5 Questions with Kana Hatakeyama
An understated drama from director Kana Hatakeyama, “okaasan (mom)” follows a mother and daughter as they reunite in rural Japan for a short visit. We asked Hatakeyama how the project started, what the biggest challenge was, and a recent film she’s loved…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I grew up wanting to be an actor in films. During college, while I took one filmmaking class and took part in two 24-hour filmmaking competitions, most of my creative attention became focused on theater, since at the time my college had more robust opportunities for actors in theater as opposed to on-camera. I did some writing and directing for theater, and I felt I had an instinct for directing, but my strength in both writing and directing was visual storytelling, so I felt that as a writer-director, the medium that would work best for me would be film.
After college, I moved to New York where for the first few years I focused on acting, mostly in theater but eventually also in TV and indie films. Directing was always in the back of my mind, but since youth felt like an important factor in the career of an actor, I had decided to focus on acting first. Eventually, feeling limited by the opportunities available for Asian actresses, I started writing, and fortunately found that I enjoyed it. In 2016 I finished my first screenplay, which became "okaasan (mom)", and decided to produce and direct it. And voilà!
I always say my first love was film, but in many ways theater really raised me as an artist. That being said, I'm really happy to have finally landed back in film--it's been deeply satisfying and thrilling, and I'm hungry for more.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
When I started writing, initially I didn't really set out to write a specific script or story. I would just write different scenes as they came to me. Eventually, I felt like I had written a bunch of scenes around this mother-daughter dynamic, so I printed all those scenes out to figure out whether there was a movie there. I figured out an order that worked for the scenes I had, identified what beats were missing, wrote those scenes, and then was like, I did it! I finally wrote my first screenplay!
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the best, and the least?
The biggest challenge was assembling the production crew, and on short notice. I had finished the script shortly before the November 2016 election, and after the election, I felt a very strong sense of urgency, that if I was going to spend time and resources making art, I wanted to make art that mattered the most to me, and for me, that was this film. A key scene in the film had to be filmed over New Year's Day, so the choice was to film either 6 weeks later, or wait another year. I didn't want to wait a year so decided to go for it. I had 6 weeks to assemble a production crew, based in Japan, who would be willing to work over Japan's most important national holiday, New Year's Day. While my family is in Japan, I'd worked almost entirely in the U.S. up until that point, so I had very few contacts in the film world there. I ended up finding my crew members mostly through Facebook, hired them after either Facebook messaging with them or talking to them over Skype, then only met them in-person a few days before the start of filming when I flew over to Japan. Taking on my first project as writer-director-producer abroad felt wild and crazy, but I'm grateful it somehow all worked out.
Even though I love being on set as an actor, the part of the creative process I enjoy the best as a director is probably post-production, because while the raw material of the film is the script and the footage we get, post is where we get to really figure out and craft what the film wants to be. The part I enjoy the least is the intense pre-production stress and feeling of terror, the "can we really get everything done in time and pull this off?!"
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I saw "The Legend of the Stardust Brothers" last year at the San Diego Asian Film Festival and have been obsessed ever since. It's incredible, and I have been telling everyone it could and should be the next big cult hit. It was made in 1985, but was recently re-mastered and is being re-released I believe soon. It was the first feature of Macoto Tezuka, son of legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka and at the time a 22-year old film student, and was made based on an imaginary soundtrack album by the musician Haruo Chicada. It's like "Rocky Horror Picture Show" meets "Bill and Ted" meets 80's Japanese aesthetics and pop culture, on lots of fun psychedelic drugs. It is bonkers in the best way possible, I love it, and everyone should see it! I am not their PR person but I might as well be!
5) What’s next for you?
I just finished my second short film, "FITNESS! or a story about SWEAT," which I also wrote, directed, produced, and acted in. This one is a weird comedy filmed in Brooklyn and entirely in English, so quite different from "okaasan (mom)." Currently I'm in the midst of festival submissions for that, so hopefully will be at a festival near you in 2020. I also recently finished a draft of my first feature screenplay, so will be working on refining that and eventually getting it made. And now I want to write a pilot, which I guess who doesn't at this point, but I'm nonetheless excited :)
Contact Info:
Website: http://www.kanahata.com
Instagram: @kanahata