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山形県が日本国のツインピークスなのか
IS YAMAGATA JAPAN'S TWIN PEAKS?

The weirdness of my old life in Yamagata, Japan, is that it was sort of like living in Twin Peaks. There was beautiful greenery everywhere to go with the mountains, but one couldn't help but think of the average person on the street as being somewhat strange, very much like how the local characters were depicted in the Twin Peaks television series. Ultimately, the xenophobic people you run into on a daily basis there were far from what I thought was the norm for even an introverted culture like Japan. From a foreigner's point of view (or at least my mine), it was a crazy place, but it gave me many of the ideas that went into this movie. This reminded me of how New York gave Andrew Walker the ideas he had for eventually writing the script SEVEN. He himself said that had he not lived in New York for three years, he wouldn't have been able to write SEVEN. I have to admit, in a similar fashion, had I not also spent 3 and a half years in Yamagata, chances are I would not have been able to write this script, nor make this movie either.


スタニスラフスキーの魔法な「例えば」と言う質問
STANISLAVSKI'S MAGIC "WHAT IF" QUESTION

I suppose at the end it all comes down to what Stanislavski called the magic "What if?" question. In this case it came down to a person I visited a Japanese school with, whom I had known had acted inappropriately with other people in a completely different context. But in this situation this person was being genuinely innocent and friendly with a 5 year old girl in class and the question just popped up in my mind. What if this girl were his daughter and she knew what he had done? What would happen?

This is an interesting point to get into and I have to admit that it has haunted me for over a decade. In fact I don't think I ever really got over it until I filmed one of the final scenes in my movie. Ingmar Bergman once said that for himself writing scripts and making movies was a form of self therapy. I didn't quite believe that was possible until I did it myself.

 

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