"Backlight" Director Ren Sudo A world that is too divided and its sense of crisis [Director's Interview Vol.127]

Ren Sudo is a 25-year-old actor. His first film as a director, ``Backlight,'' is impressive for its lush and beautiful imagery. And what is engraved in the depths of that painting is Sudo's own feelings about today's world. Aya Watanabe, an ally of the drama "Wonder Wall" (2018 *made into a movie in 2020), in which Sudo starred as an actor, wrote the screenplay, and Yoshihide Otomo provided the music, making it an independent film of about 60 minutes. We have top notch staff. Without being intimidated by the staff, Sudo works closely with them, leading them to the birth of his first masterpiece as a director.

Sudo is also involved in the promotion and distribution of this film, and is challenging the conventional wisdom of the Japanese film industry by starting screenings at a movie theater in Hiroshima, where the film was filmed.

What exactly is Sudo trying to accomplish with "Backlight"? For about an hour, we heard a lot from Sudo himself.

"Backlight" synopsis

Onomichi in the midsummer of the 1970s. 22-year-old Akira (Ren Sudo) returns home with his university senior, Yoshioka (Satoshi Nakazaki). Akira offers his family home to Yoshioka, who is in love with him, and proposes that they spend the summer vacation together. In order to keep his senior from getting bored, Akira comes up with the idea of ​​inviting a girl to go out. He asks his childhood friend Fumie (Eriko Toyama) to find a girl who is free, and Miko (Akira Kigoshi), who has a slightly unusual personality, joins the group, and the four of them start hanging out. Eventually, Yoshioka's gaze on Miko becomes hotter, and it starts to bother Akira...

Index

• The first draft was like pure literature.
• From Aya Watanabe's script to director Ren Sudo
• ``Backlight'' may be Fumie's movie.
• An indivisible “world”
• Art and costumes that recreate the 70s, beautiful photography
• The subject “we” erased our own worries.
• Doubt what is fixed

The first draft was like pure literature.

Q: The elements that make up the movie ``Reverse Light'' include ``70s,'' ``love,'' and ``Onomichi.'' How did these come about?

Sudo: Originally, I was preparing another project with Aya Watanabe. The script is almost finished and it's time to shoot! At that time, everything was postponed due to Corona. At that time, I was quite shocked... I was looking for a way to recover from that, and I realized that it was all about making things = shooting movies. However, given the coronavirus pandemic, it's not that easy to do, so I asked Mr. Watanabe if we could shoot something, even a mid-length feature.

One day, I suddenly received a call from Mr. Watanabe, saying, ``I feel like I could write a story about the 1970s with Onomichi as the background.'' Mr. Watanabe will write it for you! That alone made me happy, but at that stage I didn't really understand why it was the 70s or why Onomichi. However, the fact that Ms. Watanabe wrote it was such a big deal in itself, so I just believed in her vision of seeing something inside her.

When I asked Mr. Watanabe for more details later, he said that since the movie he had originally planned was a modern one, it would be best not to conflict with that, that he couldn't film in Tokyo due to the coronavirus pandemic, and that considering the budget since it was an independent movie, he had to decide on background design and costumes. Apparently, he decided to ``photograph the 1970s in Onomichi'' for the reason that it would be better to have a solid design.

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Q: What was your impression of the script you received?

Sudo: Immediately after I received the aforementioned contact, I met up with Mr. Watanabe in Onomichi and had a meeting and scenario hunting. I was surprised at how quickly the script was written about three days after I returned from there.

When I actually read the script, I felt like I was reading pure literature, as if I were reading a short story by Yukio Mishima. Human sighs and ambiguous emotions are delicately woven into the story, and scenes that have never been seen before are enumerated, and the ending is ambiguous. I thought that people would be surprised if this script was made into a movie. And I really liked this story myself. I didn't have a clear vision for the movie right away, but I was intuitively excited about it.

From Aya Watanabe's script to director Ren Sudo