“When you start looking in the dark, you will see something. This is the idea I wanted to capture and convey,” Kugahara Takeshi said. diverseafter the release of his first movie “Nagisa”, a film in which darkness and silence play a decisive role.
The story revolves around a young man (played by Yuzu Aoki) who is suffering from guilt related to the death of his beloved sister (Yamazaki Nanami), and encounters her ghost in a haunted tunnel. Thus, he continues to visit the tunnel to re-experience his past.
“The basic idea came up when I was in film school, a long time ago – 20 years or so ago. The idea was that [have a character] Go into a tunnel and there you see someone else, the ghost of someone special, [someone] you belong to.”
“Nagisa”
As he continued with his career, this idea stuck with Kugahara’s mind, until he managed to write a first draft of “Nagisa” eight years earlier. And when he was asked how he worked on bringing out the conflicts of characters and personalities through a film dominated by darkness and with little dialogue, he said: “In [original] script, there were more lines, more dialogues. But I let the actors improvise. […] Once in the editing room, I picked what fit the story best, and that’s how things turned out. So I didn’t mean to cut out most of the lines and highlight the silences, but I felt it worked for me and for the story.”
While the silence was the result of his creative process, the presence of darkness was clearly planned in advance: “I didn’t want to make everything ‘clean’ and clear and easy to understand. However, I felt I had to keep some allusions, some voices, some characters, even in the darkness “.
The only movie reference mentioned by Kugahara is Lee Chang-dong’s “Mint Candy”. “I watched that movie a long time ago. Then I rewatched it two more times and it helped back up my script.”
The director’s work with Aoki Yuzu has been extensive.
“I shared Lee Chang-dong’s film, and explained every scene, even page by page. We also did some rehearsals and spent some time together before shooting.”
Kugahara also called on him to improvise to build his character without necessarily focusing on scenes in the script.
Aoki has become well known in Japan as one of the main cast members of the Japanese TV drama “More Than Words”, and appeared in Johnny Depp starring in the movie Minamata.
“Nagisa” was filmed in and around Nagasaki for two weeks in late summer 2020. Kugahara himself handled the editing process, which took nearly a year.
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