Okuda Yosuke nearly called off the shoot for his Japanese Tiger contender Tokyo Playboy Club because of the disaster in Fukushima, he tells Mark Baker
Okuda, whose award-winning Hot as Hell: the Deadbeat March screened at the IFFR last year, is back in Rotterdam competing for a Tiger Award. Tokyo Playboy Club is a funny, wry, sophisticated examination of life on the criminal fringes of the Japanese capital.
The director isn’t a native of Tokyo, however – in fact, he comes from Fukushima, the remote Japanese city hit by an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster last year. The disaster nearly put a stop to shooting for Tokyo Playboy Club before it had even begun, the young director says, taking in the expansive view of a sun-dappled Rotterdam through the huge windows on the 3rd floor of De Doelen.
“My family still live in Fukushima,” he says, “and my father’s house was wrecked by the earthquake. I was just about to start shooting when it happened, and I immediately rushed back home to see if everyone was alright. Fortunately they were, and my father said to me: ‘Go back to Tokyo and make your film!’ – so I did.”
We can be grateful Okuda listened to his father. Tokyo Playboy Club is an unusual, contemplative, highly amusing take on the yakuza genre. “I have been a victim of violence in Japan myself”, the director says. “So I know that the consequences can be really harmful. But violence is often used as entertainment in films, and this is also the case in my film. It is a double-edged sword.” And indeed the plot of Tokyo Playboy Club is driven by outbursts of violence that have both comic and poignant consequences – sometimes even in a single shot. A feeling of ambiguity pervades the film. Okuda is a great fan of Quentin Tarantino, and refers to his idol’s assertion that film can show emotions that are not clear-cut: they can be in-between and hard to describe in any medium other than film.
Making Tokyo Playboy Club was a very different experience from making his indie debut, the Hot as Hell trilogy, the director says. “On Hot as Hell, I was working mostly with people who were doing it out of sheer enthusiasm. Tokyo Playboy Club was the first time I worked with all professionals, and I found this a lot harder. They are all specialists in their particular fields, and have their own ideas on how to do it. But I think I succeeded in getting my ideas across.” Partly for this reason, Okuda concentrated totally on directing for Tokyo Playboy Club (having acted in Hot as Hell, earning praise from IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof as “an excellent comedian”).
Among Okuda’s fellow Tiger contenders is a film directly dealing with the Fukushima disaster, Makino Takashi’s Generator (competing in the shorts category), an abstract piece with a haunting soundtrack by Jim O’Rourke. “I wasn’t aware of that,” he says. “It sounds very interesting, but I am not so much into art films to be honest”, he says. “I make entertainment.”
More about Tokyo Playboy Club here.