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“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
#image_title “Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of Zakkubalan, a production house for which he directed a handful of music videos in the mid-to-late 2010s, before releasing a string of shorts and finally embarking on his feature debut Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023), a concert film of his late father’s final piano performance.
In Happyend, music isn’t a mere ornament or background noise but a living force. For a tale set in a near-future Japan wrestling with two specters—an imminent “once in a century” earthquake and a fascistic government eager to turn the threat into an excuse to tighten its grip on people—the techno tunes heard throughout heighten both the film’s things-fall-apart aura as well as the rebellious vein that thrums through it. “The systems that defined people are crumbling,” a title card warns at the start; while the PM’s “security first” dogma is used to sugarcoat harsh security measures and quell dissenting voices, Sora trains his camera on a couple of high school classmates, best friends and techno enthusiasts: Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka). Happyend, in its simplest terms, tracks the teenage boys as they reconsider their place in an increasingly authoritarian world, which is to say it charts their political awakening. After their umpteenth prank, the school’s principal sets up a state-of-the-art CCTV device, “Panopty,” designed to monitor pupils and flag the most innocent interactions as punishable offenses. Debates, protests and sit-ins ensue, with Yuta and Kou slowly waking up to the fact that there’s a lot more to life than music, that being a member of society comes with its share of duties, that rules need not be followed if they’re laid out solely to coerce and punish.
All of this to say that Happyend routinely swells into a film-symposium, dogging Yuta, Kou and a few others as they discuss what is to be done—about the principal’s draconian rule, his Foucauldian new toy and their own role within a growingly militarized society. That these long conversations never slip into speechifying or grandstanding is nothing short of remarkable, as is the way Sora’s script steers clear of clichés and stereotypes. Even the most portentous lines bristle with genuine urgency. It’s their own future these teens are debating; there’s nothing abstract or stilted about their exchanges, which accounts for Happyend’s untimely and uplifting spirit. Concerned as it is with an Orwellian future where high tech is deployed to tyrannical ends, Sora’s film also shows an unwavering faith in the power of words to avert those dystopias. We have wrought this world, and we will now have to imagine it anew, together.
Back in Venice, where Happyend premiered in the Orizzonti sidebar before crossing the Atlantic to screen at NYFF, I sat with Sora to discuss the film’s genesis, what he learned from Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s approach to directing actors, the permeability of his fictional Tokyo—and, yes, music.
Filmmaker: As a way into Happyend as well as your creative process, I was curious to hear if there was one specific image out of which the whole film spilled, so to speak.
Sora: Two boys carrying a big subwoofer through a megalopolis. That’s the image that stayed from the very beginning and never changed. I had the same experience, and once had to carry some big subwoofers myself. They’re really heavy—you can’t make it on your own. So, I was imagining two people carrying a burden that was both literal and metaphorical, and that image never left. The first draft of the script was completely different from what’s in the film except for that one scene. Growing up, I had this big group of friends and remember two of them, who were tall and always walked very fast—much, much faster than me. I really admired their humor and everything else about them. But anytime we’d hang out I’d always watch them from the back. Those two guys, and the image I have of them walking ahead of me, has always stayed with me for some reason.
Filmmaker: Friendship plays a cardinal role in Happyend, yet you pit your two leads’ tempestuous bromance against a growingly authoritarian political backdrop. How and when did you decide to weave the two threads together?
Sora: The starting point was always my experiences of high school and university. So much of who I am right now is in large part a result of my interactions with a really tight group of high school friends I used to hang out and play with. I just have a profound love of my friends; I think friendship is a beautiful thing that doesn’t abide by the same norms and rules that marriage or family must follow. That was a big part of the impetus behind the film.
The other thing was the political consciousness I developed at university, where I met and made other friends. I became more aware of certain structures around me; as those convictions grew, I began to distance myself from certain people. Sometimes it was the other way around, too—some extremely dear friends would develop their own politics and suddenly I was no longer included in their ideological worldview. I fully understood why; I had my reasons for cutting them off, they had theirs. But it’s still a big tragedy, right? It feels like the earth is crumbling underneath your feet. That’s what I wanted to capture: this love and nostalgia for my high school friends, on the one hand, and the devastating feeling of splitting off, on the other, which can often be worse than breaking up with a romantic partner.
As my politics grew, so did my interest in Japanese history, and I became obsessed with this one incident that took place on September 1, 1923: the Great Kanto earthquake, which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Koreans, a genocide perpetrated by ordinary Japanese people. Bear in mind that Korea was under Japanese rule at the time, which means there were lots of Korean laborers who were living and working in Japan, as well as independence movements within occupied Korea. Because of this, anti-Korean sentiment had long been growing among Japanese and the government was bracing for something to happen. So, when the earthquake struck, devastating Tokyo and other cities, authorities circulated rumors that Koreans were going around stealing, raping and poisoning the wells. Vigilante units were created to “protect” Japanese people, while all they did in fact was ask people to pronounce words—if they couldn’t, they’d be killed on the spot. Koreans were murdered, but also lots of Chinese, disabled people, Japanese from outside Tokyo. How could this happen? The more I looked into the massacre the more I felt disturbed, because there were many things happening around me at the time that seemed to echo those years. Hate speech protests were growing, and there seemed to be a broader attempt to erase that chapter of Japanese history. They always tell you that within the next several decades there’ll be a new earthquake as big as the one from a hundred years ago. It can happen again. That’s what gave me this sense of urgency, and the idea to fuse these two things: my friendships, but also this political backdrop.
