Q&A WITH NEO SORA

Q. There’s a palpable tension between people and their environment in Happyend’s framing. Do you consider this tension central to your filmmaking?

A. One of the themes I was trying to capture, specifically in Happyend, was the backdrop of a specific socioeconomic moment, because the background of that moment and its politics are what drives a wedge between the characters. One of the ways in which I tried to do that was by using deep focus and also trying to shoot with a slightly wider angle so that the city is really present, bringing a bit more attention and detail to the world they are inhabiting.

I wanted to evoke the scale of the world these characters live in. I do a lot of photography as well and I generally tend to love landscapes. There’s something about landscapes that can capture an emotion for me that’s a little bit different from the emotion that appears on characters’ faces. Landscapes are very important to me.

Q. Happyend is set in the near-future, but feels like a film about the present. How did you go about piecing together this vision of near-future Japan?

A. The quote I was thinking about when I was imagining this world was a William Gibson quote in which he says, “The future is already here, just unevenly distributed.” I was looking to other countries where certain elements of the future were present. The buildings with the leaders’ faces came from a photo I saw taken in Russia, where Putin’s face was displayed all over a building.

The other thing I was thinking of is the idea of alienation, the kind of Brechtian alienation where I wanted to almost confuse the audience. The film is meant to kind of feel like the present, but there are moments where I introduce elements of the future that don’t quite exist in the present. Emotionally, I was really thinking about different timescales and different timelines, because one of the most important historical backgrounds for thinking about this film was 1923, when a big earthquake struck Japan that resulted in the massacre and genocide of 6,000 or more Koreans in Japan.

I was thinking about this colonial legacy and the future earthquake that they keep reminding you will happen in the film. When that happens, will we have reflected on our own history as the country of Japan to be sure something like that wouldn’t happen again? I’m not that confident that we have. There’s that kind of folding of different timelines, emotionally speaking as well.

And the perspective with which I was telling the story was, even though it doesn’t show up directly through flashbacks, from the POV of Uta and Ko when they’re older, as though they’re reminiscing on their past. It’s as if they’re grabbing a beer in their thirties talking about what it was like when those things happened in high school. That plays into my camera position choices as well. Maybe we’re a bit further back, kind of gazing on them from afar.

Q. Music plays a central role in this film, particularly underground rave music. What is your own connection to this culture?

A. I love techno and club culture. I went to a lot of clubs while I was in university and after university. They were spaces where, different from what I portray in the film, I tried experimenting with these political convictions of safer spaces. To me, encountering those kinds of politics in that way was really interesting. But more than that, it was a space to experience vibrations, the low vibrations of the kick drum that comes out of the subwoofer. That is something you just cannot get in daily life with headphones, so I was really after that feeling.

During my university days, I would help set up for concerts and shows, dragging out the subwoofer from the storage. You need two people to set up a subwoofer — it’s just too heavy. That experience of literally carrying this burden with somebody else definitely formed some of the central images of the film: two people carrying a subwoofer through the darkened streets of Japan. That also really seemed to resonate with the theme of shaking and quaking, and earthquakes in general.

Q. What comes to mind when you first start working on a project — stories, characters, sounds, images?

A. I have a habit that I started in my mid-twenties where I keep a folder in my phone’s notes app called “miso note” which comes from something screenwriters in Japan have been doing since the ‘50s. It’s whatever miso is to a soup. Miso in a film is what makes the film really come alive. It’s what makes the film have flavor. It can be an observation of something on the street, a photo of beautiful light that you see reflecting off of a mirror, a story your friend told you, or a really powerful feeling. It can be anything that can serve as the miso to a film.

I usually collect these misos. They’re just moments where different elements come together as one film. Once I have an idea for a film, I go through this folder of “miso notes” and collect all of the things that seem really relevant or would fit in one project.

Q. What’s the last film you saw and loved?

A. I watched Hard Truths on the plane, which I really liked. I also watched David Lynch’s The Straight Story very recently, which I loved.

Q. Do you have a favorite film soundtrack?

A. I love anything by Bernard Herrmann. Specifically, I mean, they’re all so good… Vertigo, perhaps.

Q. What’s one project you’d like to make someday, however impossible it may seem now?

A. I’d love to do a manga or anime adaptation that doesn’t look like cosplay and is truly a cinematic adaptation.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview on?

A. There is a painter that passed away fairly recently, a really young painter named Matthew Wong, a self-taught Canadian who unfortunately, I believe, committed suicide. His paintings are some of my favorite paintings.

He has a series of paintings of the color blue that really left a deep impression on me and I come back to them all the time. They are really relevant to Happyend because I was thinking of one image in them a lot when I was thinking about the film.

It’s these two figures in a park and there are golden leaves falling and a golden puddle in between them. This image really inspired me a lot when I was thinking about the two contrasting protagonists in Happyend. The painting is called Distance (2016).