Tokyo!

[MacGuffin]

Michel Gondry Teams Up With Steven Seagal's Daughter (?!?) For 'Tokyo'
Source: MTV

How's this for ironic? Brilliant French director Michel Gondry didn't contribute to "Paris, je t'aime," a compendium of shorts that all centered around his native City of Lights, but after recently speaking with our very own Josh Horowitz about "Be Kind Rewind" the visionary 44-year-old said he was immediately boarding a plane to contribute to a similar film anthology on Tokyo, called, appropriately enough, "Tokyo."

"We're each doing a 30-minute segment," he said of himself and collaborators Joon-ho Bong and Leos Carax. "It's all connected with Tokyo. [My segment] is a story about a girl who tries to move into Tokyo with her boyfriend and, she can't find an apartment or a job. She eventually turns into a chair."

Crazy. Surreal. Typical Gondry. But, get this: the fact that the leading actress in his film ultimately turns into a chair isn't anywhere near to being even remotely close to the coolest thing about his segment. No, the coolest thing about Gondry's segment isn't what the actress does, but who she is, namely...well, we'll let Gondry spill the beans.

"The actress we cast [Ayako Fujitani] turned out to be Steven Seagal's daughter," Gondry exclaimed. "I didn't know he had a Japanese daughter! I didn't know she was half American."

We're positive Ayako is superlative in her own right, of course, but this obviously tickles us pink. So we couldn't help but wondering, does Gondry have a favorite Seagal flick?

"I have a hard time remembering," he said.

Us too Michel, us too. They're all THAT GOOD.

[pete]

she was in gamera as a little kid.  the one with the giant bat.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release date: March 6, 2009

Starring: Yû Aoi, Yosi Yosi Arakawa, Jean-François Balmer, Julie Dreyfus, Ayako Fujitani

Directed by: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho

Premise: Paris may be the City of Light and New York may never sleep, but there is an undeniable energy to Tokyo. In this anthology film, three renowned filmmakers--Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho--each direct an imaginative featurette about the city. Gondry (BE KIND REWIND) presides over INTERIOR DESIGN, a film that features all the directors hallmarks as it follows a couple who moves to the metropolis. MERDE from Carax (THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE) centers on the eponymous character (Denis Lavant), a formerly sewer-bound monster who finds his way aboveground and begins to create chaos. Finally, Bong, the mind behind the international hit THE HOST, directs SHAKING TOKYO, a quirky romance about a hermit who forms an attachment to his pizza delivery girl.

[Stefen]

haha. wtf?

Yes, please.

Denis Lavant has a fucking gift for this type of stuff.

[SiliasRuby]

Fuck Yeah!!!!! I love Tokyo and I need to go back.

[Alexandro]

These episodic films never work. Probably the most respectable out there is New York Stories, and even that one has the shitty Coppola episode.

[polkablues]

She eventually turns into a chair.

Every movie synopsis would be improved by ending with this sentence.  It's the 21st Century version of "And his best friend is a talking pie."

[MacGuffin]

Strangers in Japan's Neon Wonderland
By DENNIS LIM; New York Times

FOR the new omnibus feature "Tokyo!," three directors, none of them Japanese, were invited to make a film in the Japanese capital. The pedigree of the participants — Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry, all auteurs with cult followings — underlines the city's place at the crossroads of global hipsterism. But the film also serves as a reminder that some of Tokyo's most memorable chroniclers have been visitors, looking in from the outside.

The literary critic Roland Barthes recorded his impressions of Japan in his 1969 book "Empire of Signs." Tokyo is a frequent pit stop in the novels of William Gibson, a keen student of Japanese technological tastes and street styles. The critic and author Donald Richie, who has lived in Japan for decades, explained the urge of the gaijin (a term for foreigner, literally, outside person) to interpret his surroundings: "Seemingly different, always changing, Japan famously demands a working model for comprehension, as though the place needed an articulated map or a working metaphor."

Outsider perspectives of Japan are hardly immune from charges of Orientalism; take the exoticized kitsch of Rob Marshall's "Memoirs of a Geisha," to name a glaring recent example. But things are far from clear-cut when it comes to Tokyo, a city whose gridless sprawl and constant renewal can prove disorienting even to natives. If foreign observers have seemed particularly attuned to its secret life, it may be because this is a city that lends itself to the musings of strangers in a strange land.

