Posing Kafka’s Century-Old Questions to a Japanese Audience

Recently news of Britain's referendum on withdrawal from the EU swept the world and the issue polarized Britain, Personally, I despaired at the referendum result, and I felt that British people had been manipulated by the traditional media and also swept up in a kind of populist hysteria by the new media. The fact that so many people, including the politicians that had agitated for the exit in the first place, appeared to immediately regret the result or claim that they had not really wanted the exit to happen, suggested that people's decision-making was impulsive and emotional. The level of debate seemed shallow and cliche ridden and a lot of people simply repeated what they had heard uncritically.

This is an issue facing not just Britain, but the entire world, and Japan is no exception. The new media and the Internet appear to offer us the freedom to pick and choose from large volumes of information and decide our own actions, but in reality we may be trapped in a kind of “information cage,” and consumerism is one of the forces behind the organization of this cage.

Sometimes it is hard to escape the anxiety that we are all sleepwalking our way to oblivion in a world where shopping, "entertainment" and status are more important than political engagement, education or the environment. Media, including news itself have become distractions from an engagement with real world problems or present these problems as if they have nothing to do with our own lives. I think we need to wake up and try questioning the accounts of the world that surround us. I want to try to use cinema to break out of the cage and be free, or at least shake the fences around me to see if I really am trapped in a cage. My new film tackles this idea of the invisible systems in which we are trapped in the contemporary world.

A man awakes on his 30th birthday to find himself arrested for undisclosed reasons and on “trial”: this is the opening of The Trial by the early 20th-century writer Franz Kafka, who was born in the part of Austria-Hungary that later became Czechoslovakia. The novel has been adapted for stage and screen many times, but in this version the story remains largely true to the original while the setting is transposed to modern-day Japan.

When I read Kafka's work in my mid-teens, he was the first literary author I had encountered. I have re-read his books many times, probably becoming more familiar with him than any other writer. I have written several Kafkaesque screenplays and tried to adapt his books a few times but have never really managed to capture the spirit of his work in my screenplays.

For reasons that may appear fairly obvious to people who have been following the recent political developments in Japan, the time seemed right to adapt Kafka's Trial. Something about the stifling world in which the hero already exists and the unexplained system in which he finds himself trapped seemed like a very apt metaphor for the state of Japanese society right now. At the same time the underlying existential questions of the work still have a universal validity: “What am I doing in this world into which I've been thrown? How do I make sense of it? How do I know if I am really free?”

It might sound as if the film will be “difficult”, but the original story is suspenseful and sexy and a lot of people don't really pick up on Kafka's sly black humour. I think it can make an engaging and suspenseful film that will also make people think about the borderline world he describes: “In reality these things should be impossible, although just maybe…”.

Unfortunately the Japanese film industry in general seems to have very little interest in literary adaptations. Unless a book is a contemporary bestseller and can be packaged with hot young actors and singers it seems very difficult to get finance. That's why I'm trying to Crowdfund the project with small donations made via the Internet. If this succeeds, we will have the production funds needed while also knowing that there are people who want to see the film. If it only gets watched by the people who have paid to fund it that would almost be enough, but in all likelihood it will reach a much larger audience through festivals, theatrical distribution and an Internet release.

At present we have almost reached our initial target, but we'll keep raising money throughout the production process, so that we can work with professional crew and actors

My life changed when I was 14 when I saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God, by the German writer and director Werner Herzog and Dersu Uzala, by Akira Kurosawa. These were artistic films with profound messages, completely different to the Westerns and James Bond films I had seen on TV up till then. I didn't fully understand these films at the time, but they had a profound impact on me and I thought about them for days afterwards. The day after I saw Aguirre on TV my German teacher told me that it had been "directed" by Werner Herzog. I had no idea what this meant at the time but learned that dircting was a job and decided that was what I wanted to do in the future.

Unfortunately for me there was only a single film school in Britain at the time, the National Film School, which only accepted students over the age of 27. I called them up and they told me to go to University first and then apply after working for a few years in the industry. But I soon found out that it was hard to get work in the industry which was very much a closed shop at the time. Most directors seemed to be from families who already worked in the industry.

I decided to study French and German literature at the University of Cambridge, and started to make films there in the film club. When I graduated I worked in a Comprehensive school in North London. I did this for two years and then saw an ad for an English conversation school in Japan. Around the same time I was exposed to more Japanese films through a festival of Japanese culture in the UK and saw Tampopo by Juzo Itami, and Gyakufunsha Kazoku, by Ishi Sogo, but to tell the truth I really came to Japan with the idea of working for two years to save up the tuition fees for film school.

When I arrived in Nagoya though I immediately made friends with a group of film students from the art college there and began to make independent films on 8mm. I was amazed by the freedom of the 8mm film culture in Japan. In the UK most independent filmmakers made films on 16mm, which was still quite expensive, but filmmakers in Nagoya, working collectively on each other's projects, could make films for next to nothing. I'm not saying these were great works of art, but they were a training ground for many filmmakers, including myself. I ended up working on several films by other directors, as an actor, doing lighting, and even catering. It ended up being my film school.

I started making my own films a year after coming to Japan but I wasn't completely committed to the idea of becoming a Japanese director until much later. I think that came with my first feature film, Firefly Dreams, which I made in Nagoya and Horaicho in 1999, eleven years after arriving.

Sophia University hired me in 2001 and I teach in the Department of English Studies in the Faculty of Foreign Studies, where I where most of my classes are film-related. These include a practical class where students write screenplays in the spring semester and film them in the autumn semester and more recently some classes in Film Theory and European Cinema.

Some students and graduates, especially those who are taking or have taken my classes, are involved in the production of The Proceedings, and one of them appears in it as an actress. Many of my colleagues and other staff have donated to the film too and the support I have received from the whole university is very encouraging, creating an environment where it's easy much easier to make the film.

Recent technology has made it easier than ever to make films. This is liberating in many ways. It means that the old "closed shop" world of the film industry is breaking down, but it's also a problem because films can be made so quickly and this isn't always good. The classic films, the ones I still really love, were works of many people working together as craftspeople and artists. I think you can see the work in these films and that is what makes them still watchable after 30 or 50 or even 100 years. Even if the budget is small or the shoot is short I'm still interested in trying to make that kind of cinema.