"Enemy" Director Daihachi Yoshida makes movies he wants to see [Director's Interview Vol. 464]

Create a house plan and write a script

Q: What exactly did you start with when writing the script?

Yoshida: The first thing I did was to create a layout of the house. I couldn't get a good image of the house just by reading it, so I asked art designer Mayumi Tomita to create a blueprint for me. With the several blueprints, including 3D, she created for me, the protagonist's house and its neighborhood began to stand out, and I could easily imagine the story starting to unfold here. Maybe because I wrote the script while looking at those blueprints, the first draft was very quick. Of course, the blueprints and the actual filming locations will change again. I was prepared for that from the beginning.

The storyline hasn't changed much from the original, and I chose what I like and what I wanted to make into a movie while keeping the balance. It naturally settled into its current form.

"Enemy" ©1998 Yasutaka Tsutsui/Shinchosha ©2023 TEKINOMIKATA

Q: It felt like the story was completely different from the original, but how did you balance it with the original?

Yoshida: There are some differences from the novel, but I wasn't aware that I changed the story too much this time, and it's the most faithful to the original out of all the films I've been involved in. In a good way, I think it's become a film adaptation that won't surprise people who have read the original.

When I adapt a novel, I usually rely on my own impressions after reading it and write until the end, but if I had written it based on my impressions when I was in my 30s, I think the shape would have been quite different. Tsutsui wrote this novel when he was about 65 years old, and I adapted it when I was almost 60 years old. In that sense, I was able to imagine the life of an elderly person over 70 years old with a relatively similar feeling, so I think there was less of a gap.

The importance of talking to actors