What's more, the image of Japanese culture as fundamentally alien is in a way consistent with how Japan sees itself. The notion of separateness or even uniqueness has long been part of the country's self-image, going back to the centuries of isolation that ended only with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's American squadron in the mid-19th century. The topic of what makes the Japanese who they are, and what sets them apart from other Asians and Westerners, has a way of creeping into the national conversation. (A book arguing that the Japanese brain is different from all others was a best seller in the 1980s.)

Working in relatively unfamiliar environments the filmmakers who contributed to "Tokyo!" — which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year and opens in New York on Friday — immersed themselves to different degrees. The most thoroughly Japanese of the shorts, "Shaking Tokyo," by Mr. Bong, the South Korean director best known for the monster movie "The Host," is a delicate love story that explores the phenomenon of the hikikomori, young and mostly male shut-ins who have voluntarily retreated from society.

The French-born, New York-based Mr. Gondry also uses an all-Japanese cast for his film "Interior Design." This story of a young couple newly arrived in Tokyo has been transplanted from another context; it is based on "Cecil and Jordan in New York," a comic by Gabrielle Bell, who wrote the script with Mr. Gondry. But its themes — the aspirations and insecurities of young bohemians, the cruel realities of big-city apartment hunting— are right at home in Tokyo. And with his penchant for surrealist whimsy, Mr. Gondry is perhaps the non-Japanese filmmaker who comes closest to the singularly Japanese concept of kawaii (or cuteness).

It falls to Mr. Carax, the onetime enfant terrible of French cinema, to play the bad boy and insult his hosts. A lunatic riff on the old "Godzilla" movies, his section (named for a French vulgarity) imagines a monster that is an id-like personification of the Japanese fear of otherness. Bursting from a manhole in the ritzy shopping district of Ginza, this grotesque, red-bearded troll (Mr. Carax's regular star, Denis Lavant) is the nightmare gaijin, assaulting passers-by, eating cash and chrysanthemums (the royal flower), tossing grenades.

The film is a bit of a stunt, a xenophobic attack on Japanese xenophobia, with an explicit reference to one of the great movies on the subject, Nagisa Oshima's "Death by Hanging"(1968). But Mr. Carax's bluntness feels like something new in the context of Tokyo movies, which tend to resemble dispatches from some dreamy, liminal interzone. Taking their cue from Barthes, they usually suggest that Tokyo, with its blaze of neon kanji characters and abundance of mysterious rites, lies on the other side of the looking glass, a semiotic wonderland waiting to be decoded.

The masterpiece of that interpretive mode remains "Sans Soleil," the unclassifiable 1982 film by the French cine-essayist Chris Marker. This free-associative travelogue combines globe-trotting images (presented as the film shot by a peripatetic cinematographer) with wide-ranging philosophical ruminations on the nature of memory and the recorded image (the cameraman's letters, read by the unseen female recipient). The film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau but mostly lingers in and around Tokyo, which inspires its richest reflections.

Haunting the city's animist shrines and underground malls, seeking out its hidden rhythms and connections, Mr. Marker undertakes an urban expedition worthy of a Borges or Calvino story. He imagines the trains that crisscross Tokyo acting as repositories for the dreams of its dozing passengers, the entire city taking shape as the projection of its citizens' "giant collective dream." (Mr. Marker has made several other films and videos, including "The Koumiko Mystery" (1965), about Japan; a bar in Tokyo's famous Golden Gai district, is named for his best-known film, "La Jetée.")

If "Sans Soleil" attests to the invigorating properties of alienation, Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" (2003) positively luxuriates in it. A critical and popular hit in the United States, Ms. Coppola's tale of two lonely and sleepless Americans (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson), connecting in the faraway dream world of Tokyo, received a chillier reception in Japan, where viewers were less amused by its portrayal of the locals' poor command of English and general wackiness.

Cultural insensitivities aside, the supremely fashion-forward Ms. Coppola is well-suited to capturing Tokyo's aura of bleeding-edge cool. (As Mr. Gibson has said, Japan represents "the global imagination's default setting for the future.") Her film's wordless, trancelike sequences evoke a vaguely futuristic state of being adrift in space and time, a kind of designer jet lag.

