Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada on Cannes winner Harmonium, his Eric Rohmer fandom, and his brush with theatre
Writer-director has mined contemporary theatre troupe’s work for screenplays, stars and acting style, but his biggest influence is French New Wave’s Rohmer and his characters’ journey through suffering to happiness
A piece of trivia that comes up in almost every interview with Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada is that he’s a mega fan of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer, who weaved naturalistic performances and recurrent touches of ambiguity into his profound dramas about relationships.
Rohmer’s gentle 1986 classic, The Green Ray, is a favourite of Fukada, whose first five features are all informed by Rohmer’s world view to different degrees. Few people were surprised that Harmonium, the Japanese writer-director’s first entry in the Cannes Film Festival, found an appreciative audience there in May 2016 and walked away with the Jury Prize in its Un Certain Regard section.
“I started watching Rohmer’s work when I was in senior high,” says Fukada, 37, speaking in Hong Kong in March, where he attended the Asian Film Awards ceremony; Tadanobu Asano was awarded the best actor prize for his enigmatic role in Harmonium. “The audience can feel his characters’ joy and sadness through Rohmer’s direction and screenplay. His films usually have a happy ending, but it’s one that you feel the characters have to earn through a lot of chance encounters.
“In my films as well, you see suffering but also a kind of happiness in the end. Rohmer’s films are not about how people succeed with hard work, like they do in Rocky.”