To see at the cinema: What great movie inspired the moving Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Innocence?

With four feature films between 2018 and 2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda hasn’t lost any of his prolific side since he won the Palme d’Or five years ago for “Family Affair.” A year after exploring Korea in the glorious The Good Stars (Best Actor Award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival), he returns to his native Japan with innocence. Also on the St. Croisette.

Organized into three chapters and as many points of view, exploring an incident between a teacher and a student, the film won the Queer Palm last May and, above all, the screenplay prize. What many predicted, at least after discovering this moving drama, in which the director follows in the footsteps of master Akira Kurosawa, takes inspiration from the narrative process of Rashomon, which was released in 1950.

Except for one big detail: Where Kurosawa’s film showed the same events from different angles, according to each character’s testimony, each point of view of Innocence (which was dubbed Monster last May) tries to reveal the unwanted. front camera. The plot is nuanced and thus rewritten at regular intervals until the third part blows away our certainty. And shed our tears.

Hours before its official screening at the Cannes Film Festival, where it opened the competition, we spoke to Hirokazu Kore-eda about this new opus, which also proves his talent when it comes to directing children.

AlloCiné: Innocence is one of the rare films that you didn’t write yourself. What aspect of the script spoke to you the most and made you want to shoot it?

Hirokazu Kore-eda : This is a project that was offered to me a long time ago, in December 2018, when the script was not yet written. I just received a treatment that the producers brought me and said I might be interested. And it turns out I’ve always wanted to work with Yuji Sakamoto, who’s a screenwriter whose work I really admire.

I was even more enthusiastic, on paper, because the treatment already contained the main themes in the film. There was already this three-part structure. And from the moment I agreed to direct, we started working on the script together. We had a lot of meetings, we traveled together to future shootings. Since we collaborated in this way, I haven’t had a script that has been brought to me since.

From the moment we have a movie like Rashômon, we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist

I was already very familiar with what the script had become, so it was easier for me to make it myself. And the themes that already existed in the treatment were very modern and relevant about things like lack of solidarity, lack of interest in the fate of others. Or too much fear, too much reluctance that we can have about what we don’t understand and what we don’t know, and that can create this insecurity that we can feel toward others. This is something I found very relevant.

Before this three-part structure, we obviously think of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Was that a conscious influence, or something you wanted to distance yourself from, seeing how big its shadow is?

It is an essential hint. Piece of art. From the moment we have a movie like this, we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. But the idea was primarily to go further: to see the film, absorb it and see what we could do with it, to repeat this exercise, knowing that the structure of the three chapters would definitely be comparable to what was done in Rashomon. We had to see how we could breathe new life into it.

The difference between Rashômon and Innocence is that we didn’t necessarily want to shoot and say the same thing. In our case, it was important that throughout the chapters the audience was involved, on the one hand, and as the story developed, it discovered – as well as the characters – what is hidden behind the monster or monster.

At first, everyone has superstitions and beliefs. But we understand that these were possibly false clues. This quest is for the characters as well as the audience. We can almost say that the film is in four parts: the fourth will be for the viewer, how he appropriated all this and what he can recover. This structure was really designed to bring him in and take an active part in the story.

It involves the viewer and shows how the concept of truth is much more complex than you imagine in such a case. And this theme often appears in your cinema, even in the title of Catherine Deneuve’s film (“Truth”). Why are you so attached to him?

I don’t know if I was interested in the question of truth so much in this movie. For me, justice was more important here: asking what is right rather than what is true. And from there, the pursuit of justice can turn into something disgusting and violent.

The desire to insist at any cost can be an act of violence to other people. I was more interested in this mechanism. Instead of trying to understand what is true or not, what really happened or not.

You often direct children, and many directors say that they are difficult to shoot with. How do you work with them to achieve the level of precision we see here and in your previous films?

On Innocence I worked with them differently. Usually I don’t give them a script, I give them the lines once on set and ask them to live in the moment. Let’s take advantage and be there when we need it. For the rest, what I’m interested in is transplanting their personality into the character, bringing a little bit of it.

It was more difficult here. Because the two main characters, two children, are struggling with conflicting feelings, a struggle that needs to be expressed with great precision. Therefore, it was difficult for me to work normally and seek spontaneity from them. So I gave them the script, we did a reading together, with all the actors, and we brought in specialists, speakers, so that they could give their opinion about the situations described in the film.

We really did everything we could to give them the best possible understanding of the script. And I think in that sense, as actors, they were absolutely brilliant.

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in Cannes on May 17, 2023