Pause for Thought

Interview: Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Sam Adams

Even though we don't speak the same language, it's clear Hirokazu Kore-eda is not one to rush. His answers are preceded by a low "hmmm," as if he's still mulling over a movie he finished more than a year ago.

Like its director, Nobody Knows is unhurried, with a calm tone that belies its tabloid subject matter. The story of four children left to fend for themselves in a cramped apartment was well-known in Kore-eda's native Japan, but rather than adopting a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy, Kore-eda chose a measured, naturalistic approach. "The first important decision was that we didn't want to portray the children as weak victims, or the mother as an easily identifiable villain," he says. "Those were the precise points of view of the TV news and magazines, so I wanted explicitly to avoid them."

A maker of documentaries as well as fiction films, Kore-eda adopted a fundamentally realist approach for Nobody Knows, using natural light, shooting in a real apartment, and spacing out filming over the course of a year. As a result, the production had to cope with unforeseen issues like 12-year-old actor Yuya Yagira's five-inch growth spurt, not to mention the fact that his voice began to change. (A line was added to the script noting the downward shift.) But although his documentary experience undoubtedly helped Kore-eda function in the tiny apartment, he stresses that every line was written, every shot storyboarded. The greatest advantage of the extended shooting schedule was not any sort of documentary realism, but the fact that he had time to edit in between two-week bursts of shooting every three months.

A self-described latchkey kid, Kore-eda identifies most with Yagira's Akira, who is forced to take responsibility for his younger siblings while negotiating his own tenuous adulthood. "My childhood was not as severe, nor was I as responsible," he says. "But what I did share with him was a kind of panic or pressure, like "Oh boy — given what's happening in my home, I better grow up fast.'"

Though the movie rarely rises to the level of condemnation, it's hardest on the neighbors and adults who blind themselves to the children's worsening situation, and Kore-eda seems particularly gratified that Japanese audiences have taken the film to heart. "People write that children who had been part of the landscape have become real to them," he says. "They say that they look back on the real incident in a different way, and that just blaming the family is insufficient."