Before Chloe Zhao and Kore-eda Hirokazu sat down for their Tokyo International Film Festival conversation, they had each been crying over the other’s work.
Kore-eda watched Zhao’s “Hamnet” in a small screening room with just one other person, grateful no one else was there to see his tears. “I couldn’t stop crying,” the Japanese auteur admitted, moved by the film’s exploration of why creators tell stories and the communal act of experiencing tragedy together.
That morning of their conversation, Zhao had risen at 4 a.m., jet-lagged, to watch Kore-eda’s 1998 masterpiece “After Life.” She was crying for an hour while her makeup team worked on her before the event. “I said to Kore-eda-san, I feel like ‘Hamnet’ and ‘After Life’ are very much the same film,” Zhao told the TIFF Lounge audience. “Because it is about how when we see our lives, whether it’s joyful or painful, mirrored back to us, it gives these experiences meaning and makes the human experience a little less difficult.”
The mutual admiration set the tone for an intimate conversation between two auteurs who share more than they might have expected. The discussion took place as Zhao’s latest feature prepared to close the festival, while Kore-eda is currently in production on his new film “Sheep In The Box,” starring Ayase Haruka and comedian Daigo.
The emotional connection revealed a striking similarity in how both directors approach their work: neither knows how their films will end when they begin shooting.
“When I go in to make a film, I never know how it’s going to end,” Zhao explained. “I will write it on the page so it reads nice, so it gets greenlit and gets money to make a film. But I know deep inside – and often my lead actors know – that it’s not there.”
This creative philosophy nearly proved disastrous on “Hamnet.” Four days before production wrapped, only two people at the Globe Theatre knew there was no working ending to the film: Zhao and her lead actress, Jessie Buckley.
“I filmed the ending that was on the script,” Zhao recalled. “I looked at it and said, ‘This doesn’t work. We don’t have a film.’” She remembered Buckley’s reaction: “Jessie’s looking at me like, ‘This is it? I went through all of this and this is the ending?’”
The breakthrough came the following morning during a car ride through rainy London. Buckley sent Zhao Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” – the haunting track that appeared in “Arrival” and other films. “That song has a very special ability to harmonize your whole body to the world around you,” Zhao said. “You suddenly feel like one with everything.”
While listening to the song, Zhao found herself reaching for the rain outside the car window. “I wanted to reach nature so that I can no longer be afraid of losing my love, because if we’re all one, then you can’t lose love. It just transforms into something else.” In that moment of personal grief and creative desperation, the film’s true ending revealed itself.
“I always wait for the ending to show up, which is very stressful because you’re always this little bit from not having a film,” Zhao admitted. “But that’s how life is.”
Kore-eda expressed understanding, revealing his own unconventional process. He creates storyboards but abandons them once on set. “I’m always looking about two weeks ahead,” he said through translation. “I look at the schedule to see which actors will be on set, and I think about what I can do. I actually write and rewrite the script on set in that space. The staff are probably nervous, but what emerges this way rarely feels wrong.”
Zhao drew a distinction between her latest work and her previous films. “‘Hamnet’ is about the internal landscape, as opposed to ‘Nomadland,’ which is about the external landscape,” she explained.
Working with cinematographer Lukasz Żal for the first time, Zhao shifted from the wide-open horizons of her earlier American films to something more contained. “In my previous films, I was in my 30s and very much about chasing as many horizons as possible. So it wass about going wide. With ‘Hamnet,’ I was interested in how can we confine everything into one frame, one stage, one room, so that the water can go deeper.”
This theatrical approach led Zhao to ask Kore-eda about his own precisely composed frames, which often recall stage backdrops. The Japanese director explained that he exchanges few words with his cinematographer on set, preferring to explore each other’s intentions through the camera itself. “It’s very enjoyable,” he said. “If I just followed the storyboard, it would just be about consuming a tight schedule.”
When asked why she works in fiction rather than documentary, Zhao offered a surprising answer about courage – or her lack of it. “I think when you’re making a documentary, you’re saying, ‘This is me and this is the subject,’” she explained, citing Werner Herzog’s “Into the Abyss” as an example of fearless documentary filmmaking. “I haven’t found that courage in my 30s to do that work.”
But there was another reason, rooted in representation and dignity. Zhao spoke about marginalized communities in America – people on reservations or living in vans – who are often documented with rough digital cameras under unflattering lights, studied as social issues rather than human beings.
“If you are with them in their lifestyle, you are exposed to the most beautiful landscape of America,” Zhao said. “And cinema’s cinematic treatments, these painterly images, are usually – because of circumstances of history – preserved for certain demographic people.”
