there a significance in the lead character, Minako Ohba, being a milkwoman? Milkmen and women are generally unnot iced characters; is this a metaphor for her character being an ordinary, unnoticed person, particularly with regard to her feelings for Kaita?

That’s a question for Aoki, as the milk delivery aspect was his idea. Myself, I think of the milkwoman, in contrast with a paperboy, for example, as providing something that directly feeds and nourishes each person she encounters, something that physically becomes part of each other person. While researching, I also found that dairies open from midnight until about four in the morning, and bring down their shutters during the daytime – rather like Minako, who spends each day quietly living her own life.

As for Kaita, he is really a symbol for so-called “ordinary” life. But “ordinary” life, from when we are born until we die… What does that actually mean? Even within an ordinary, everyday existance, there are emotions and moments of drama. That drama forms each person’s own history. Even if their lives are unremarkable, they are still valuable. In the last few years, there has been this popular word in Japanese, “makeinu”, which means a sort of “loser”. People tend to think that i f a woman has pas sed age 30 and not married, then she is a “loser”, which I think is regrettable. What’s wrong with an ordinary life? What’s wrong with a person like Minako, who makes breakfast, delivers the milk, reads her books, sometimes has a beer with her neighbour…? Even within her ordinary life, there are stormy times.

When I made those 20th century documentaries, the subjects were always people to whom great events had happened, but history is not just for those people at the forefront of historical events. It is hard to shine a spotlight on ordinary people in those documentaries, so Aoki and I decided to do so through fiction, which is why we have these two films.

I understand that Yuko Tanaka, who played Minako Ohba, had to train as a milkwoman for several weeks, carrying bottles up and down Nagasaki’s hills. Did this present any particular difficulties?

One difficulty was having to ask her, the first time we met, to start working as a milkwoman as soon as she ar r ived in Nagasaki . We introduced her to a dairy, and she started her delivery run straight away. I didn’t do that with her, but Aoki and I had already done a few deliveries with the same store beforehand, when we had arrived in Nagasaki ourselves.

Apparently she also had to practise riding a bicycle, but I didn’t get involved with this. That is something for the actors to work out themselves.

There seems to be a sense of shame throughout the film – of Minako’s and Kaita’s parents’ affair, of mutual attraction that cannot be acted upon, and of the young supermarket employee who sleeps with different men. What is the film trying to say about shame and human relationships?

Nowadays, young people in Japan can say “I love you” to their partners, but for older Japanese people, we have traditionally been unable to express those feelings. Right up until the 1970s, we grew up with a sense of reserve and shyness. Japanese people used to be unable to express their own feelings, and bottled them up.

If you think about the two lead characters, they would have been born around 1945, right at the end of the war, caught in that generation between old Japan and today. They cannot express their feelings to one another directly – they want to, but are held back by their inhibitions.

We wanted to portray these two people who have difficulty in adapting their feelings to contemporary society.

One character who does not demonstrate any shame i s Minako’s aunt , when she reveals that she stole her husband from another woman.

If you look carefully, you will see that this film shows strong women and men who ultimately fail. Women in Japan have become stronger in the last 10-20 years, and this particular scene is symbolic of that. Perhaps this is Aoki’s strange form of feminism.

The only two characters who really stand on their own feet in this film are Minako and her aunt, and in this scene where they are drinking beer together, I asked them to act as if they were men drinking together in a bar. This is symbolic of women being independent, and not needing to rely on the men around them.

There is a poignant mixture of sadness and beauty throughout the f ilm, and a particularly tragic turn of events at the end; yet the final scenes of the film seem to depict a sense of continuity and hope. Did you intend that this story would end in a positive way?

Yes, absolutely. I do think it’s a happy ending. I think it’s our answer to the question of what it means today for a woman to be living on her own. The era when women simply became mothers and fulfilled that role in the family is coming to an end. There are more single mothers, and the idea of the family unit has become diluted. In that context, we wanted to present our answer to how people should live their own lives.

For a person to make breakfast every morning, to have several good books on the bookshelf, to live this ordinary life… I think that ’s a wonderful thing, and I wanted to show that.

I think the film talks about how each of us should stand on our own feet and live our own lives.