Lust of Angels: An Interview With Nagisa Isogai

Written by Hayley Scanlon on 26 Nov 2014

With both her debut student film My Baby and her first short Lust of Angels included in the Third Window Films New Directors From Japan Box Set, we sat down with promising new filmmaker Nagisa Isogai to talk a little about her career so far prior to the premier of Lust of Angels at the 2014 Raindance Film Festival

Is this your first time in London, how are your finding it so far? 

Nagisa Isogai: Yes, I’m enjoying it so much.

Lust of Angels is only your second film so far after My Baby, how did you get into filmmaking - was that something you always wanted to do?

Nagisa Isogai: I didn’t start out to be a film director, I was just working in an office after I graduated university. While I was working as an office lady, I started going to evening classes at a film school and that’s how I started really. To be really I honest I wanted to work in distribution first of all and applied for a few jobs but didn’t get them. I thought maybe this is the end of my career working in the film industry but I didn’t want to end there, that’s why I started thinking ‘why don’t I direct’ so that’s how it came about really.

My Baby is quite a crazy story - how did you come up with the scenario? 

Nagisa Isogai: My Baby is a movie about two sisters and I have a younger sister myself. It’s not a true story, but it could have been because I had a slightly similar situation. I felt like my sister was always ‘better’, I felt a kind of rivalry with her. I had a complex, if things became worse something like that could have happened. It probably wouldn’t have happened but the film is sort of an exaggeration of the relationship between myself and my sister. There’s a line in the film where she says the first memory she has is of the sister being born, she’s already thinking of her sister as a rival as soon as she was born. So it’s kind of half and half reality and exaggeration. 

You mentioned in the interview that’s featured on the DVD that My Baby was a film school project where you had to use 16mm film and non sync sound, I just wondered if the 4:3 framing was also something that was required by the project or a particular choice you made?

Nagisa Isogai: Yes, that was part of the rules too. I love 4:3 anyway, but that was the rule I had to follow. I thought about using 4:3 for Lust of Angels but discussing it with the DP we decided to go with cinemascope. 

The 16mm film, framing and the non sync sound gives it quite a ‘70s quality I just wondered if that was an aesthetic thing you particularly liked? 

Nagisa Isogai: I never thought about it! I guessed Lust of Angels could be a bit ‘70s but I never thought about My Baby. I’m really surprised you said that. Maybe the music? The Composer who made the music in My Baby really liked old movies too, maybe that’s where he got the ideas from. 

That obviously also carried over into Lust of Angels which had some ‘70s exploitation aspects?

Nagisa Isogai: I’m quite influenced by older movies, probably 50% of the movies I watch are new but the rest are really old. I get influences from both ends so maybe that’s why. 

Did you shoot Lust of Angels entirely on digital, it still has that ‘70s effect with the non sync sound etc? 

Nagisa Isogai: Yes, it’s all digital. 

You decided to keep the non sync sound though, why was that?

Nagisa Isogai: It was part of the rules in My Baby, it was just the criteria so I had to follow it but I just really like it! So I intentionally used it in Lust of Angels.