Working with her cinematographer, Zhao insisted on capturing these faces with the same cinematic treatment as any Hollywood star, shooting at the golden hour. “The quality of lighting makes us feel like we’re one with light. And that kind of sunset and sunrise, these people who aren’t in big cities, or have the privilege many of us do, are actually experiencing on a daily basis.”
“Sometimes poetry can capture truth better than facts can,” Zhao concluded. “It is an emotional truth, not just fact.”
Zhao found unexpected freedom in her outsider status. “I only saw two and a half westerns when I made my own westerns,” she laughed. “I didn’t have the burdens on my shoulders as Americans do about making a Western. And when I made this Shakespeare, I don’t know Shakespeare very well, so I don’t have the burden as a British person. Everything about Shakespeare is so sacred. I just do whatever I want.”
This cavalier approach masks an earlier struggle. When Zhao first came to America for school, her insecurity about language was so profound that she gave up on storytelling and studied politics instead. “I didn’t think I could tell stories. How can I do it if I don’t speak a language?”
But her favorite films had lots of silence. “There’s a language of how your face moves and how your body moves,” she realized. “And if you don’t speak the language, you actually develop an extra sensitivity to nonverbal interactions.” What was once a challenge became an advantage.
Before the conversation, Zhao had watched Kore-eda’s 1998 masterpiece “After Life” – a film about newly deceased people who must choose one memory to take into eternity while workers in a way station create film recreations of those memories.
“I was crying for an hour,” Zhao confessed, explaining how the film resonated with her work on “Hamnet,” which deals with how Shakespeare and his wife processed the death of their son. “When we see our lives, whether it’s joyful or painful, mirrored back to us, it gives these experiences meaning and makes the human experience a little less difficult.”
She identified with the characters in “After Life” who choose not to select a memory, instead staying in limbo to help others. “My favorite memories in my life are actually while making belief, while making fantasies that are not real, for other people’s memories,” Zhao said. “When you see ‘Hamnet,’ you’ll see that Shakespeare is also a man who has a lot of trouble connecting and communicating in real life. But when he’s on his stage, he can connect with everything. So there’s a bittersweetness to many of us who chose to be storytellers.”
Kore-eda, who made “After Life” in his 20s, acknowledged this tension still exists for him in his 60s. “I want to keep making work without becoming cynical about that feeling,” he said.
Zhao praised Kore-eda’s films for their focus on mundane details – laundry, cooking, daily routines – that create a meditative rhythm before emotional tsunamis arrive. “A lot of times cinema skips past the 80% in between, showing only the highs and the super lows,” Zhao observed. “But you invite us into the comfort of these daily rituals. And through that, it goes and it pushes us off. It’s like some kind of ritual and the piece comes in a loop. And then when it hits you, it’s in the body.”
Kore-eda modestly accepted the compliment, saying he hopes to build stories from small emotional fluctuations in daily life, though he’s unsure how well he succeeds.
The conversation also touched on practical matters. Kore-eda shoots for roughly two months and tries to finish before dinner when children are on set, adhering to improved labor rules in Japanese production. He also edits at night during production, sometimes sending footage to his team for feedback the next day – a practice that elicits nervous anticipation from his crew.
Zhao, by contrast, needs eight hours of sleep and doesn’t touch the edit during production. “I’m so easily influenced by everyone around me,” she explained. “If I edit something early on and it hasn’t quite worked, it might change how I want to do things.” “Hamnet” shot from late July through September.
When asked about the tension between communal theatrical experiences and streaming platforms, both directors acknowledged the paradox. Kore-eda said he still can’t separate the act of watching a film with someone in the dark from what cinema means to him. “That’s why we need film festivals – so that experience doesn’t cease to exist.”
Zhao agreed about the importance of communal viewing – it’s central to “Hamnet’s” themes – but also celebrated how technology has democratized access. “Because of iPhones and technology, ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me’ could be watched by a teenager in South Dakota on the Lakota reservation. I think that is an incredible thing.”
Looking ahead, Zhao said she believes stories choose filmmakers, not the other way around. “When the conduit, the lightning conductor is ready, it will come.”
She has noticed patterns: her first three films explored identity, home and belonging, while “Eternals” and “Hamnet” deal with oneness and dissolving the illusion of separation. “I think that’s what I’m looking for – how do we dissolve the illusion of separation that we feel with each other, and feel that kind of oneness that you feel in the moment you are born or when you’re in nature.”
“I believe in the power of threes,” she added. “Since I made two about that, I think there’s a third one. I just don’t know what it is.”
As for Kore-eda, he continues production on “Sheep In The Box,” maintaining the work-life balance that isn’t really a balance at all. “I’ve become someone who’s always working, and that’s not unpleasant for me,” he admitted. But he wants younger filmmakers to know they don’t have to be 60-year-old workaholics to make films. “If they think filmmaking might be fun even when choosing it as work, that would be good.”
AloJapan.com