The Japanese director, who received the Palme d’or in 2018 with A family matteris back at the Cannes Film Festival and opened the competition on Wednesday May 18 with Monster. It is the story of the young boy Minato who behaves more and more strangely, arousing the concern of his mother, a young widow who works in a dry cleaners. While remaining faithful to his social fiber, Hirokazu Kore-eda presents us with a fascinating cinematographic adventure, a whole society between lies, realities and fantasies. Interview.
RFI : Have you ever been a monster ?
Hirokazu Kore-eda : If I was a monster, I was not aware of it. On the other hand, I know that my job as a director is a job that can make us become monsters very easily, whether with regard to our films, with regard to our technical teams, our actors… Really, we are to a position where, if we take a bad step, we can immediately put ourselves in this monster’s place. So I’m still very vigilant about that.
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In your film, the child is weird, the father of the family is dead, the school is facing major problems and a typhoon is about to hit the town. The whole basis of human life and society is in danger. Monsteris this the first apocalyptic film by Hirokazu Kore-Eda ?
It is a story where one has the impression of seeing things which, in reality, do not exist. In Japan, there is a proverb, an expression that says : “ A suspicious heart sees a demon in the darkness “. All the characters are on a quest for what is monstrous, the quest for the monster. In reality, no one knows what he is looking for. So nobody knows what he sees either. Especially in the first part, there is this desire to establish a climate. There is certainly a typhoon, but at the same time, there is no monster, no real creature. Everything happens in the darkness of the heart, inside the characters. Particularly in the first part, there is this anxiety-provoking climate, which I wanted to install and which denotes a bit of the other films I have made up to that point.
In all your films you can find childhood and the difficulty of growing up. Was it this theme that triggered your vocation to become a director? ?
I find it very difficult to talk about my work from an objective point of view, to say that it was such a thing that led me to do such a thing. It is rather the spectator who can make the connections or who can project things, if he wants. For me, it is difficult to find cause and effect links between what I experienced and what I did. But, I think you are not very far from reality. Throughout my filmography appears the theme of adolescence, starting with Nobody Knows (2004), which is the first original screenplay I wrote. It was about the tallest boy’s late teens. After, in A family matter, he is also the boy who awakens to a certain moral sense. And it is this morality that will end up destroying the family a little. And then, in Monster Also. These are questions that children ask themselves: the discovery of feelings that they hadn’t imagined until then, which makes them see the world differently. In any case, there is a continuity in my work at this level, but I don’t think that’s what motivated me at the very beginning to make films.
“ What you can’t say, blow it said the headmistress of the school to the tormented boy, giving him a wind musical instrument, a trombone. You dedicated this film to Ryuichi Sakamoto, legendary composer, who died in March 2023, at the age of 71, and composer of the music of Monster. What role does the music play in this film ? The music, is it the air we breathe in the film ?
I had written Ryuichi Sakamoto a letter asking him to compose the music for the film. When he saw the edit he said : “ The sound of the trombone and horn in this music room is so beautiful that I don’t want the music to “spoil” the sound of these instruments. So, I’m going to try to compose something that doesn’t “get in the way”, that doesn’t interfere with that sound. “Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music is never something you just slap on. It’s always as if the music finally springs from within. It was his ambition: to become one with the film. And we had the same conception of things when we decided to work together. We didn’t want something that suffocates, but, on the contrary, something that infuses a new sound.
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