Heso’s latest short film, On A Boat, charts a mismatched married couple negotiating the limits of freedom and control. What separates husband Chu (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) and his wife Sara (Ryo Matsuura) beyond sex is age – she is 12 years younger than him – and outlook – she was once free spirited and he is controlling. It is all exposed when Sara’s friends, led by feisty Edamame (Nairu Yamamoto) come to a house-warming party and cause chaos.
The film unfolds over a tight 32 minutes where not a shot or second is wasted. It features an exacting visual design and concise screenplay that mainlines vividly acted characters whose polar-opposite personalities are placed in constant conflict. The story ends up being an absolute roller-coaster ride that swings audiences into laughter and dunks them into horror as the couple fight and furniture gets caught in the crossfire.
My immediate reaction to it was “wow” because of the performances and active visualisation and subsequent re-watches result in things for me to find and admire.
This short announces Heso as a director to watch and people in Osaka have the chance to see his work since the film plays as part of the Short Film Program B section of the 19th Osaka Asian Film Festival. As he takes part in the festival, Heso answered some interview questions where he gave background on the production, the stories that informed the screenplay and the conflicted characters, and working closely with cast and crew, and strong visual design.
Thanks for making the film and for taking the time to look at the questions.
There are a number of films at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024 with really excruciatingly awkward and painful family breakups/downs. Some are darkly humorous – It Must be Love – while others offer catharsis at the end – Faraway Family. This one really made me cringe and I marvelled at your use of cinematic language to build that feeling.
Indeed, On a Boat makes quite an impression. It’s a visually and emotionally exacting film where the design of scenes and pitch-perfect acting quickly sketch the characters and then ratchets up the tension of scenes and it feels like agony watching the conflict.
How did this film come about?
In terms of the project, this happened as a result of the Grand Prix for a domestic short film award called “Filmbum Film Awards” and they supported me in making another short. The first thing on my mind was to make a short film that doesn’t feel short and limited, something similar to works by Guillaume Brac, instead of something obvious-conceptual or a punch-line-centred one.
As for the idea of the film, a part of it came from my personal memory. When I was a teenager, my mother, who used to be a full-time housewife, told me that she had originally wanted to go to an art university and become a painter. These words felt so heavy since my parents had met each other at a university, which both of them had gone to, and it wasn’t an “art university”. That means that if my mother had pursued her original dream I wouldn’t even exist. This makes me believe that all of our decisions in life, even if they bring any happy results, have an aspect of sacrifice. I tried to put those feelings into this film.
Can you describe how you came up with the characters?
The inspiration for the characters only arose while I was writing. Writing was the best way for me to recall things and get elements of the characters.
Before the actual story came up, I had written a few random scripts. For example one of them was about an uninhibited-alcohol-loving woman, the original version of Edamame, who happened to need to stay sober and take care of her niece. Another script was about a control-freak guy, of course it’s Chu, who needed to handle an uncontrollable situation while he’s climbing up a mountain with his co-worker. After I created enough alive and attractive characters, I started to provide them other roles, and put them together and wrote the first draft of On a Boat. Even there, the wife, Sara, suddenly occurred to me while trying to make a connection between Chu and Edamame.
There is exacting visual and aural design here that shows intense planning/storyboarding to maximise the human drama. Even the film’s title is disjointed which suggests a challenge to the main male character, Chu. What was your approach to the visuals and soundscape?
The first thing I did was to get ideas from the people in charge of each department. Indeed, just from the script Daniel Lazoff (DP) and Edan Mason (sound director) gave me tons of ideas, from abstract ones to technical, for each scene. Then I drew a 99-page storyboard which included all of the information for each shot such as blocking, lines, background sound, shot type, birds-eye drawing and shot image. Then I did my imaginary editing with it then, again, I asked them their ideas on it and I revised it.
And thank you for mentioning the film’s title. I adore Haruki Murakami kind of metaphors and that’s my other approach to cinematography and soundscape. You can find a lot of metaphors like the title, even in the things on table or the background sound, and they show the slight change of the power balance of the characters along the way of the story.
The staging of scenes and the responding camera movements feel so perfectly pitched. At first the camera is observational as characters are introduced to the viewer but as the action gets going, the camera takes on a life of its own, panning and cutting to people in anticipation of their reactions. How do you see the camera as part of the storytelling process?
Since the background information of the characters and the story itself is limited and also most of the characters’ behaviours are not too empathetic, cinematography was the key to get the audience’s empathy. There, the motions of the camera in the latter half, which totally came from Daniel the DP, feel so successful to me in terms of making the viewer feel themselves become the seventh person in the room.
Kiyohiko Shibukawa and Ryo Matsuura are. Pitch. Perfect. They can be on screen alone and hold attention as they play out their character’s quirks – the early scenes where Shibukawa-san is chasing the fly – and they can sing impromptu.
What was your approach to the performances? How did you work with the cast to prepare them for their roles and did you allow ad-libbing while shooting or was everything heavily rehearsed?
The biggest part of my approach is controlling and limiting the information each cast member receives at different rates.
This story should be difficult for the actors to perform since, as I mentioned, the background information of the characters is shown in a limited manner and it’s drawn from a sort of a mixture of several scripts.
So, after the table-reading with all of the cast, some of them texted me saying they couldn’t get the reasons of their actions. Instead of providing them “the answer” for each of their questions, I threw them some questions about themselves that could connect them to the characters. I also asked them to read the script again focusing on a specific thing which was different, cast member by cast member. On the set, we always rehearsed blocking while in the setting and right before the shoot I called some of the cast separately and told them further information about the story to get their real-time-understanding of the character’s situation. I believe that helped them perform, not along to the story but along to each character.
This time there’s almost no space for ad-libbing since each action and line has an exact meaning metaphorically. I was so astonished by all the cast because some of the lines were so unnatural and literary but they made them their own naturally, as if they were coming from real people.
There is a really interesting and disturbing dynamic in the gender imbalance. It definitely felt like a challenge to traditional “male dominance” of a household and one could sense that Chu felt offended by all of these women pushing back against him. Was that to further explore his control issues or maybe highlight an issue like domestic violence?
As in the story, yes, it tries to emphasize Chu’s issue and how the situation is out of his control. And it also has an aspect of generation-imbalance and tries to highlight the issue on superficial understandings of “paternity” to other genders and the next generation in this country.
Do you see the couple being able to reconcile?
Honestly I cannot imagine it but some of couples I know can keep fighting and fussing for years and years and still be together. And maybe that’s one of the points of marriage as a system, an ancient and out-of-time system, in a good and bad way.
Is there anything you would like viewers to watch out for or take away from the film?
Oh yes I strongly insist that this film is a kind of comedy! Under those serious and stressful masks, there are always many kinds of funny faces waiting. So if you find anything funny, please laugh out loud! Thank you for reading this interview!
On A Boat played at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024 as part of the Short Films Program B on March 02. It will play again on March 06 at Nakanoshima Museum of Art Osaka at 10:30.
You can read my review of the film here.