Comedy's a Punny Business - Kosuke Takaya

Written by Hayley Scanlon on 17 Jun 2015

With his debut short featured in Third Window Films' New Directors from Japan box set, we sat down with director Kosuke Takaya at the Raindance Film Festival to discuss his career to date.

Is this your first visit to London?

Kosuke Takaya: Yes, it’s my first time. I really wanted to come here!

Are you enjoying "the land of Monty Python and punk" as you termed it in the interview from the DVD?

Kosuke Takaya: Yes, absolutely. I’m enjoying it so much!

You’ve had a slightly unorthodox route into filmmaking as you started working at the North Kyushu Film Commission; had you always wanted to make films for yourself?

Kosuke Takaya: When I was in university (just a regular college not a film school) I was already making independent movies and I was just so interested in films, so when I graduated university there was a chance of working at the Film Commission so I just grabbed the opportunity.

Buy Bling Get One Free is part of the VIPO New Directions in Japanese Cinema programme, which chooses five new directors and gives them resources to make a 30 minute film on 35mm, could you talk a little about how you became involved with the programme and your experiences of it?

Kosuke Takaya: Firstly, I left the Film Commission but my film wasn’t actually picked to begin with. So the next year I submitted something again and got through, but by then I’d already left Kyushu and moved to Tokyo to be a film director.

Do you think it was a helpful experience to work on 35mm given than your future work will probably be entirely digital?

Kosuke Takaya: I don’t think we’ll be able to use 35mm in Japan anymore, it’s impossible, but having the opportunity to use 35mm was just an unbelievable experience. Nobody these days can use 35mm to shoot a movie so this was just an amazing one-off experience. It was tense, there were about 50 crew, using 35mm there’s just no comparison - with digital you can just keep pressing buttons but with 35mm everyone is really silent, the film is rolling. There is so much tension you can’t really experience with other kinds of filmmaking. The editor is a really famous guy in Japan, Miajima, and while we were filming he was physically rolling the film by hand - I’ll never be able to see anything like that again! When it came to editing he had to physically cut the film - I’ll never see that again either, it was such an amazing experience to see him doing it manually. These days you can just push CTRL+Z and do it again, which is a really convenient and amazing thing but we don’t have the same kind of tension as when you’re using 35mm.

As this is your first short, did you find it helpful to work with an already experienced crew or was that quite intimidating for you, how would you have felt about making a film entirely on your own?

Kosuke Takaya: It was really intimidating to begin with, but I had the opportunity to work with these masters, these really experienced people. So I thought if I’m working with them, it’s a waste if I don’t ask them questions so I was just really inquisitive and asking them lots of questions. If I wasn’t sure about something I could always ask their opinions. I worked with them a lot, I learnt a lot from them as well.

How much contact did you have with the other successful applicants, did you get together as a group or were you all just working separately on your own individual projects?  

Kosuke Takaya: I think it was deliberately completely isolated. We had different production crews attached to one project each, and we were completely separated individually. We started shooting in the November, all at the same time, then we only really met at the final screenings at the end of the project. The screening was in alphabetical order, so you have no choice what number you are but you kind of want to know what the other people were doing so there are all these rumours - what kind of titles and that kind of thing. We were all really passionate about filmmaking and wanted to make our debuts as directors so we were all really curious about what everyone’s doing, it’s a natural thing, I guess.  

Have you seen all of the finished films so far?  

Kosuke Takaya: Yes, of course. 

Was everyone happy with the way their films turned out?

Kosuke Takaya: It all depends. We’re all budding filmmakers, first time directors. I guess we all felt differently. At the start it’s the same but I guess we all felt differently at the end. One person said they preferred making independent movies than this kind of filmmaking. I’d like to make more movies like this though; I wish I could use the same crew. It was a dream-like time working with such an experienced crew, I wish I could have that experience again.

What sort of impact do you think it’s going to have on your career in the future, do you think it’s going to make things easier for you?

Kosuke Takaya: I don’t know - the start was such good quality it just means I’ve set the bar so much higher, it’s going to be harder to match the same standard from then on. In an independent movie you just make the movie by yourself but here I learnt that the quality is more important than just simply making something. You have to have a filmic quality good enough to show to people. This is my level now, so starting from there is going to be hard...