With ‘Eureka,’ Director Finds Wider Fame

“I am like an enraged child,” says Shinji Aoyama, the Japanese director whose highly lauded epic “Eureka” opened Friday in Los Angeles.

Apparently, it is this rage that impels him to continue to make films, a process he finds both pleasurable and painful. “There are things much more painful in the world than making films,” he says. “I make films to fight against those things.”

Speaking through a translator, Aoyama says he is frustrated by a variety of social and political ills besetting modern Japan. However, don’t expect “Eureka” to reveal those specific concerns to the audience. The movie he wrote and directed deals with modern malaise in a metaphoric manner.

“The film is about people who have survived a catastrophe, who are trying to find their lives again,” he says, “so the story can be read as a metaphor for postwar Japan.”

At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, a slew of films in competition were weighing in at three hours or better. While critics groaned at the load in an already demanding screening schedule, “Eureka” won over most of those willing to sit through its daunting length: three hours and 40 minutes. It was awarded the festival’s International Film Critics Award and the Ecumenical Prize. His most recent film, “Desert Moon,” has also been selected for this year’s Cannes competition.

Months after the Cannes win, Aoyama, 37, is back in Japan, sitting in a musty classroom of the Film School of Tokyo, where he teaches part time. The school is one of the few in Japan teaching hands-on filmmaking, and it is tucked into the first floor of an older building in the middle of the Ginza, the city’s traditional business/shopping district.

“Eureka” is about the aftermath of a violent bus hijacking on driver Makoto Sawai (Koji Yakusho) and two child passengers, Kozuo and her older brother Naoki (played by real-life sister and brother Aoi and Masaru Miyazaki). They all survive but experience varying levels of trauma.

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Two years later, we find that Sawai’s life has been destroyed, and he has resettled in a small town, working as a handyman. Coincidentally, the two children live nearby. Their father dead, their mother fled, they live alone in the family house, surviving on packaged food and refusing to speak to anyone. Sawai decides to make them a home and moves in with them. One day the children’s cousin arrives and also moves in.

Things get better, but they are still not quite right. When Sawai realizes that their lives have to be shaken up, he buys an old bus and takes everyone on a road trip.

“They can be seen as a kind of a family, but it’s a family that rejects the family as an institution,” Aoyama says. “When they go on the trip, it’s a trip to go outside the community, so the new life can be seen as leaving the community and being more open to the world itself.”

The setting for this extended drama is the southwestern island of Kyushu, home island of Aoyama as well as actor Yakusho. “The structure of the story made it necessary to shoot in Kyushu,” Aoyama explains. “There’s a certain violence to the place--people who live in Kyushu tend to be rude, they tend to disregard other people’s feelings.”

Aoyama is a fan of films of the French New Wave. “Films made in Hollywood seem to be made in a dreamlike place, a utopia, whereas the French New Wave films were shot in apartments, ordinary places, real places,” he says. “It was after seeing Jean-Luc Godard [films] that I was inspired and wanted to make my own films.”

After graduating from college, Aoyama went to Tokyo and entered the film industry as a prop assistant and then became assistant director on several projects.

In 1995, he made his first theatrical feature, “Helpless,” which won the Grand Prix at the Japan Film Industry Professional Awards the following year; “Eureka” is his seventh feature film and his first to be in Cannes competition.

“Of course I was happy winning the prizes,” he says. “I do think raising funds for filmmaking will be easier in the future, but the most important thing for me was to be in competition in Cannes and to get to know some of the other directors in competition. This gives me strength for making films in the future.”

The film took more time to make than the average Japanese film--40 shooting days and four months of post-production; the typical Japanese feature shoots in a month or less and is usually completed within another month.

Aoyama had long been a fan of Yakusho’s, so casting him was a natural decision. The two children were found through auditions; he selected a real sister-and-brother pair, captivated by their faces and the intensity in their eyes.

“In the film the two children live by themselves, and I guess they protect themselves by being watchful; watching is a way to survive.”

Aoyama cannot say whether his story ends in hope or despair. “I always try to be hopeful, but is there hope in the film?” he asks. “I’m not exactly sure if they found hope--perhaps they found hope for the discovery of hope.”