No director can dramatise the inner lives of children quite like Hirokazu Kore-eda can. Nobody Knows, the Japanese film-maker’s indelible take on the Sugamo child-abandonment case, from 2004, saw 12-year-old Yuya Yagira become the youngest winner of the best-actor award at Cannes film festival. Like Father, Like Son, from 2013, told the story of two six-year-old boys mistakenly switched at birth and their parents’ attempts to swap them back. In the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, from 2018, the impoverished pilferers of the title adopt an abused young girl.
“What I felt was that problems in society affect the weakest in society the most,” Kore-eda says about Nobody Knows. “In that case it was the children and their mother. I wanted to place a camera inside that flat to see how they lived and how they felt. It was like having a small window on the world. And that’s what I’ve carried on doing: showing the world through these small windows, which are the eyes of children, which I think offer a clearer view of the world than the eyes of adults.”
Monster, the auteur’s 16th feature, simultaneously feels familiar and strikingly original. Adopting the triptych structure of Rashomon, Monster presents competing perspectives. Unlike Akira Kurosawa’s film, we are not presented with contradictory accounts; only differing contexts.
The film concerns a boy named Minato, whose widowed mother feels that he has begun to act differently and that something must be terribly wrong. When she learns that Mr Hori, Minato’s teacher, has called him “pig brain”, she goes to the school to demand justice. After much bowing and ritualised apology, the teacher claims that Minato is, in fact, a bully. Flashbacks from Hori’s point of view are finally eclipsed by the third act, retelling the story from Minato’s perspective. The titular beast, we learn, is anything that falls outside what the children perceive as normal behaviour.
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This is Kore-eda’s first film since Maborosi, from 1995, that he did not write himself. Monster was instead scripted by Yuji Sakamoto, the writer of several acclaimed Japanese TV series and Real Sound: Kaze no Regret, the groundbreaking 1997 sound-based computer game designed for the visually impaired.
“When I first read the story the three-part structure with the mother, and then the teacher and the children’s point of view, was already in place”, says Kore-eda, who had hoped to start filming in 2019. “The bones of the story haven’t changed. The climactic scene in the music room with the head teacher and the boy giving voice to the feelings that they can’t speak of by playing those instruments was already there. But It did change quite a bit. There was an early version that featured a rescue and another that ended with a dream scene. There were a lot of revisions until right before we started filming. And there were also a lot of scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor.”
Monster derives much of its dramatic impact from its score, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final composition before his death, in March 2023. The composer of the iconic film music for The Last Emperor, The Revenant and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence was too ill to compose a full-length work, but he contributed music for two sequences in the film, including the nail-biting final scene. Sakamoto also gave the director access to the music from his final solo album, 12. Monster is dedicated to his memory.
“About 15 years ago I approached Ryuichi Sakamoto about working together on a film,” Kore-eda says. “The film itself fell through in the end, but I told him that I wanted to work with him one day, and it finally happened. When I saw the lake in the town that we filmed in I knew. I went up the hill at night. It was dark and looked down on the town. And there was this black lake surrounded by the lights of the town. It was a strange sensation. It felt like I was looking at a black hole in the sky.
“I started thinking about Sakamoto’s piano music. I instinctively knew that this was how the film was going to start, with this black hole and his music. I couldn’t imagine it with any other music. During the edit I was using three of his earlier songs as temp music, and I also got permission to use those in the film.”
Kore-eda typically workshops his humanist, child-centric dramas extensively. His sweet 2013 drama, I Wish, in which a group of children come to believe that when the bullet-train line comes to their town the resulting energy surge from the passing trains will be magical enough to grant wishes to all who witness the event, was not scripted until the director cast and observed the interactions between the real-life brothers Koki and Oshiro Maeda. Monster’s LGBTQ themes required a radically different approach. The two young leads, Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi, were taught about LGBTQ identity, and the film-makers consulted with queer organisations and LGBTQ parent groups.
“This time was different,” says the director. “I always do a lot of research before I make a film. In this case, I visited a lot of schools and talked to teachers.
I’ve been grateful for the recognition I’ve received from Cannes over the course of my career. But for me it’s not just about that
“Normally, I try to write the child characters as close as possible to the personalities of the child actors that are playing them. I use vocabulary that they are familiar with. And then I write it as we film, so they don’t get to see the description or plot in advance. I explain it to them as we go along. I didn’t think that would be the way to go and thought that would be difficult. So I worked with the children to create the characters together.
“We read the scripts and discussed how the character would be feeling and we had a rehearsal process. There’s a scene, for example, that mentions an erection. And so we got a school nurse to talk about the changes that the body goes through. And throughout the filming there was the intimacy co-ordinator, who was a source of reassurance for everybody, including myself and the children.”
At 61, Kore-eda has never been in more demand. The Truth, his first European film, starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke, debuted in 2019. He subsequently directed Broker, a characteristically sensitive feature based on the baby-box phenomenon, which allows struggling mothers to give up their children for adoption anonymously. Last year he served as director, writer and showrunner on the Netflix series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.
“It doesn’t matter if it comes from Japan or elsewhere,” he says. “I never know how my films will be welcomed. I always ask questions and check with people. But I always have my doubts about how a work will be perceived.”
Last year, when Monster premiered at Cannes, Kore-eda became the most selected Japanese film-maker in the history of the festival, and the recipient of his third major prize there.
“When you win awards at Cannes, it does impact the box office in Japan,” he says. “I’ve been grateful for the recognition I’ve received from Cannes over the course of my career. But for me it’s not just about that. You receive a lot of praise. You also receive criticism sometimes. In the early days that might have affected me. But after 30 years, rather than winning the award or not winning the awards or being liked or not liked, it’s more about spending that time with film-makers from around the world, and having a sense of being connected to the history of film.
“Cannes will probably still be going there for the next 100 years and more. And I’m part of that. It’s a very enriching experience. It gives me the energy that I need for my next project, and it always encourages me to take another look at myself as a film-maker.”
Monster is in cinemas from Friday, March 15th
