Wim Wenders can be happy: For “Perfect Days” he received his first Oscar nomination for “best international film” (Japan). He was previously unsuccessfully nominated for the documentary Oscar three times. Read our portrait from issue 12/23 here. At that point, Wenders couldn’t have known anything about his impending happiness (but he hoped so).
It has been over forty years since Wim Wenders traveled to Tokyo for the first time. At that time he wanted to follow in the footsteps of director Yasujiro Ozu, who died in 1963, for his film “Tokyo-Ga”, whose quiet family dramas, which he directed from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, were a reflection of Japanese society. But the first confrontation with the megacity of the 80s was a shock for Wenders. It took many more visits to find the Japan Ozus behind the flashing and traffic-busting facade. Now he shows it to us in his new film.
“Perfect Days” tells the story of a man past sixty. Hirayama, named after the main character in Ozu’s last film, An Autumn Afternoon, has left behind an existence riddled with suffering and darkness to lead a ritualized, simple and happy life as a public toilet cleaner in the Japanese capital. He collects cassettes of the music of his youth, photographs the sunlight shining through the foliage of trees (there’s a word for it in Japan: komorebi), raises seedlings in his spartan apartment and reads books by William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith and Koda Aya. Wenders follows him with an empathetic look that shows more than just one man’s life: He shows the individual as part of a large social organism that can only flourish through the mindfulness and solidarity of each individual. “Perfect Days” is the film of an old master that teaches us as viewers how to see and interact with one another in a new way.
“Perfect Days” is in the running for the foreign Oscar for Japan. Does that mean something to you?
That’s pretty extraordinary. I also recently won the Film Art Theater Guild Prize in Leipzig. This has happened to me a few times in my life, but only for my German films. This time it was for the best foreign film. That was a completely new attitude to life: I’m coming back as a foreigner.
A stranger in his own land. And a confidant in a foreign land. You are the first non-Japanese director ever to be nominated for an Oscar by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan.
This can of course be explained by the fact that my main actor Koji Yakusho is a big hero in Japan, who received international recognition for the first time with the Actor Prize in Cannes, which made the whole of Japan very happy about it. They even repeated the award ceremony several times on television. And when he came home from Cannes, there were a thousand people at the airport to welcome him. So I think I owe the film’s nomination to this fact.
What else makes the film a Japanese film – apart from the producer, lead actor and location?
The attitude with which it was told. We weren’t trying to make a film about this man named Hirayama, but with him. And we internalized a lot of what he represents in the film. His attention to detail. Or its minimalism. Reduction was a big theme for the film. We only shot the whole thing from Franz Lustig’s shoulder. No rails, no dolly, no gimbal, no Steadicam, no crane, no nothing. Just the shoulder of a Breisgauer.
Not only are the resources reduced, so is the view of the film and that of the main character.
Correct. I had to avoid making a tourist film. This can happen very quickly. The first time I filmed there, in 1982, “Tokyo-Ga” was a film about a visitor to Japan. Back then, Tokyo was still a bit science fiction for me. And I was following in the footsteps of my great master, the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, who had died twenty years earlier. And that’s when I noticed everything that every German tourist notices for the first time. That was exactly forty years ago, and now I knew Japan in a different way and wanted to tell a story that was also about Japanese virtues, that is, the strong sense of the common good and attention to the little things. These are both very Japanese. And both are important to me. That means that in many ways I thought about Japan in the film and put myself in it. And because no one else from Germany was there during the filming apart from Franz, my wife and me, we were completely surrounded by Japanese people. And our main actor was of course Japan itself. An actor is much more in the eye of the viewer than direction, resolution, music or lighting and what do I know.
What changed your image of Japan after you were there for the first time in 1982?
“Tokyo-Ga” acted as if it were following up on a work by Ozu twenty years later and continuing his meticulous recording of all the changes in Tokyo and Japanese society into present-day Japan. For the film we also tracked down the actor who actually starred in all Ozu films over 35 years – except for one where he was ill – Ryu Chishu. He gave us a long interview for the film. Later I also did “To the End of the World” with him, where he played a great role. I learned a lot about Japan from him and from Ozu’s long-time cinematographer, Yuharu Atsuta. Also about reduction. Atsuta showed us how they made the films. He also gave me a big gift.
What kind of gift was that?
In “Tokyo-Ga” he shows us, among other things, this crazy optical instrument that Ozu always used to search for motifs, through which he looked to find his motifs. He had this specially built, a small mechanical device that wasn’t all that complicated. I had never seen anything like that before. A small tube where you can adjust the focal length and also the format of the film. And then you could look through it and see the setting correctly. Yuharu Atsuta died later that same year. And a year later I received a package from Tokyo with a letter from a lawyer inside saying that Yuharu Atsuta’s will had expressly stated that one of his assets was to be passed on to me. And that was this subject finder! This is a small sanctuary that now has its special place in my study.
But you’ve never used it yourself?
This was too valuable for me to use as a commodity. In addition, it is actually much easier today to see your setting through the lens you are using than through an optical device that only roughly reproduces the subject. The most present motifs in this film, which is so influenced by Japanese culture, are – apart from the face of your main character – toilets. What makes the toilet a Japanese place? In a toilet you are inherently alone. At least, in the best case scenario, you like to be alone there. The toilets, where you are not alone, are unpleasant experiences. As a child or boy scout, I experienced sitting on a beam like this with several people. If you’re lucky, the toilet is clean and there’s a pleasant light. And if you’re even luckier, you’ll come to your senses for a moment. That’s why the beautiful German word ‘quiet place’ is also a word of longing. You would really like it to be the quiet place. Most of the time it isn’t.
Your friend Peter Handke wrote in “Experiment on the Quiet Place” that it was only in the Nara temple toilet that he became at home in Japanese culture.
I have to tell him that you told me that because I hardly know anyone who knows the booklet. “Still” has many word meanings. It means both “calm” and that you come to yourself. So in the broadest interpretation it is also a meditative place. And that’s what it is in Japan much more than here, that is: the quality of the toilet as something where you can be completely with yourself for a moment, not only because you want to do some business, but also because there is a lot going on around it and you are in a big city or come from the hectic office and then suddenly there is peace in the box. And in our Japanese toilets, for example, this is achieved simply by not sitting on a cold seat. It’s actually heated! That can definitely be a real feeling of happiness. And you don’t use damn paper. Instead, there is a small shower where you can adjust the intensity and temperature. Once you get used to it, you can feel really well looked after and cared for in a toilet like this. In our country the word “necessity” quickly comes into play – in Japan it is roughly the opposite.