Kevin Mcgue
Films are often born from a single chance meeting, sometimes one that crosses international borders and generations. When veteran Iranian director
Amir Naderi, himself an avid filmgoer, attended the Filmex festival in Tokyo, he happened to meet the indie favorite
Hidetoshi Nishijima (Dolls; Tony Takitani), and bluntly told the young actor, “It is fate that we make a movie together.” Six years later, the result is the drama Cut in which Nishijima plays a dedicated cinephile and struggling director who falls in with the gangsters from whom his late brother borrowed money. “I wanted to make a completely Japanese movie,” the director said at a recent sneak preview at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. “Not a movie made by a tourist.” To insure the story was culturally authentic, Japanese director
Shinji Aoyama was brought in as a script advisor. When questioned about the violence in the film, Naderi explained, “Each time a scriptwriter writes a script and no one is interested, and each time a filmmaker takes a film to a festival and nothing happens, it feels as if they are hit. I wanted to show that feeling literally.”
Cut opens Dec 17 at Cinemart Shinjuku, and with English subtitles at Cinemart Roppongi from Jan 7. www.bitters.co.jp/cut
See Rob Schwartz’s review here.
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