Filmmaker: Even as you single out two boys, this remains a very choral portrait. And in a film that teems with fiery debates, I was surprised by how none of these ever veered into speechifying. How did you go about writing so many different voices, and how did you ensure these conversations would remain so vibrant?
Sora: Thank you for saying that. I must confess that was one of the things I was worried about the most, especially with regards to the authority figures in the film. There were moments when I felt those were coming across as caricatures. But the writing process took so long—I started writing this seven years ago!—and the duration helped make each character stand on their own. At first I was influenced by my friends and tried to distribute some of their traits to these characters. But that would just make them symbols or stand-ins for real-life people, and I really wanted the characters to develop a life of their own on the page. The time it took to finish the script was what allowed for that. The other thing that helped breathe life into these characters were the actors, of course. I was extremely lucky with the casting, because I managed to find actors who closely embodied each of these characters. They were very instinctive, too, and all got along together. Which I think is pretty rare. As for the principles by which I directed them, I borrowed the Meisner idea of acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” And because the actors were very similar to these characters, I asked them to live as they would live, to borrow from their lives as well.
Filmmaker: For a film set in a “near future,” there’s something almost anachronistic about Happyend’s belief in the power of words to overcome and avoid crises. Yes, things are falling apart, but we can still find a way out so long as we sit down and talk.
Sora: Interesting. That’s a perspective I hadn’t really heard before. But yeah, as you may have realized by now, I’m a leftist—and writing all those conversations and debates was something I really struggled with. I’m not sure if you’ve ever overheard leftists debate, but… it can be quite boring. Hardly cinematic! [laughs] I’d written earlier drafts of the script and some of the most talk-heavy scenes, like the moment when students and teachers talk about politics at the restaurant, or the sit-in, later in the film, where they debate and demand things. But none of it worked. It was all just really boring, too on the nose. I was like, I can’t do realism here—I have to find a way to put all of this into the subtext. So much of Happyend is about the joy of discovering a community, or how to represent conflicts through something that’s not just words. There are words, and there’s the subtext behind them. That was really important. I believe we all, in theory, possess the communication skills and intellect required to avoid genocides and massacres and crises and authoritarian regimes—we just don’t use them as often as we should. But to completely lose faith in that ability, that’s an ironic distance that I prefer not to have. I’d much rather be sincere.
Filmmaker: I noticed Ryusuke Hamaguchi acknowledged in the “thanks” section. What was the connection there? Did he see previous cuts of the film?
Sora: One of our producers, Aiko Masubuchi, previously served as Hamaguchi’s interpreter. I’d seen so many of his films, and once I finished casting and realized that four of the five kids we’d work with were not professional actors, I thought back to his Happy Hour, which also featured plenty of non-professionals. I just wasn’t that experienced in directing actors, and really wanted to get advice from somebody. So I called him—we had this connection, and had had dinner before—and went, “look, I cast these non-professional actors, and don’t quite know what to do.” He very graciously gave me a few hours of his time and told me how he did it, and I applied some of that. I basically just followed Hamaguchi’s principles of acting, which is to draw out moments of truthfulness through the text being read by the actors. Which means we kind of did the Drive My Car thing: we would read the script all together without any emotion or inflection. That formed the basis of the acting.
Filmmaker: You and Hamaguchi also seem to share a similar interest in the collective; both Happyend and his films (from Happy Hour to Evil Does Not Exist) suggest that change and artistic creation can only be brought about by the many. I was wondering if you think this speaks to a larger paradigm shift in Japanese cinema—if filmmakers today are less concerned with individual perspectives than they might have been in the past, and more open instead to horizontal, collective narratives and POVs.
Sora: I think there are many Japanese directors who may not be as widely known or seen abroad but are very sincere and concerned with this collective spirit you mention. The Kamagasaki Cauldron War, by Leo Sato, is just one recent and great example. But there are several other films that try to move beyond individualism and embrace communities instead. Maybe in the past there was a generation of filmmakers that tried to champion individualism in response to this perceived homogeneity or conformity that exists in Japan. I’m not sure how that stereotype holds up if we were to scrutinize it. But there might have been directors who responded to that. Just like there are filmmakers today who are responding to this neoliberal hell world that we live in. We can’t go on like this anymore; what we need is mutual aid and more sustainable, communal ways of living. Maybe those are some of the things you were picking up on, but I’m not sure I was ever conscious about them as I was writing and directing the film.
