#They compareme to hitler movie#

So we ate more modern food: a lot of frozen and instant food.

But she had to go out to work, instead of my father, so she couldn’t find the time to cook nice meals. What food did his mother serve Kore-eda and his sisters? “We used to have prawn tempura: that was my mother’s favourite dish. “In Our Little Sister, food is important: for example, when the women speak about the plum wine and the white fish.” “Details are important in a very small and subtle way,” he says. Is he aware of attaching significance to detail in his films? You would choke!” It’s a sublime aesthetic credo. I mention that my favourite line in his works is said by the amiable slacker dad in I Wish: “Not everything has to be significant. Kore-eda smiles and shakes his head a little: “If you can’t choose, it means that you are still alive. I can’t resist asking about After Life, and how perplexingly difficult I found it to think of a truly “heavenly” memory in which I might want to spend eternity. But I think that my work is more like Mikio Naruse – and Ken Loach.” “I of course take it as a compliment,” he replies carefully. I ask how he reacts to being compared to Yasujiro Ozu. “When he was drunk,” says Kore-eda quietly, “he would always tell us how horrible the Russians were.” About a tenth of them died out there, and they were not all finally released until the early 1950s. Despite this formal capitulation, the Soviets treated captured troops as PoWs rather than civilian internees: Kore-eda Sr was one of approximately 500,000 men sent to labour camps. He lost a lot of time in his 20s, after the war, because he was sent to a forced-labour camp in Siberia.” Kore-eda’s father was a soldier in the Kwantung army in the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria, defeated by Soviet forces in August 1945, a catastrophe for Japan that, almost as much as Hiroshima, hastened the surrender. “My father did not have a lot of security in his life. Kore-eda’s smile is replaced with a sombre expression. But my mother was always very proud of my movies, and would give videocassettes of them to all the neighbours.”Īnd how about his father, I ask. Because that was safe, and it had security. She said that I should be a civil servant. My mother was really against it when I said I wanted to make films. At this idea, Kore-eda laughs and shakes his head.

#They compareme to hitler movie#

I ventured to say that his mother must have been delighted when he told her that he wanted to be a movie director. She stopped all family business or discussions to watch these movies. We couldn’t afford to go together to the cinema, but she was always watching their movies on TV. “My mother loved films! She adored Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Vivien Leigh. Did his parents like cinema? Kore-eda’s eyes light up. I ask about his own family, and his siblings – two older sisters growing up in 60s and 70s Tokyo. From the older generation to the next generation.” Something is missing, so we always try to take over. So I have realised that we always try to get ‘in between’. He goes on to explain that creating and filling gaps is what families are all about: “In the last 15 years, I lost my father, I lost my mother and I have a daughter.

They try to reconstruct that family bond. But someone else is there, trying to take over the role of parents. “It is important to have a story about a family with some family members missing.

“I loved making a story about this,” he replies. I ask Kore-eda about the importance of absences in families: the painful gaps. I have loved Kore-eda’s work since I saw his strange cult movie After Life (1998), about an imaginary place in which we can choose our happiest memory, and live in it for ever after we die. The pathos and poignancy has led Kore-eda to be compared to the great master Yasujiro Ozu.

This is another of the heartfelt, painful “family dramas” in which Kore-eda now seems to specialise – such as the baby-swap film Like Father, Like Son (2013), I Wish (2011), in which two young siblings live apart after their parents’ marital breakdown, Still Walking (2008), in which a family is tormented by the loss of a son killed saving another boy from drowning and, indeed, Nobody Knows (2004), in which a 12-year-old kid has to look after his younger siblings when their mother walks out. It is a drama of sweetness and delicacy derived from the manga Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida, about three adult sisters who have lived together in a house belonging to their grandmother after their parents’ divorce, and who agree to take responsibility for their 13-year-old half-sister after their father’s death. We meet after the premiere of his latest film, Our Little Sister.