As a mood piece "Lost in Translation" extracts maximum atmosphere from cityscapes: the bright lights and back alleys of Shinjuku, the Times Square squared that is the Shibuya intersection. Mr. Richie has noted that Tokyo, with no real center and not much of a memory, is also a city without conventional vistas. But Ms. Coppola recognizes that the emblematic view of Tokyo is a blur of iridescent neon as seen from a moving vehicle at night.

Other visiting filmmakers have been drawn mainly by Japan's robust cinematic tradition. In "Tokyo-Ga" (1985) the German director (and eternal nomad) Wim Wenders travels to Tokyo to pay homage to the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, whose films he considers "sacred treasures." His impressions of the country formed entirely by the cinema, Mr. Wenders interviews Ozu's collaborators while the symbols of the new Japan — all-night pachinko parlors, golf ranges atop downtown skyscrapers, rockabilly teenagers — conspire to shatter his illusions.

Commissioned to mark Ozu's centenary year, "Café Lumière," the 2003 film by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, is a more discreet tribute. Newly returned from a stay in Taiwan, the heroine of Mr. Hou's movie wanders the streets and rides the trains, and the Tokyo that emerges is one that has largely eluded foreign filmmakers: a place where daily life, with its small pleasures and disappointments, unfolds. There have been gaudier and more glamorous portraits, but none more serene or content. (The Japanese title, "Coffee Jikou," translates as "Coffee, Time, Light.") Mr. Hou's matter-of-fact depiction liberates the city from its assigned roles. Neither vexed by its vanished past nor held up as a totem of the future, his is a Tokyo that exists fully in the moment.

[SiliasRuby]

After seeing the trailer again, I don't know why...but I've kind of lost interest.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Michel Gondry Invades Tokyo!
Source: Max Evry; ComingSoon

The anthology film Tokyo! presents three different director's visions of Japan's sprawling metropolis. Home to 35 million people as well as the center of Japanese government and one of the largest economies in the world, Tokyo inspired Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge), Bong Joon-ho (The Host), and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to each create segments that bring out the distinct essence of Japanese society in ways you may not have imagined.

Michel Gondry's success making distinctive music videos for the likes of Bjork and The White Stripes has been parlayed into a career making wildly creative features, including The Science of Sleep and last year's Be Kind Rewind. For his segment, titled "Interior Design", Gondry brought his sense of playful invention and penchant for in-camera effects to the story of a young Japanese couple that move in with a friend who eventually becomes annoyed with them. When a series of personal frustrations begin to take their toll on the young woman, she undergoes a remarkable and unexpected transformation...

Mr. Gondry sat down with us in New York for an exclusive chat about his portion of the Tokyo! omnibus, along with co-writer Gabrielle Bell whose indie comic book "Cecil and Jordan in New York" was the basis for this short film.

ComingSoon.net: Your segment felt like a happy version of Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Where did the inspiration come from?
Michel Gondry: Gabrielle wrote the story. I think that was her friend Sadie who was the main character, who felt more and more useless. Now I know Sadie, and she's very quiet and always feels like she's removed from the scene, from the room. I guess she was complaining about something, and she had this idea that she wished she'd just be a chair. There's something quite self-deprecating about that. My contribution was to make the transformation slow and painful, 'cause in the book it's just sort of a morph, two or three frames. It's not very much Kafka because in "Metamorphosis" the guy wakes up and he's a cockroach. Of course, it's a masterpiece. I always avoided reading it because I'd heard of it too much, but finally I said, "Okay I have to read it," and I just realized how much you get a different idea from what the piece actually is. It's very witty and funny and surprising. Basically, I think the Kafka story takes the most extreme situation and puts it in a normal context. It's genius. This is different. I was mostly thinking of the Polanski film "Repulsion," this sort of slow deterioration. I wanted the audience to not see it coming that she would become a chair. So it starts with a hole in the chest and there are two slots of wood, but it looks like she has lost her heart. It is misleading. The feet are in wood, and I thought about the "Pinocchio" from 1973 by Comencini where they switch back-and-forth between a piece of wood and the real boy's flesh. As a kid when I watched that I was terrified. Like when he tried to cut the log of wood and the log of wood has this little nose and he hears the little boy's voice and he jumps! That was enough to scare me to death.

CS: Yours has an interesting twist in that she enjoys her transformation, it becomes everything she ever wanted out of life!
Gondry: We're not sure if we even have the same opinion about the ending and what it means. There is something a little bit cynical, ironic, and sarcastic about it.

