Playwright Henrik Ibsen said that the devil is compromise. It is no surprise that the films associated with Kazuhiko Hasegawa are as uncompromising as the man himself. His rookie years in the film industry found him experiencing two very different film worlds. First, he cut his teeth as an assistant director under the steady hand of Shohei Imamura. Later, he would write and/or AD some of the more unique films for Nikkatsu as their Roman Porno films were artistically and monetarily climaxing. With a firm footing, Hasegawa would hold the reins like a pro for the only two feature films he would helm as director: The Youth Killer and The Man Who Stole the Sun. These two films wildly different on the surface, make a multitude of similar comments about authority, loneliness, and the nature of family. In the ‘80s, fed up with the studio system, Hasegawa gathered a dream team of directors to start the Director’s Company. They would make films on their terms for the next ten years. Films considered to be some of the best of the decade.

After being out of the filmmaking world for some years, Hasegawa has started to pop up at events around Tokyo. This year he participated in a film discussion with Shunji Iwai that was broadcast on Japanese television . Speaking with Hasegawa-san, one gets the feeling “The Maverick” is still very in love with creating movies. But, is the film world finally ready for him?

First, could you tell us how you started your career in the film industry?

In 1968 when I was 22 years old and in my fifth year of college, I joined Imamura Productions and took part in the production of The Profound Desire of the Gods after being hired by the company as an assistant director. Shohei Imamura, who was the president of the company and also the director of The Profound Desire of the Gods, was already a well known and very influential film director at that moment. Imamura took an unbelievable amount of time shooting and was an extraordinary perfectionist in terms of taking control of everything at the shooting location. One example: Imamura, as a matter of course, ordered the staff to gather 1,000 extras at five in the morning in a village with a population of 1,200.

How was the atmosphere surrounding those Roman Porno production teams?

At the very beginning, you could say it was servile because there was a sense of humiliation. Even if nobody actually did, it seemed everyone wanted to say “At last, glorious Nikkatsu has plumbed the depths and has started making pornography”. However, after realizing the success of Roman Porno --- for example, box office hits, and even some Roman Porno films were picked in the “Best 10 movies of the year” by film critics --- the atmosphere drastically changed. It was as if “Hey, we are making CINEMA. Do you wanna say something about our job!?” That’s the great thing, or the amazing thing, rather, about the Nikkatsu staff in those days.

It was really exciting working at Nikkatsu for several years after we recovered, or rediscovered pride for our job: filmmaking. Directors such as Tatsumi Kumashiro, Noboru Tanaka, Chusei Sone and Masaru Konuma, who were not given chances for directing their own films in the 60’s when Nikkatsu produced “cheerful and fun movies”, started giving birth to freewheeling and unique masterpieces which became hallmarks of Roman Porno afterwards. Erotic scenes were mandatory because they were produced as a part of the Roman Porno line-up, but as long as those scenes were there, you were allowed to do anything you wanted, and the shooting locations were filled with a free spirit and a taste of anarchy.

Although I was an assistant director at the time, I was very confident we were making “top ranked” Japanese cinema as a team, and we were proud of ourselves. Of course, we enjoyed interesting films, such as Toho’s youth movies and Toei’s yakuza movies as audiences, but at the same time we were fueled with energy to beat them with more exciting films from Nikkatsu. Anyway, we never felt ashamed of making pornography. All the staff were professional at Nikkatsu. Good times.

Why was the film not finalized?

Well…I suppose it was because we tried to make an “art film” too seriously (laughs). All the production staff were my buddies I got to know while working at Imamura Productions, and there was no guarantee of payment for them, but that situation made us very determined, just like “We definitely will make a GREAT film”. We blew the budget because we took 20 days on a film which generally took four or five days as I’ve mentioned. And even worse, the producer bet the rest of the budget, which was already minuscule, on a horse race and lost it. I am the one to be blamed for it because I let him go, saying “If you can win and make money, you can go and bet” (laughs). After that experience, I greatly reflected on myself and understood that I needed to train before directing my own films, and therefore, I started working at Nikkatsu again as an assistant director.

You left the company at the age of 29?

More like Nikkatsu terminated my employment, then I left the company.

Why did Nikkatsu terminate your employment?

