Last Letter director Shunji Iwai on his Chinese-language debut and Peter Chan’s contribution
- The Japanese director made the film after discovering how many Chinese fans he had
- The film is inspired by a South Korean TV miniseries and was painstakingly adapted to China
It was always going to be just a matter of time before Shunji Iwai made a film in China. The attraction should be mutual: long before China became one of the world’s most lucrative film markets, the Japanese filmmaker had already developed an avid fan base there with such lyrical efforts as Love Letter (1995) and Hana and Alice (2004).
“You could say that I’m making this film for the fans in China,” Iwai told the Post at the recently concluded Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, at which his first Chinese-language feature, Last Letter, was one of the programme’s two closing films. “Once I realised how many people in China liked my work, I decided to do something for them.”
Again revisiting his favourite themes of youth, memory and letter writing, Last Letter (whose Chinese title translates as Hello, Zhihua) stars Zhou Xun as Zhihua, a married woman who attends a high-school reunion on behalf of her late sister Zhinan – unseen in this film – to announce her death, only to be reunited with her own teenage crush, the novelist Yin Chuan (Qin Hao).
As the scenario quickly turns into a prolonged case of mistaken identity, Zhihua decides to write to Yin – without a return address – to reminisce about the past. Then the daughters of Zhihua (played by Zhang Zifeng) and Zhinan (Deng Enxi) also begin to exchange letters with the mildly confused Yin.
Iwai says the idea for Last Letter came from Chang-OK’s Letter, the 2017 TV miniseries starring Bae Doona as an unhappy housewife that he scripted and directed in South Korea. “The stories are not the same, but Last Letter can certainly be described as an extension of Chang-OK’s Letter. After Last Letter, I’m going to publish a novel about Zhinan, so it’ll go on and on.”
Having originally written the story with a Korean setting in mind, Iwai says it took the production team a long time to transpose the story to China and localise it in every detail. “The story would have to be made closer to the culture it’s set in. Last Letter is the consequence of some very meticulous research and assessment. We need to check every line of dialogue to make sure they sound right.”