CS: About the nature of that character?
Gondry: Yeah, the fact that she enjoys being what she has become.

CS: Many people get caught up in the cultural peculiarities of Japan, like in "Lost in Translation," but your segment could have been about an American couple or a European couple just as easily. What are, in your opinion, the biggest commonalities between Japan and the West?
Gondry: I think Japanese people have a complex of lack of personality as a global entity. When we did the press conference there they always asked, "What do you think of Tokyo? What do you think of Tokyo?", like they needed somebody to tell them who they are. It's interesting, and maybe it's rooted in the fact that they lost the war with America and then became overly American. It's complex and I'm not sure I have the element to understand it, but they have become more American and European than the Americans and Europeans. They don't see that they influence us, the life we lead with all the technology and fast communication. They see themselves as having no personality. It's also self-deprecation. In our film, none of the three segments are very positive about Tokyo, which makes it more interesting than another film that just glorifies the city and thrives on stereotypes. As for us, it's more like there are monsters between the cracks. If you spread the buildings, like you spread the butt, it's something you want to see inside of!

CS: That's especially so in Leos Carax's second segment where the evil main character is throwing grenades leftover from the Nanking Massacre in 1937. It's the darkness lurking in the sewers just below the surface.
Gondry: It's funny, those grenades remind me of soap my Auntie uses that's from the '30s. We use them still today.

CS: (laughs) It's still good?
Gondry: Yeah, like the soap from Marseille. They're all twisted and brown but you see them everyday in the kitchen. She has a box of soap marked "1932."

CS: Is soap like wine, does it get better with age?
Gondry: They don't get worse at least.

CS: In your piece the woman has trouble competing for attention with her boyfriend's career as a filmmaker. From your experience, what is it about being an artist that makes relationships more difficult than having another profession?
Gondry: A few months ago I might have commented with a different perspective. It seems very arrogant now to take the perspective of an artist and talk about problems. I just realized most artists are privileged people, especially filmmakers. I don't see many filmmakers who come from challenging backgrounds. Gabrielle is a comic book artist, that's different.

Gabrielle Bell: Even that is very privileged. To be able to say "I am an artist" is a very privileged position.

Gondry: Yeah. I went to see Chris Rock. He said, "When somebody complains about his career he should just shut up, because if you say the word 'career' you should not complain. It is the difference between having a career and having a job." Since then I've been starting to realize how selfish and privileged artists are... and they don't share their privilege much. It seems a little arrogant to talk about the artist's problems, although it's true we talk about that in the film. I don't know why I wanted to talk about that at this moment. I felt guilty lately about being an artist and just being spoiled. The only reason why people are artists is because they just have the opportunity to be an artist. Everybody would want to be a director. Everybody would want to take the camera on a shoot and yell at people.

Bell: Not me, I'd want to be a cartoonist. (laughs)

Gondry: I guess not everybody.

Bell: The difference between the two characters is that one says, "I am an artist and this is what I do. This is the one thing I do."

Gondry: He's actually a crappy one.

Bell: The other person says, "I am a person. These are all the things that I do." In a way, just to say you're an artist is like an illusion that can carry you. You're focused on one thing and it gives you a certain kind of drive. He had this kind of drive, like an idea. She did not have that. In a way she wasn't able to cope. They moved to the city and started a new life. She didn't have the thing driving her to...

Gondry: Survive? Thrive?

Bell: Thrive. (laughs)

Gondry: It sounds sort of biological to me. "The species will thrive within the niche environment."

CS: You have been making features for almost a decade now. How has your process of directing evolved in that time?
Gondry: The main job of a director is to cover up his incapacities, pretend everything is alright. Everyone can feel insecure except him, or her. All those questions you have to answer. When I did "Eternal Sunshine," the last weekend before we shot Jim Carrey asked me, "What advice can you give me to prepare for my character?" (laughs) I have no idea what to say to you. But I came up with something that turned out to be very helpful. I told him, "Don't talk about yourself at least for this weekend." He's very self-centered, like a child. He always brings subject to him. I say, "This weekend you're not going to talk about yourself once. You're gonna call your friends, ask about their story, write that down in your notebook." Now I realize it was pretty arrogant to say that, but it's funny that I see in interviews he talks about this advice I gave him as though it was very precious. I had no idea what I was talking about. I think that little bits like that is how you direct actors. First of all I don't say anything, then I pretend I know what I'm doing. Most of the time I say something and they do the opposite. I think you can say the most random thing and just see what happens.

