After Life Directed By Kore-Eda Hirokazu -- To Die And Then Have Time
(… the following is an edited version of a conversation from October 1998 with Japanese film director, Kore-eda
Hirokazu, in which he talks about his 1998 film, After Life … He is speaking through a translator … )
"I conceived of this place. It's a forgiving place, and it's a forgiven place. Life is tough, and life is
pretty unforgiving, including my own, so at least after you're dead, it wouldn't be so bad if there was a place
that was forgiving and forgiven.
"There's this setting where you have three days to pick a memory, and then three days to recreate the memory
before you go into heaven. The whole set-up is really a way to have people look back over their life, and go, 'you
know it wasn't such a bad life after all.' So, in fact, what those people are doing is reclaiming their lives.
"This whole system of getting to choose one memory looks very different depending on who you are, and what
kind of life you've led, and how you think about life. There's one guy, who says, 'You mean I can forget everything?
There really must be a heaven.' So, for some people, just having one memory means, 'Hallelujah, I can forget about
the rest of my life and be happy again.' But then there's the young guy who says, 'having to live with just one
memory would be really difficult for me.' So it's like a system, and depending on who's looking at it, it looks
completely different. In this movie, I just portrayed a few possible ways in which the set-up might look to some
different people. But there's endless responses.
"The guy who said it's your whole set-up that needs rethinking probably thought there was no meaning. But,
as the guy who made the movie, my answer is, perhaps, there's no real meaning in picking just one memory, but in
the process of looking back over your whole life there's meaning. In order to pick the memory, you have to reevaluate
and re-look at everything. You know the guy who connects with the lady who has Alzheimers? She gives him the cherry
blossom leaves at the end. He says at one point, 'What's the meaning of all this? Why are we recreating dead people's
memories?' And that's the same question that I, as a filmmaker, ask: 'What's the meaning in all this? Why do we
do this?' So, for instance in the recreation, first you hear the old people tell their memories, and then you see
them go into a studio, and they start to recreate it, and then they bump up against, more or less, the reality
of their experience. And they say, 'how did that go?' You have all these wonderful details that come back to life.
So it's the process of re-remembering and recreating in which the meaning exists.
"Most of the stories that are told in the movie are real stories that happened to real people. And even with
some of the professional actors, I had written parts for them, but when they got to the shooting stage, and they
watched these real people telling their real story, they said, 'I have a real story I want to tell, too. I don't
need your script. I want to tell my story.' In terms of the woman with Alzheimer's, she is actually a very famous
actor in Japan. She's 86, and she's completely fit as a fiddle in body and mind. But her behaviour is very much
modeled on my grandfather. He probably had -- and there was no word Alzheimer's back then -- when I was six years
old, he began to stop remembering things.
"I actually believe that memories are central to identity. If you took away your memories, you wouldn't have
an identity anymore. So obviously, the act of taking a photograph and looking at it, and thereby remembering and
reliving an event that took place in your life, is clearly a way of staying close to who you are and who you've
been, and events that define your life. What I really wanted to do in this film is to say that by being engaged
in a conversation or dialogue with your past, that people can actually grow. Usually, people say that when old
people just live inside their memory, that's talked about as a bad thing, but in this film I wanted to talk about
it as a good thing. That by re-remembering a memory, once again in a new way, it can appear to you differently,
and then that can be a catalyst for change. It's not denying what you say, but there is a different way of being
engaged with the past.
"I've thought about the inevitable discrepancy between 'fact' and 'human memory' a lot. But although I've
portrayed many aspects of those discrepancies in the film, I don't presume to judge this as negative. I think that
the way we remember things is a record of our experience filled with our own emotional response to the situation,
and maybe little lies that we tell ourselves, or little changes that we make in the story to make it prettier or
better or more interesting than it really was. But all those little differences reflect the true character of that
person. So the whole thing, all the changes, all the scratches, and all the ways we pretty it up, it's all a record
of who we are.
"What we're trying to do in the studio with the camera and the crew and the cotton and the clouds is to try
and create the subjective memory that is filled with emotion that you talked about, the kind you usually have,
where you're in the middle of it, and that's fused with your subjectivity and your emotion. They're two entirely
different things. The videotape record, like the security camera, is used simply as little notes to remind someone
of what it felt like.
"The videotape is not really like a human memory -- it's like a camera at a superstore or bank, it's like
a security camera. It's like an eye that has no emotions, no subjective experience. It's just a fixed camera and
it's always recording a life. Of course, no such thing exists. So that's where the videotapes come in -- no emotion,
no subjectivity.
"You know the videotapes in the film, those are the same as that audio-tape of your interview that you were
so disappointed by. And then the article that you write, even if it was a disappointing audio tape, you're going
to write from that magical memory that you have. And if this audio tape is equal to the videotapes in the film,
then the article you would write is equal to the recreated memories. It is filled with your emotions, what you
experienced inside yourself, not some flat fact of the tape. So that's fine -- they're not the same thing. What
you're talking about, that kind of disappointment, is exactly what that old man goes through. He's looking at year
after year of his life on tape, and he thought he had a pretty good life. And he looks at the tape, and nothing
happens, and nothing happens, and it feels empty, but the point of the movie is how do you overcome, how do you
come to terms with that? So, say, it's disappointing, well, you're already dead, what are you going to do?"
(For further biographical information of the director, check out: www.artlic.com/films/afterlife.html
or www.kore-eda.com )
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