Interview with Umetsugu Inoue
Udine Film Festival 2006
The Master of Japanese musical
How did you come to choose musicals as your main genre?
I began working as a director in 1952, at the age of 27. A year later someone suggested making a film with a jazz singer. At that time Japan was in the middle of a huge jazz boom and so I began to “study” it, hanging out at all the trendiest clubs. Thus Tokyo Cinderella Girl was born: the film was a great success and so the producers asked me to make more films with the same character.
I loved music a lot, and I even played some musical instruments a bit, so it was natural that I would dedicate myself to musicals.
Your career has been long and prolific. How did you begin?
When it started, Shintoho had huge economic problems because it had no stars available, nor any popular box office hits: that was a really difficult time to try to get into the market.
However, I did have the opportunity to start making films, and I managed to do it in such a way that the production house was able, despite the low budget, to realize a certain box office success. I had a lot of work right from the beginning; I never asked for much money, I worked quickly and my films were successful.
Which films and filmmakers have inspired you the most?
American films have, without doubt, been the greatest inspiration, but not only: French and Italian cinema too have been very important. For example, The Bicycle Thieves greatly influenced me. Maybe the main reason I have had such success in Japan is exactly because I refer so much to foreign films, bringing a whiff of internationality, both in terms of genre and in the subjects, to my country’s cinema.
Thanks in part to your films Yûjirô Ishihara, in the role of the slightly uncouth roughneck who finds love and fortune, became a legend. How do you think such an anti-hero came to be so loved by the audience?
That’s the true secret of comedy: in real life it’s the serious people who reach their goals, while in a screenplay it’s characters like Yûjirô Ishihara’s who manage to become heroes. People warm to him because his adventures, and the outcomes of them, are so far from what would happen in real life.
What do you think of contemporary Japanese cinema? What do you find different from the way you worked for so long?
Every now and again, I meet up with members of my old staff: they, like me, are not working at the time. When we talk about contemporary cinema, we share the sensation that the way of making films has completely changed in Japan. Today the legendary big names of the past have closed or produce very little, while television channels are making films that are more and more similar to television programmes. The romantic image of the filmmaker who looks after the film from its beginning to the end has disappeared: there is no longer any room for the director’s individual identity; entertainment cinema is decidedly automated.