CS: Just go from the gut?
Gondry: Not even! The first thing that comes to your mind. I would not even call it the gut. Your gut is diarrhea when you shoot a movie.

CS: So more like intuition.
Gondry: Yeah, I guess you could call it intuition. It's a very flattering word for what I would call "randomness." Lots of times you realize that randomness has a better result than something that is calculated.

Tokyo! opens in limited engagements this Friday.

[mogwai]

i'm looking forward seeing this. i'm a fan of leos carax's "lovers on the bridge" and that he's teamed up with denis lavant again.

[MacGuffin]

'Tokyo!': three directors' twisted tales
The city fuels a trio of frenetic fantasies by directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho.
By Susan King; Los Angeles Times

A woman who transforms into an inanimate object. A wild man who emerges from the sewers, terrorizing citizens on the street. An agoraphobic who is so enamored with a pizza delivery girl he decides to leave the house to find her. These off-kilter tales make up what is being described as a surreal triptych movie, "Tokyo!," opening Friday at the Nuart Theatre.

An official selection for the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section last year, the trilogy brings together three diverse, imaginative directors: France's Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and Leos Carax ("The Lovers on the Bridge"), as well as South Korea's Bong Joon-ho ("The Host"). (The film also got fairly positive critical reaction when it opened in Japan in August.)

Though rarely produced these days, omnibus films have long been a staple, whether D.W. Griffith's 1916 masterwork "Intolerance," the 1942 Hollywood comedy "Tales of Manhattan" or the 1945 British horror classic "Dead of Night."

Gondry's quirky segment, "Interior Design," anchors the film. Adapted from the comic "Cecil and Jordan in New York," the comedy revolves around an unmarried Japanese couple who move to Tokyo to pursue their dreams. The young man finds a job wrapping packages at a store while trying to make it as a filmmaker, while his girlfriend seems to have no success fitting in. But when she literally transforms into something nonhuman she finally discovers her purpose in life.

By contrast, Carax's "Merde" is unsettling. Denis Lavant, who has worked several times with Carax, plays a wild man named Merde who lives in the sewers of Tokyo and speaks in a gibberish only a few can understand. He's eventually caught and put on trial.

Carax said he got involved with the project because he was having problems getting his own feature projects off the ground. "I accepted the proposal: to write something very fast, to be shot in the city of Mizoguchi and Godzilla," he explained via e-mail.

Carax rather cryptically said his part of "Tokyo!" is less about the city and more about the title's exclamation point. "I got my first vision of 'Merde' one bad day, as I was walking on a large and hectic Parisian boulevard. I imagined somebody -- myself? -- springing out from a manhole, breaking into the crowds and shooting down everyone crossing his path. It came to me then that this man should have no means of communication with the rest of us. It should really be coming out of nowhere -- a kind of child-monster, a primeval creature, the remnant of a lost civilization."

He then adapted the concept to Tokyo. "The fact that Japan is an island and that so many things are repressed (memory, feelings, etc.) nourished the project," he said. "Merde is an absurd terrorist and absolute immigrant."

After all was said and shot, though, Carax admits he didn't really enjoy the short-film format. But the character has inspired him.

"I am hoping to shoot a sequel to 'Merde,' a feature film called 'Merde in the U.S.,' set in New York and loosely based on 'Beauty and the Beast,' with Denis Lavant and Kate Moss."

Bong's "Shaking Tokyo" concludes the trilogy, with the story of a hermit obsessed with pizza who struggles with going outside after meeting the love of his life: a pizza delivery girl. She faints at his house when an earthquake hits as she delivers his pizza.

The director was in postproduction on "The Host" three years ago when he received the offer to become one of the project's directors.

"It didn't take long to take the offer because I feel familiar with the charm of the city of Tokyo," he wrote via e-mail. "Doing an omnibus project was kind of interesting and refreshing to me. When I got the offer, the remainder of the directors was not fixed yet. I guess it was late 2006 when it was fixed as Gondry, Carax and me."

The majority of his segment was shot in the Kugayama district of Tokyo. "I really enjoyed the shooting. Tokyo is not the best city to do location shooting, but we could overcome various obstacles since the crew I work with were all very passionate and organized."