I was not in the workers union because I was hired by Nikkatsu as a temporary worker, a temp assistant director, and therefore I didn’t get the benefits permanent workers enjoyed. But as the union got stronger in the company, they formed another union specifically for temporary workers and started soliciting members. So, they approached me, but I declined to join the union because I didn’t like their views which were based on Japanese Communist Party thinking that “We, as members of the union who work in the film industry, should abandon sordid Roman Porno and start producing ‘genuine and proper’ films”. I thought it was ridiculous to think that because everyone at Nikkatsu lived on Roman Porno, and moreover, I had never seen Roman Porno as “sordid”. Because I had an attitude problem, and bluffed “I’m so happy about being a temp assistant director. I am neither a permanent worker nor a union member. So what? ”, the union noticed me and regarded me as a “dangerous element”. In fact, Nikkatsu kindly offered to promote me to director twice even though I was just temp staff, but in each case the union interfered and blew my chances.

Nishimura was working on so many projects because he was the top grossing director of Nikkatsu with his Danchizuma (Apartment Wife) series. He seemed to be efficient in making standard melodramas in a well-trained manner, and at the same time was a very prolific filmmaker who released “deep” movies in terms of “erotic density”. I was a part of quite a few of his works because I needed to make my own living from those (laughs). I was paid JPY130,000 for each project I was involved in as an assistant director. One film took me a couple of months if I went through with it from the beginning to the end. So, I simply had to work on many projects at once to earn enough money to support my family. That’s why I decided to join his team. He was producing so many films.

Similar to Fujita and Kumashiro’s films, could you tell us about any suggestions you picked up from your production team that were reflected in the works you directed?

The lead characters are male, and distinctively, those characters are driven by strong emotions and eventually become criminals.

In my mind, I maybe feel like I want to become a criminal. It may be too much to say “I want to become a criminal”, so maybe I want to become a juvenile delinquent (laughs). I’ve always been attracted to characters who break rules and norms. Basically, I probably don’t believe in rules established by human beings and society. Don’t you think a phrase like “everyone is created equal” is a big lie? Human beings are born under different conditions and that means equality is not secured even for a newly-born baby. Furthermore, most rules are designed to work for people in power, and do not necessarily work for people without power. So, it’s totally okay for me, a person without power to take any illegal action if the action is to fight back against people in power. On the other hand, I cannot turn a blind eye if people with power take certain action to defeat people without power, whether those actions are legal or not.

A long time ago when I was in my first year of my college, I saw at an ATG theater The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner which is based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe, one of the “Angry Young Men” generation, and directed by Tony Richardson. The lead character is a young guy, unable to adapt to the harsh reality surrounding him. He commits a small crime and gets sent to a reform school. His only special skill is long distance running. At a cross country cup in which the character was enrolled by the head of the reform school, who is apparently a hypocrite, he is way ahead of the other runners and almost at the finish line, but suddenly he stops running and lets the others pass. This is his irresistible resistance against the head of the school emerging in an anarchical kind of way. I was impressed with his way of resistance, like “Oh! You did that in an amazing way!” but American sailors who saw the film at the same time in the theater were shouting “STUPID!” at the character. I wanted to shout at those sailors, “YOU ASSHOLES! YOU GUYS ARE STUPID!!!” (laughs). To stop running isn’t a crime, but it was a big statement which meant more to me than a crime. This film was the first one that made me think “Ah, I wanna shoot films like this”.

Before that experience, I just thought “I want to become a film director” for no specific reason. But this great movie naturally made me think I could make movies, or I could make my own movies if I could find subject matter that demonstrated this type of rebellion for my own work. I was fed up with the sweet and typical Hollywood happy endings at that time, so this one was surprisingly new to me. After The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, so called American new wave cinema emerged, and I enjoyed a bunch of movies released around that movement. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a great British movie which may have functioned as a forerunner to the birth of American new wave cinema. I think the commonality in enjoying various creative genres such as film, theatrical plays and novels is that such works enable you to grow by empathizing with the characters in those fiction pieces. It’s not only for the audience and readers, but also for the creators. For me, film was the most familiar and enjoyable creation to express myself with.

In that sense, we see a shadow of you in Bitterness of Youth for which you wrote the script. The lead character’s worries and his surroundings lead him to another world he has never imagined.

For Bitterness of Youth, another scriptwriter who had been working longer than me was originally hired, and Kumashiro wanted me to look over the draft as a ghostwriter for JPY 5,000 per day (laughs). After taking the offer from Kumashiro, I read both the draft and the original novel and felt at a loss because I liked neither of them. In short, I did not like the lead character. After thinking it over, I finally gave the job back to Kumashiro because I knew it would become a new story if I rewrote it. The initial draft was declined by the author of the original novel, and therefore, I was officially hired for the script. I wrote the final script really quick in 10 days.

