The actor who wants to direct is a movie world cliché, though many Hollywood actors have made the transition successfully, from Charlie Chaplin to Clint Eastwood.
In Japan the number of actors-turned-directors has long been fewer since the Japanese film industry – and Japanese society – tend to funnel people into career paths early and shut the gate to latecomers. In the old studio system just about the only way to become a director was to join the studio as an assistant director and serve an apprenticeship. The actors who did manage to direct, such as Tanaka Kinuyo and Mifune Toshiro, usually had the clout of stardom behind them.
Some that attitude still lingered when Sabu (birth name: Tanaka Hiroyuki), an actor who had starred in animator Otomo Katsuhiro’s 1991 horror comedy World Apartment Horror, decided to direct his first film. Kitano Takeshi had made the leap from actor to director in 1989 with his first film Violent Cop (in which he also starred) but he was a nationally famous as a TV comedian and emcee.
Sabu was then far more obscure and his journey to the director’s chair was far more arduous. Also, he made the journey harder by writing his own script instead of, as is still standard, finding a proven property – such as a hit manga or best-selling novel – to film. Producers were reluctant to give him money. Nonetheless he persevered and in 1996 released his first feature as a director: Dangan Runner.
In filming this story of a bumbling bank-robber-turned-shoplifter (Taguchi Tomoro) who ends up pursued by a store clerk and a yakuza drug dealer Sabu tossed aside the conventions of the local crime film, while using that most ancient of cinematic story drivers: the chase. His three leads spend the opening scenes running like marathoners – or rather characters in an old Keystone cops comedy. But instead of knockabout farce, the film becomes a penetrating look into the causes of his threesome’s desperation and determination.
This combination of headlong comedy-inflected action with more serious character-driven drama, seen in such films as Postman Blues (1997), Unlucky Monkey (1998), Monday (2000) and Drive (2001) became a Sabu signature – and marked him as a unique talent amid a rising tide of young Japanese indie filmmakers. Foreign programmers began to take notice early on though domestic recognition was slower to come. Sabu has since traveled to festivals far and wide, including four trips to the Berlin Film Festival, where his films have won a total of three prizes.
But this combination – call it “formula” – also began to limit him, with the trademark chase scenes becoming less fresh, more pro forma. In 2003 he dialed down with Blessing Bell, an offbeat road movie starring Kitano favorite Terajima Susumu as an Everyman who wanders from disastrous lows (jailed for murder) to incredible highs (discovery of a winning lottery ticket) while barely uttering a word.
Since this change of pace, Sabu has attempted a variety of stories and themes. Based on an early 20th century proletarian novel, The Crab Cannery Boat (2009) depicted a mutiny against a tyrannical crab boat boss as stylized theater of the absurd with an underlying critique of conditions in recession-hit Japan. Then in 2013 came Miss Zombie, an offbeat zombie movie set in a world where the undead become dangerous only gradually – and the title heroine works as a maid in an otherwise normal human household.
Last year, in partnership with LDH, a talent agency/media company best known for the boy pop group Exile, Sabu released Jam, a three-part film starring actors from the LDH roster.
Once again the story is about three guys under pressure whose fates intersect, somewhat like Dangan Runner minus the breathless runs. Now 54, Sabu may have come full circle, but he is still searching, experimenting – and surprising.
Mark Schilling