Japanese Auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Making His Anti-Capitalist Action Film ‘Cloud’

The genre master comes back to Venice’s main competition with the movie, chosen to be Japan’s submission for the Oscars international film race after he was awarded the best director at the event last year. 
 
The last time the journeyman Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa competed at the Venice Film Festival, Kurosawa came away with the event’s top honor: best director for Wife of a Spy, a period drama. He is once again a part of the main competition of the Italian festival this week with Cloud being his first action movie out of many in his illustrious movie career. Cloud got a lift on Friday morning before the actual start of the competition in the Venice film festival on the Lido when cloud was confirmed as Japan’s pick for Oscars best foreign film category. 
 
The movie is about a man called Ryōsuke Yoshii as portrayed by Masaki Suda in his breakout role; he is a factory worker in his mid-twenties who works at a factory and has a side hustle of buying and selling anything he can gain a profit from them; from medical equipment, bags, dolls, among others. Step by step, Yoshii starts avoiding people — an old mate, who showed Yoshii the tricks of the resale business, his empathetic superior in the factory, and several Internet and personal partners — focused only on increasing his cash amount in the wallet. But when strange and malicious events begin to happen in and around Yoshii with more and more frequency, he moves himself and his girlfriend (Amane Okayama) to a big house near a lake, and hires a rather stupid-looking native (Daiken Okudaira) to help him with sales. There a rising upward cycle of enmity is encountered that continuously increases. 
 
This is Kurosawa’s second best director win at a festival; he previously won at Cannes and Rome, However, before he could do that, the Academy Award winner spoke to The Hollywood Reporter through a Zoom interview to share with Film Society the process of making his 29th feature. 
 
What could this film be about and what kind of topics do you get to address by working on this picture? 
 
This project’s concept has not come from a thematic approach but has always been my dream to make an action movie. Action is a very traditional genre for motion pictures which makes creating one set in modern Japan a little challenging especially on practicality and feasibility. However, the desire to take on an action film remained in me till this day or rather till this point in the text. 
 
One of the major goals I had was to try to avoid the manga- or animeesque protagonists of Japanese action films: Yakuza, cops, or members of the defense force and deal with more ordinary people. These are people who have never had any contact with violence in their day to day lives but are forced to live a life where sheer survival means becoming a killer. This entailed creating ‘truthful’ tale that puts decent hardworking simple folks into an infrastructural setting of kill or be killed. To that end, getting them there was the biggest storytelling challenge. 
 
What was the motivation for using the format of an online reseller as the protagonist? Which objects does this occupation came to symbolize to you over the course of your seminars? 
 
I think it was personal interest — I know someone, who does this kind of work, and I was intrigued by it. This person works on the thin line between being legal and being unethical hence his actions are legal but most are unethical. They are very hardworking people, they are always monitoring their computer, buying items, listing them, selling them and all this while they are in the busy city of Tokyo. This, my friend, to me represents today’s capitalism – if you are not a star or a millionaire, then the best - according to post - modernist consumerist values – is to become a reseller. It’s interesting because, when you think about it, this small-scale operation mirrors what large corporations do on a grander scale: But there is a lot more focus on the phrase ‘buy low and sell high’ without much regard for any ethical infringements. The occupation was striking more as a comment on the world we become a part of when we are grown. 
 
Yeah, I read it mostly reading it as a rather pristine and toxic kind of libertarianism where the character over the course of the novella has progressively less regard for the consequences of his actions on other people with whom he is conducting business — or for his closest loved ones. Greed for profits starts to rise in levels. I especially appreciated the premise that at first his activities may not appear so absurd and you have the conventions of the horror movie to make the audience feel as though the character is being hunted by some sort of unseen terror for reasons never quite explained. Yet as the protagonist is compelled to question why this is happening to him, the audience is prompted to wonder about his actions and his responsibility in a somewhat more nuanced way, right until the moment the critique, which is built into the very fabric of the film, steadily emerges from the background and, turning into an out-and-out action movie at last. 
 
That is a very good treatment of the matter that I think I really like. It is such kind of reading that makes me feel justified in making this film. 
 
Of course, I also have several questions regarding the assistant character. He was rather an enigmatic person for me. Where were your intentions toward me? 
 
When it came to creating the assistant character, he wasn’t conceived out of the notion that a character like him exists out in the world but more out of an inside necessity that the genre demands. I needed a character who seemed basically harmless but who is dangerously capable of violence, and who seemed potentially threatening to Deputy Don. Daiken Okudaira, the artist portraying him, is an interesting young man from Japan who, though still unknown in international entertainment, brought so much mystery to the role and made the character hard to read. I was not quite sure if it would be effective to have a character walk through, but Okudaira imposed his mysterious aura to the character which helped a lot. 
 
I am always against using interpretations in my work, but if I have to, then in my case the assistant is the devil. He’s the kind of person who puts together an unspoken and nearly imperceptible deal with the main character — giving the protagonist joy in exchange for sorrow. I think that is the most fundamental way that I would describe his role in the telling of events in the story. 
 
Running with the anti-capitalist critique above, I grew to see him as a logical endpoint: That greed turns a person into a character void of empathy; a ruthless gangster motivated by profit. 
 
Oh, I absolutely agree. It’s all there in the last scene in the car with both of them, they say it all. Therefore, the manner in which you watch the movie is going to depend with how you analyse this interaction. You might want to regard him as the monster of Capitalism or even more like an actual devil they portray in the movies. Of course, how it is seen is now in the viewers’ discretion. 

Taking these themes and how you addressed them into account, I raised the question whether the film can be viewed as a reaction to the social transformations that has occurred in Japan: the shift to America-style business mentality, and increasing income disparity eroding the basis of Japanese middle-class solidarity. Or was your intention when you penned down this critique to make it more general than this one? 
 
Well, first of all, the story is written in modern Japanese and the events depicted are seen through the ordinary citizens’ lenses; therefore it is a portrayal of the modern Japanese reality. Well, I can’t exactly go deep into American culture, but it is vivid that many countries are experiencing the tendency of polarization between the upper and lower classes. But, Japan isn’t quite there, yet. Japan has gone through the post-war success, which created the mid-century middle-class culture, and that solidarity feeling is still with us and dear to us. 
 
Yet ahead, we feel an element of fear on just what becomes of such enterprise in the future. But there are more people who still consider themselves as middle class, and there is a nagging insecurity, insecurity as though people are caged, and the base that previously seemed rock solid is slowly being eroded. This feel of individual desperation, this sense that “If I don’t do something soon, I am going to lose everything,” seems to be intensifying. It is this feeling that I wanted to depict in the film — the feeling of this slowly creeping through the society. 
 
You mentioned that with this project your primary concern was nothing more than to gun for your long-time want of doing an action picture. So after you’ve done that, do you still have any hidden dreams of filming? So you’ve already worked in so many styles and registers throughout the years of your great career. What is your attitude toward your career goals at this age? 
 
To be very honest, when it comes to my profession, I have never had a clear plan of what I want my career to be like or how it will look like in the future. Of course, I and other journalists around me may contribute to the construction of that narrative, but what concerns me most is the thickness of the cinematic language that challenges me by itself: I do not think that however many films I have made, any of them are perfect or finished. And the more films I make, the more the idea of cinema slips through my fingers as if it is always one step ahead of me, as if it didn’t exist at all when I wake up in the morning and as if it will overrun me when I am gone to the grave.