In your debut film as a director, The Youth Killer, what part of yourself is reflected, and how it is depicted?

The main subject of The Youth Killer is parenticide, which was taken from a real story about a young person who killed his parents. The guy, who the lead character is based on, had failed college entrance exams for several years and had been in Tokyo while preparing for the exams, but one day his father called him back to his hometown and gave him a pub (to make him abandon the hope for college education and life in Tokyo). After becoming the pub owner, he fell in love with a girl who was his childhood friend, and hired her as a waitress for the pub, and because of the relationship, his parents belittled the girlfriend scurrilously, and so he went into a frenzy and killed his parents. Everyone could feel sympathy toward the character because of the exploding emotion of wanting to be free from parental control. Although I never thought of killing my parents, I wanted to run away from home in my youth. So I understood how the guy felt. I thought the subject was suitable for my debut film because I recalled no movie had ever depicted the murder of one’s parents deeply and overwhelmingly, and that is why I decided to work with this subject.

So let’s go on to your next work, The Man Who Stole the Sun. First, could you tell us how you got to know Leonard Schrader, and how the two of you came to write the script for this project?　　

I first met Leonard Schrader in 1977, one year after The Youth Killer was released. I was in the United States on a trip writing a travel journal for Playboy Magazine Japan. The only thing I knew about him was he was the younger brother of Paul Schrader, the scriptwriter of Taxi Driver. We instantly got along with each other and became buddies when we first met. Leonard is two years older than me. I called him “Len” and he called me “Goji”.

We talked about everything, including our childhoods. In 1969, Len had been living in Kyoto for five years teaching English literature classes at Doshisha University. He was doing this in order to escape the military draft --- he said this with a little embarrassment. He got married to a Japanese woman named Chieko who was a student of his at Doshisha. So he was already an extraordinary expert about Japan when I first met him. He even had a wide range of knowledge about the Japanese yakuza world, and was the co-writer of the script for the film Yakuza (starring Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura) in 1974. He was a nice guy and knew a lot about Japan, so probably I talked about things related to my personal history --- one of which would have been my background as a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and how I was indirectly exposed to radiation inside my mother’s womb.

After several months, I got back from the U.S and when we reunited in Tokyo, he shared with me the initial idea for The Man Who Stole the Sun, saying “Goji, I came up with an excellent idea which will become your next film”. He talked about a plot in which “An ordinary guy develops an atomic bomb on his own and blackmails the government to ‘keep airing the nightly baseball game on TV without disruption!’ with this handmade atomic bomb”.

There was this weird, stupid magazine called “Assassin”, and Len had read an article before a flight to Japan entitled “Become the First Guy to Produce an Atomic Bomb in Your Town!”, and the article helped him to think of the idea. While we were in Los Angeles, we chatted about Japan and I asked him “What do you think about Japan?”, and he replied “It is a very strange country where nobody makes any complaints even if everything, head to toe, is red-taped by bureaucratic rules and regulations”. He would think the strict and non-flexible time slot for airing a baseball game was a perfect symbol of the “red-taped Japanese society”. Len asked me if I liked the idea, so I responded “So Stupid, So Good”, and this is how we started writing together.

I heard Len had originally shared the plot with Dustin Hoffman who was enthusiastic about the film. However, Len changed his mind, thinking “This plot should go to Goji. A survivor of the atomic bombing should direct the film in Japan, the victim nation of the bombing”. And “If the film is produced in Japan by a Japanese director, the film will receive more attention from the world”. Anyway, we agreed to work on it together, and Len said he would prepare the first draft, and he went back to the U.S. The problem was, although Len was a super Japan expert, he refused to speak and write Japanese. He was embarrassed about being a “funny GAIJIN” who speaks and writes imperfect Japanese --- a shy guy in a bit of a strange way. So, Chieko, his wife, helped us with the translation, and the first draft was sent to me in three months. After the first draft, we worked on drafts, one in Los Angeles and the other in Japan for almost a year until we came to the final version. It was quite tough as we didn’t have convenient gadgets like personal computers back then. I don’t want to remember how many hours we spent talking on the phone …. Scary (laughs).

What was tough about co-writing, aside from exchanging information?

In the first draft Len sent, Makoto, the lead character, makes only one demand regarding the baseball game, and the story ends like, “Makoto successfully earns a tremendous amount of money through the blackmailing and flies to Brazil with his girlfriend”. I especially didn’t like the ending, so I said to Len, “Hey, this ending is like a Hollywood light comedy. Why don’t you include more exciting demands that a guy with a handmade atomic bomb would make to the government just like ‘I wanna watch the baseball game until it ends!’ This would be a GREAT movie if we could come up with two more demands which absurdly don’t fit with the serious nature of an atomic bomb. And definitely those demands need to be exhilarating so the anarchy inside of Makoto will directly come out to the audience”.

