Mongrel Media Presents NORWEGIAN WOOD A Film by Anh Hung Tran (133 min., Japan, 2011) Language: Japanese with English Subtitles Distribution Publicity Bonne Smith 1028 Queen Street West Star PR Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6J 1H6 Tel: 416-488-4436 Tel: 416-516-9775 Fax: 416-516-0651 Fax: 416-488-8438 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] www.mongrelmedia.com High res stills may be downloaded from http://www.mongrelmedia.com/press.html SYNOPSIS Published in 1987 and since translated into 33 languages, NORWEGIAN WOOD is a story of loss and heartbreak in a time of global instability. Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel is brought to the screen by Tran Anh Hung (Golden Lion winner for CYCLO and Academy Award nominee for THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA) and features Japanese rising star Kenichi Matsuyama (DEATH NOTE, DETROIT METAL CITY) and Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi (BABEL) alongside newcomer Kiko Mizuhara. Tokyo, the late 1960s…Students around the world are uniting to overthrow the establishment and Toru Watanabe’s personal life is similarly in tumult. At heart, he is deeply devoted to his first love, Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their complex bond has been forged by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Watanabe lives with the influence of death everywhere. That is, until Midori, a girl who is everything that Naoko is not – outgoing, vivacious, supremely self- confident – marches into his life and Watanabe must choose between his past and his future. ABOUT THE NOVEL A nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, NORWEGIAN WOOD’s protagonist Watanabe looks back on his days as a freshman university student living in Tokyo. Through his reminiscences, we see him develop relationships with two very different women — the beautiful yet emotionally troubled Naoko, and the outgoing, lively Midori. The novel is set in Tokyo during the late 1960s, a time when Japanese students, like those of many other nations, were protesting against the established order. While it serves as the backdrop against which the events of the novel unfold, Murakami emphasizes that NORWEGIAN WOOD is purely a love story. “This is a love story. I know this is a very stale way to call it, but I can't think of any other appropriate words,” says Murakami in the postscript of the first edition of NORWEGIAN WOOD. The upwards of 10 million copies sold in Japan is a testament to how popular the novel is with Japanese readers, while the 2.6 million copies sold overseas is indicative of its international appeal. To date, NORWEGIAN WOOD has been published in 36 countries and translated in 33 languages, including English, Icelandic, Arabian, Italian, Estonian, Dutch, Cataluna, Greek, Croatian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovene, Serb, Czech, Danish, German, Turkish, Norwegian, Hungarian, French, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Rumanian, Russian, Chinese (Simplified, Chinese (Traditional), Korean, Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese. 3 DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT "To me, NORWEGIAN WOOD is at its heart, a story about many of the various things in life that everyone has to pass through, such as the unfilled desire of youth, radical protests, the choice of life or death, the process of growing up, and so on. The original novel is so powerful and sensitive; it has a chaos of violence and elegance, and is filled with sensuality and poetry. It contains a wide variety of themes that lend themselves to a film adaptation. I believe that my instinct to adapt this work into a film will lead to another due recognition of how wonderful and abundant the original novel was." -- Tran Anh Hung 4 INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR - TRAN ANH HUNG How did you encounter the book and what was the process of developing the film? I read the French edition, several years after it was published in Japan. I was immediately captivated and wanted to film it. But because I couldn’t get positive responses to my proposal, I had almost given up when producer Shinji Ogawa contacted me. He and I began thorough discussions about the direction of the film adaptation. When we met Haruki Murakami, he asked us to show him the first draft of the screenplay. I finished the first draft and showed it to Haruki, who gave me many notes, including additional dialogue not included in his original book. I wrote the second draft based on his notes and after that, I was free to revise the screenplay as I wanted. I believe Haruki felt I had grasped the essence of his book and we were able to finish the film. What about the book captivated you? Norwegian Wood is a fantastic novel that brilliantly portrays the radical inner lives of youth, through the character’s personal experiences. The book depicts young people, seeking to define their lives and accepting the consequences as they fall in love and honestly confront their emotions. As Haruki himself has said, this leads the characters into dangerous territory. Yet, it was this aching yearning of youth that intrigued me. Another factor is the sensuality. Because everything is structured around the sexual lives of the characters, I knew that visually, I would need to strike the right balance for the audience to experience the sex as more than simple pleasure, without descending into vulgarity. What was your greatest challenge in writing the screenplay? The novel begins with a plane landing at Hamburg Airport. The story is told in a nostalgic voice, looking back at the past, but I wanted to recreate the raw painfulness of fresh wounds. That’s why I wrote the screenplay in the present tense. That was the hardest decision to make. Did you plan from the beginning to cast Japanese actors and film in Japan? It was never an option for me to work with anyone other than Japanese actors or shoot outside Japan, because I love the uniquely Japanese culture and sensibility palpable in the novel. Of course, it was a challenge to direct actors speaking Japanese, but my producer, Ogawa, provided invaluable support. 5 What were your casting criteria? For me, casting is always about the personality of the actor. Especially for someone who has never acted before, what is critical is how much the actor fits the worldview of the film and how suitable the actor is to the character. The next step is to discern how much acting potential the actor has. Why did you cast Matsuyama Kenichi for the role of Watanabe? When I first saw his photograph, frankly, I wasn’t sure. But I did sense something unique in him so I decided to meet him. The instant I met him, I knew no one else could play Watanabe. This was because of his personality, as I mentioned before. He is able to express his whole personality through sheer presence. A truly wonderful actor. What about Rinko Kikuchi, who plays Naoko? I had seen her in BABEL and didn’t think she was appropriate for the role but she really wanted to audition. When I saw her audition video, I instantly knew she was the one. When I met her for the first time, she gave the impression of a delicate young woman. When I learned later that she had slipped away from filming as a maniacal murderer in MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO and had transformed herself into a girlish presence to meet me, this only confirmed my respect for her as an actress. Why did you cast Kiko Mizuhara as Midori? I had a hard time casting Midori and met many actresses in the audition process, but she instantly captivated me. What people feel seeing her is a sense of absolute warmth. Because warmth is such an essential aspect of Midori, I cast her for the part. How did you overcome language and other cultural barriers shooting in Japan? Even though I don’t speak the language, it’s obvious whether an actor is inhabiting the role in any given scene. I asked the actors to try multiple takes until I was satisfied with their performance. In the most challenging scenes, I asked my producer, Ogawa, his opinion of their intonation before deciding whether to shoot another take. It’s actually a great deal of fun to film a movie in a language you don’t understand. The dialogue sounds just like music that grows increasingly mysterious and fetishistic. 6 What was your greatest challenge in scouting locations? When I scouted locations, I wasn’t looking to recreate scenes from the novel. Instead, I wanted to find places where I could shoot gorgeous images. Because of that, the grassland so pivotal to the novel had to be outstandingly beautiful and that proved difficult. In the novel, Watanabe first visits the grassland in autumn; but because in the location we chose, the grasses grow too tall for the actors to walk through, we needed to adapt the season to when that landscape looked most beautiful. Why did you ask Lee Ping-bin to be your cinematographer? Because his images are so sensual. In a film where sensuality is one of the major themes, this was essential. The level of his artistry is very high, which allows me to create wonderful images. However, I didn’t want the images in this film to be overly beautiful, so we filmed in HD. What I wanted was the kind of beauty appropriate to this film, not beautiful images for their own sake. Shooting in digital, I was able to capture the texture of human skin. HD was also essential to capture its beauty and softness. Why did you ask Jonny Greenwood to score the film? My reason was simple.