Our loveless world: the selfishness that preoccupies Your Name filmmaker Genki Kawamura
- ‘If you love yourself too much, then loving others is just annoying … If you love the UK so much, you don’t care about Europe,’ Japanese writer and director says
- His book If Cats Disappeared from the World explores the theme via a terminally ill man who trades memories, and the love attached to them, for a longer life
In 1982, When Genki Kawamura was three years old, his father took him to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which had just been released at the cinema. “It was the first film I ever saw. It was a special experience for me,” Kawamura says, citing the famous scene in which Elliott, who befriends the film’s eponymous visitor, is silhouetted against the moon as his bicycle takes flight. “When I was 23, E.T. was re-released with a special remaster. I was just as stunned by the same scene. That’s why I wanted to become a filmmaker. To inspire the same emotions in someone who was three and also 23.”
Fast forward 36 years from that first viewing, and Kawamura is one of the most successful and influential filmmakers in Japan, and possibly the world: his production credits such as Confessions (2010) and animated blockbuster Your Name (2016) have earned billions of yen – and some high-profile collaborations.
Part of the reason he has flown overnight from Tokyo to London is to meet J.J. Abrams, arguably the hottest player in Hollywood today. The pair are working on a remake of Your Name. And the day after we talk, Kawamura will be driven to the set of the new Star Wars film, which Abrams is directing and which is currently being shot at Pinewood Studios.
“It is very, very high security,” Kawamura tells me. “I can’t choose the taxi. Only a registered car can visit the set. I have to pay three hours for the hire, because the same car has to wait. Expensive experience. But also very exciting.”
I first encounter Kawamura at the revolving door of his London hotel: he is on the way out for photographs as I arrive for our interview. He looks, on first glimpse, like any slightly ageing hipster, with elegant facial fuzz, round glasses, retro T-shirt (The Supremes) and an aura of understated cool – all of which seems to knock a few years off Kawamura’s age of 39. Indeed, as he shakes my hand and mumbles “Kawamura”, my second impression is that he looks nothing like one of Japan’s leading filmmakers and most popular novelists. Then again, as he wanders a little wearily into the pale sunshine, I wonder what bestselling novelists and superstar filmmakers are supposed to look like.
A few minutes later, Kawamura slides into his seat and gets ready to talk, occasionally in English, but mostly with the help of his comparatively perky translator. Kawamura’s body may be in London, but the rest of him seems half a world away, on Japanese time. There is, though, little rest for the wildly successful. He has already lunched – at the ultra-hip Tramshed steakhouse, replete with dead cow and chicken suspended in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst. “The art is very good; the food is only so-so,” Kawamura opines.