Another change I suggested to Len was to have Makoto exposed to radiation during the course of creating the atomic bomb. Makoto, a guy who develops an atomic bomb and blackmails the government, is no doubt a law offender, but at the same time, I wanted him to be a victim of a nuke. I wanted to do so probably because I am also a victim of a nuclear weapon. Since I was a little child, I have always believed I wouldn’t live long, and I wanted to share this feeling with somebody else who may watch my work. However, now, after the tragedy of 3/11 in Fukushima, the fact is people all over the world are slaves and victims of nukes without exception. I precede these people by about 60 something years as a victim of Hiroshima. In a sense, I may have synchronized myself with the lead role more deeply than in my other works.

Did Leonard Schrader consent with the suggestions?

He was fine with the change of the main character to only one demand. I guess he did not like the happy-ending plot so much (laughs). However, he hesitated with the suggestion about exposing Makoto to radiation . He was very reluctant, saying, “Goji, the subject will become too heavy and that will cause the film to fail”. In response I said with excitement, “Asshole, how can a movie about a nuclear weapon NOT be heavy? It definitely should be super-heavy, and at the same time it needs to be super-hilarious and striking in a way never imagined!” (laughs). Finally, Len understood what I meant and started revising the script, saying “All right. Heavy stuff, just great. We are the Schraider brothers of Taxi Driver. We are enormously efficient in terms of being HEAVY!” The revised version I received after three months was ... brilliantly super-heavy (laughs). I said to him, “Good. Now I know how you want to reshape this script, so now let me make some adjustments”, and I started making additional changes to Len’s version. The first change was the age and occupation of the main character. Makoto was supposed to be a “20-something student” in Len’s version, but I changed him to a “30-something school teacher” so the guy would be more familiar to me. I gave him the occupation of a science teacher who teaches at a junior high school, assuring this guy is capable of developing an atomic bomb and it looked real. At the same time, this aspect illustrates his solitude --- lonely in a crowd so to speak. I tried to think of this guy as a school teacher with lofty ideals struggling to change society, but his own solitude amidst the crowd of students made him a lunatic terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon he created.

I imagine the arrangement with the distributor (Toho) was not straightforward and the situation was tough because the subject is deeply related to the atomic bomb. How did it actually go?

I have heard there was some back and forth regarding the title of the film. Was it related to a strategy or concern from Toho?

We had so many difficulties in determining the title. The title Len gave to the film was The Kid Who Robbed Japan. I suppose Japanese and Americans understand the meaning, or nuance of “robbing Japan” differently. For non-Japanese, including Americans, a phrase like “robbing Japan” would imply some sort of degree in a certain way, but to be honest, I thought “Robbing Japan? It means nothing if you rob such a tiny thing. huh?” Then another problem was we didn’t have an equivalent word for “kid” in Japanese. So I used “kid” in the last name of the lead character, “Kido”, which came from the word “kid”.

Toho was sensitive in terms of the promotion, too. At the early stage of the promotion, they did not use any materials and terminology related to an A-bomb in the posters or the tagline. The tagline was “Great guys produced a great movie” and this does not let audiences know what this movie is about. As the release date approached, some young guys in the promotion team finally stood up and suggested to their managers that they should use the term A-bomb in the promotion, otherwise they would not be able to promote this movie. Finally, the top management agreed to use the term A-bomb and the copy was revised as “There was a man who created an A-bomb in Japan” which was used in the newspaper ads in a larger font than the title. I could have used “Laughing A-Bomb” if they were going to print it like that (laughs).

We can call the Director’s Company a “transition filled with challenges” --- something to free ourselves from the influence of major film companies. In another words, we believed that we would make our own movies by taking the risks ourselves.

During the time when cinema was the king of entertainment and active in terms of being a business, a large number of films were released from studios owned by several major film companies, and directors were hired by such companies as their employees. Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu were company employees in those days. After that period, some directors established their own independent production companies to make movies under freer circumstances with less influence from film companies / studios. I also started my career at Imamura Productions which was a typical poor independent production company. But I had an acute feeling that I wouldn’t be able to tackle so many difficulties like Imamura could deal with. He always had to be the charismatic center of a small company. Afterwards, working at Nikkatsu as an assistant director, I fully understood the benefits of the studio system, although I couldn’t really enjoy those benefits at Nikkatsu because I was a mere assistant director there.