Filmmaker: I was also quite stunned by how porous Happyend is. Tokyo itself is very permeable and receptive to outside influences, faces, looks, and sounds. Your cast is very diverse, but so is the music they listen to. In more ways than one, this feels like a global film.
Sora: I think the idea that Japan is an insular or homogenous nation is a myth that the country has long tried to stoke and spread abroad. I strongly believe that it came as a result of the modernization of the Japanese nation state, which went hand in hand with an effort to foster this idea of Japanese-ness. It’s all an illusion, of course; there was no such thing as a “homogenous” Japan in the past and there’s no such thing now. But it was a fantasy that helped to maintain a kind of unity of the nation. Just like you have Ainu people in the North and Ryukyuan people in the South of the country, you also have Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese people—not to mention the divisions between Tokyoites and people from other parts of the country. There are so many different groups and cultures and dialects that you might as well consider them different countries. The myth of a single, homogenous Japan was something I really wanted to dispel. Not least because it’s just so out of touch with how the country really is; my own neighborhood in Tokyo is just super diverse, but I fear that this is a side of Japan that doesn’t really get to be shown a lot in the press or films. And as a way of portraying this near-future world in which Japan will be presumably even more diverse, I wanted to show the country in a way that was close to what I experienced growing up in New York—but I didn’t want it to come across as forced, or for it to draw attention to itself. I just wanted for it to feel like it was just the most natural thing in the world. It was very intentional on my part though; I really wanted to push back against this illusion of Japanese-ness.
Filmmaker: I’m happy to hear you bring up your New York childhood; I was wondering if you think that being brought up in a different world influenced the visual language with which you approached Tokyo here.
Sora: Well, I am a product of my influences—and one of the biggest is Taiwanese cinema. Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang… The way they compose spaces and cities. Those are the films I just love the most. On the other hand, I also really like more classical Hollywood cinema, like Ernst Lubitsch and the like. It’s hard to hide those things sometimes. As for the cinematography, I think it’s less about the cultural upbringing that I brought to Japanese cinema, and more about how I tried to uniquely use cinematography and the music to capture the film that I wanted to make. One of the key concepts that I discussed with my team was how to make the film as if its protagonists, Yuta and Kou, were remembering their own high school life from the future. What things would they recall? And where would the camera be placed? What would it look at, and how could it soak up these memories? I think that’s what gives you the anachronistic quality you described… In a way, the film is quite nostalgic, and that’s something we really worked on: how to tell the story so that it would follow the perspective of someone remembering their high school years.
Filmmaker: And yet you still offset that nostalgia with these high-angle, CCTV-like shots. It’s as if the film’s concerns with surveillance permeated its aesthetic.
Sora: Yeah. I mean, there are different approaches. Mostly we thought about memory and where the camera would be in our recollections of those days. But then, once we turn to the machine eye of the surveillance cameras, the perspective just becomes this extremely cold shot, because that’s just what was watching them. I also think that sometimes memory isn’t accurate to your perspective; sometimes you remember things from a completely different angle and see yourself in your own memories. Those ideas also made their way into the shots’ composition.
Filmmaker: Can we talk about the music? What informed your choices for the score you assembled here? You toggle from techno to electronic to ambient music in a way that feels so harmonious.
Sora: Ah, man, I could talk about this forever. I love techno and electronic music. I also love film scores that are big and melodic and memorable. In Happyend, the score was designed to capture our emotional perspective—the perspective of storytellers remembering their high school. Sometimes it’s tragic, sometimes it’s melancholic, others romantic. When you are remembering a happy moment in your childhood but you’re aware that it would eventually end, that happy moment has a melancholic tinge to it, right? That emotion was what we tried to evoke through the music. As for the techno, I just love it. I think sometimes when you’re in a club listening to really great deep house or deep techno, you can feel like you’re in a womb, protected from everything—just listening to the beat. That also felt in line with Yuta’s character: a child protected from everything. At the same time, it really worked well with the earthquakes theme, where everything is shaking, the way the subwoofers can shake a building. And in terms of the ambient music, I love it because—I mean, I love music in general, but something I’ve come to learn about myself is that I am not a linguistic person. I have acquired language to be able to explain or express certain things, but usually in my mind I think in terms of these ambient feelings I have. That’s why I think that listening to ambient music or other non-verbal types of music sometimes captures what I know or feel much more accurately than if I were to write or make an image about it.
Filmmaker: Were you listening to some of these tracks as you were writing the script? I’m asking because were moments Happyend seemed to emerge from the music, so strong was the connection between sounds and visuals.
Sora: Definitely. And I’m very happy I was able to work with the original score’s composer, Lia Ouyang Rusli, who’s classically trained but is also a techno artist and does ambient music and everything in between. My whole breadth of musical inspiration coincided with theirs, which is why we worked so well together. Some of the artists I was writing to before we met include people like Dedekind Cut, who does ambient as well as more electronic and experimental music, and others like him. It’s impossible to describe with words the sensations these songs give you. It’s just this ineffable feeling of nostalgia and melancholia, though sometimes they can also be really quite dystopic. I just love them—that’s why I keep going back to them.
