High School Hell - Interview with Daihachi Yoshida

Written by Hayley Scanlon on 12 Mar 2014

The Kirishima Thing takes a long hard look at the intricate world of high school social relations as one of the key players suddenly decides he doesn't need to play the game any more. We sat down and had a chat with its director Daihachi Yoshida for the film's premiere at the Raindance Film Festival.

UK Anime: Good afternoon; is this your first time in England, or have you been here before?

Daihachi Yoshida: It’s about my fourth or fifth time.

UK Anime: How do you like it here?

Daihachi Yoshida: I quite like it! I’m feeling really comfortable.

UK Anime: The Kirishima Thing seems quite different from your other work in some ways in that Fukuneke and Permanent Nobara were very comedic films with a slightly absurd, heightened reality, whereas Kirishima seems much more realistic - is the change in tone something you did deliberately or whether it was born out of the source material? What was your motivation?

Daihachi Yoshida: The similarities in my way of making a film comes from the idea of giving a surprise or climax at the end. That’s actually the same as Funuke and Permanent Nobara. Style-wise I didn’t change that much, but the subject matter was a little different from the other films, than Funuke and Permanent Nobara - they both have original novels too, but Kirishima is a school movie which is sort of far away from me because I’m an adult and haven’t had any sort of school life for a long time, but I really wanted to shoot this film as objectively as possible. That’s why maybe compared to Funuke or Permanent Nobara I’m not reflecting my own emotion in the filmm so perhaps that’s why they feel different.

UK Anime: We also noticed that most of your previous work has been adaptations of novels or manga, so we just wondered if that’s an accident or something you particularly like to do? 

Daihachi Yoshida: It's coincidence. Well, I say that, but in Japan producing an original screenplay is really very difficult, so it’s normally down to either adaptations of manga or novels - I’d like to make my own movie written by myself one day, but it’s not really possible yet.

UK Anime: Did the author of this particular novel, Asai Ryo, have a lot of involvement with the film itself? Do you enjoy having a lot of input from the respective original authors or prefer to be left alone to do it yourself?

Daihachi Yoshida: He didn't really have anything to do with it after I obtained the rights to making the film. 

UK Anime: Has Asai Ryo seen the finished film? How does he feel about it?

Daihachi Yoshida: Asai Ryo was kind of half-joking but he said he the film was a lot more popular than his novel... he was sort of joking so I’m not sure.

UK Anime: The film feels very realistic in the way it represents modern high school life - how did you go about casting the movie? I read in another interview you said it ended up feeling like a long ‘Omiai’ - so I wondered if you could comment a bit on the casting of the film?

Daihachi Yoshida: Personally I don’t know many young actors and actresses; those actors are really young, teenagers - so if I’ve seen them in a movie that was released a year ago then they’re going to be different in their appearance and how they act. They’ll have changed so you can’t really refer to the movies they’ve done before so it wasn’t really how it worked, but I saw so many people! Maybe the hard part was that all the actors have different levels of experience. Some of the actresses have been acting since they were very young and some were models who’d never really acted before. So to make an ensemble school drama with the differing levels of experience was the really hard part. It took a while to train the inexperienced actor to the level of the experienced actors and actresses, so that was really the hardest part.

UK Anime: In the UK we don’t think high school has quite the cultural pull that it has in American culture or Japanese culture, but we can still kind of identify with the different social groups even if they aren’t quite as defined here. It’s quite shocking to think that when you remove that central pin that is Kirishima the entire system starts to unravel. Do you think that’s going to be a permanent change in the social dynamics of the class or just a fleeting moment of panic before everything goes back to normal?

Daihachi Yoshida: The latter I think. When the central guy disappears, all the school becomes panicked and that’s kind of a transitory state, but as time goes by I’m sure that groups reform back to normal. Personally, I wanted to show - although it’s over a short time, only five days - a bigger scale; all of humanity’s problems over five days and I feel I achieved that. I had war in my mind. Maybe it wasn’t so clear in that last scene on the roof, but those confusions are reflecting the state of the world.

UK Anime: There are these marginal characters that have a foot in both worlds  - the girl who likes geeky films but doesn’t want to lose her status as one of the popular girls, or the other girl who’s the only person who can see what’s going on and admires the popular girls but also hates them for what they fail to see. Do you think these characters will remain on the margins or will the crisis finally force them to pick a side?

Daihachi Yoshida: I think she’s on a tightrope with those popular people and is a bit of a geeky person - she definitely wants to stay in the popular group but she has got compassion for the geeks and is trying to understand the "other world" of these people as well as the her own group. However, she is still looking down on them but she wants to be compassionate and understanding and is worried that when she moves up to the next year or university it might be that she’s the one who’s a bit geeky - she’s putting on weight or getting spots, so she might end up ‘one of them’. So she’s always worried and keeping her balance. It’s a dilemma for her and she’s on a tightrope between those two poles.

UK Anime: Apparently the zombie film isn’t in Asai’s novel so we just wondered why you decided to make it a zombie film that they were shooting?

Daihachi Yoshida: In the novel there isn’t a title or a genre given for the movie mentioned, they were talking about it but they didn’t really mention it. Maybe it’s my generation, but if you wanted to make a movie and it’s an independent movie in a film club then zombie is a an easy genre to pick. Maybe that’s just my generation but the high school movie zombie idea fit for me, but in the novel there was no genre or anything mentioned so it’s my creation. There’s another good reason for picking it though, as the zombies are biting and grabbing people from bottom to top so when you put that into the hierarchy of the school it’s sort of like the deprived bottom people are biting the top people to bring them down to their position, so maybe that sort of represents school life. 

UK Anime: It’s interesting that the teacher of the film club seems so over-involved, and when you look at the other clubs they’re run mostly by the students themselves. Is the teacher’s over-involvement one of the reasons it’s so unpopular with the rest of the students? 

Daihachi Yoshida: Sports teachers are really involved with their clubs too, it’s their life so maybe it's a different situation. Club activities are so big and sometimes bigger than their normal studies and things, but talking to the people outside Japan I realised it’s difficult to get across how important club activities are in Japanese schools. In this film, the teacher was kind of selfish in that he made and wrote the film and he wanted to use the kids to make his film just for his own ego. You know he’s a bit different from the normal teachers so maybe the people outside Japan read him a bit differently than the Japanese do. 

UK Anime: Maeda, who makes the zombie film, has quite an impassioned speech about using film rather than digital - we wondered if that’s something you agree with, and how you actually shot Kirishima?

Daihachi Yoshida: Yes I agree, but I shot Kirishima on digital. Six years ago I would have said I felt the same as Maeda, but because the quality and technology of digital is more advanced I’ve accepted the digital world and film-making, so I don’t have any obsession with using digital versus film. I don’t feel the same now as I did six years ago.

UK Anime: What do you have coming up in the future? Is there anything coming up at the moment? Do you plan to continue adapting manga and novels or are you hoping get your own original project off the ground? 

Up until last week I was actually directing a play in Japan. It was my first time writing for the theatre and directing a play so it was really difficult but stimulating as well, so maybe I’d like to do a bit more of that. My next film is going to be an adaptation, but writing too so the door’s open, there are a lot of opportunities. 

UK Anime: Thank you very much for the interview, and best of luck with Kirishima!

The Kirishima Thing received its UK premiere at Raindance Festival 2013.

Many thanks to Third Window Films for organising this interview.