In the film industry, some people thought “What can they achieve by gathering unskilled young directors?”, but we had some people on our side who cheered us on. We rallied in the excitement, bluffing that there is strength in numbers. The Director's Company adopted an annual salary system just like the one used for baseball players, and so the risk would be shared by the members. The rule was one’s salary for the next year would be decreased or the contract terminated if the director fails to make a profit and the project goes into the red. To reinforce this system, we produced each other’s directing projects so we could share filmmaking experience with each other.

I was appointed as a producer for The Crazy Family by Sogo Ishii. It was kind of a cumbersome job to seize Ishii by the neck --- someone who was so eager to start shooting. I worked with him for a year and a half in writing the script, encouraging him like “Not yet. This script isn’t good enough. I won’t let you start shooting before you finalize a quality script”. I also gave him some ideas to contribute to the script. I was worried the film would become something un-Ishii like if I was too involved in the scriptwriting. Lo and behold, he magnificently created his own Sogo Ishii movie without losing any money. In terms of budgeting, Banmei Takahashi, who was the producer responsible for the production side, did a great job though.

The worst director for constantly being in the red was Shinji Somai. There was nothing I could do with him --- having a deficit of nearly JPY 0.2 billion for a project with a budget of JPY 0.2 billion! I seriously thought I would kill him one day (laughs). Somai was just like a spoiled boy everyone cared about. That kind of spoiled nature is a very important quality for a director, though. In the last days of the company, all the directors gathered and held an evaluation meeting about company losses, and finally at that moment, Somai said, “Gosh, did I do that bad?” his face blushing in embarrassment. So, he regretted what he did. All of us were like, “Too late!” and got mad at him.

What do you think are some other factors that have prevented you from shooting a film after The Man Who Stole the Sun?

My desire of depicting something that cannot be realized, such as “flying high” and “transforming into somebody else”, got stronger than ever after shooting The Youth Killer and The Man Who Stole the Sun. I had the lead character kill his parents in The Youth Killer. I had another lead character develop an atomic bomb and blackmail the government. Now I can’t find a character in which to synchronize myself. Maybe that’s the reason I can’t shoot my next film. Another reason is the sales of The Man Who Stole the Sun weren’t so good. I truly wish the film had been released under the title I originally attached, Laughing A-Bomb, and it had become a box-office hit. The next film would have easily materialized if The Man Who Stole the Sun had been a big hit. And one more possibility is I sort of took on the nature of a perfectionist from Shohei Imamura because I started my career and learned filmmaking under him. I’m making a lot of excuses, but frankly speaking, I may just be an absolutely lazy guy (laughs). The mad passion for making movies is still in me though.

So, what kind of film would you like to shoot when you get the chance?

I’ve always been the kind of guy who hates to preach, and hates getting preached to. So, I don’t want to watch or make movies that are preachy. It seems many efficient film directors tend to make preachy or “morally right” movies. For instance, Kurosawa’s incredible Seven Samurai --- I hate the end part where Takashi Shimura, one of the Samurai, declares “Those farmers won the war,” which sounds very insolent. If I may say so, Kurosawa’s paternal nature is exposed unexpectedly in that ending. In terms of Kurosawa / Shimura movies, Ikiru (To Live) seems to be far more elegant.

As for my next work ... the subject will be anti-paternalism in some context. It may be my third attempt to describe anti-paternalism in my work with The Youth Killer and The Man Who Stole the Sun being based on an anti-paternalistic philosophy. I can’t explain in detail because I’m still working on the plot, but it will be a nonsensical and striking adventure movie set in Fukushima, Hiroshima and Okinawa after the events of 3/11. It will definitely be based on a notion of paternalism vs libertarianism, but I don’t want to make the work an anti-nation film. Rather, I want to build the work as a non-nation film. I mean, how can human beings and individuals live their lives without the frame of a nation influencing them? The history of human beings consists of a never-ending, disgusting cycle of struggle against power and nation, and then a struggle to form a new power and nation. I want to create an adventure movie in which people fight to destroy this disgusting cycle. When imagining a nation-less society, the existence and power of women are important. Women’s power, such as those of female priest and shaman of Okinawa, has had a great influence uplifting so-called “primitive communitarian societies”. I myself want to be born as a woman in my next life (laughs). In that sense, my next film will be the drama of “me in my current life” versus “me in my next life”. I want to tailor the storyline like, “The two characters fiercely fight against each other, but in the end, they sympathize with each other and end up in an ideal non-nation society”.