"[Window] MADO" Director Asao Drawing creates a sense of self [Director's Interview Vol.272]

Edited over a year

Q: Many of the commercials that Director Mao has made so far have bright and fun content, but the tone is quite different from this movie. Have you ever noticed anything?

Mao: Actually, I want to do an action comedy like Jackie Chan (lol). Many of the commercials I've made have been entertainment-oriented, so I was able to make this movie even more entertaining. However, this time I started by drawing that diary, so I tried to faithfully draw the nuances of the diary. I didn't do it thinking, ``I'm a socialite, so I'm going to change the tone!'' It just happened naturally.

Q: I think there are many things in which your experience in commercial production was put to good use, but what was the biggest thing among them?

Mao: It's been exactly 10 years since I became a commercial director, but when I was younger, I made a lot of short web videos. All of the dramas were about 10 minutes long, so I think I was able to get a sense of dramatizing them. If you make 8 to 10 continuous web videos, they will be as long as a movie. If I had only had experience in commercial production, things might have been a little different.

“[Window] MADO” Director Asao

Q: The length of the commercial and the movie are completely different.

Mao: Commercials usually consist of one scene, and there are no transitions between scenes like in movies. That's why when I create something along the lines of a commercial, I end up creating a punch line for each scene (lol). This time, it was based on a diary and there were a lot of pointillisms, so it was difficult to build up the parts. It is necessary to connect the parts while thinking about the connections and flow of each scene. That was a discovery.

Q: So, do you feel that the structure is quite different between the script and editing?

Mao: That's right. This time it was an accumulation of such parts, so there were many ways to edit it. It was decided at the end of November of last year that this work would receive a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, but the condition was that the first preview must be previewed by the end of December of last year. In other words, there was no time at all. Anyway, we hurriedly proceeded with casting and staffing, shot the film in 6 days at the end of the year, and then edited and finished it without sleeping for 3 days. I thought, "You can edit a movie in three days" (laughs). So I managed to make it to the preview screening of the first issue in time, but I had to carefully re-edit it over the year from then until it was released in theaters.

As I re-edit it, I realize that there are many things that are missing. At first, we didn't film the scene where the father of Family A investigates chemical sensitivity in the library, but if the audience doesn't know about chemical sensitivity in the first place, they won't be able to understand it. So we shot an additional scene in the library. In the end, we took three additional shots.

“[Window] MADO” ©2022 towaie LLC

Q: The story progresses from the perspective of Family A, who filed the lawsuit, but was the timing and structure of the introduction of Family B's perspective the same in the script and editing?

Mao: The timing for switching viewpoints was decided from the beginning. However, in the first edited version, there weren't enough elements of Family B, so we added scenes such as the scene between Family B's mother and the people from the housing complex.

In that sense, it really felt like drawing. Draw it once, set it up, compare it, and make a decision. That's why editing this past year was so important. I don't think it would take a year to edit a normal commercial film, but this time I was able to do it because I was using my own capital.

From both Japanese and overseas perspectives