The acclaimed American indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt was invited by the Tokyo International Film Festival to come to Japan and join a symposium to talk about the work of the late Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth. Following a screening of Ozu’s 1959 comedy, Ohayo (Good Morning), on Oct. 27 at the Mitsukoshi Theater, Reichardt discussed the film and other Ozu works with fellow directors Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Jia Zhangke. Each was to choose a film to discuss in detail. Reichardt chose Ozu’s most famous film, Tokyo Story, which often shows up on lists of the greatest movies ever made. Kurosawa chose the lesser known The Munekata Sisters, and Jia talked about Late Spring. Several days later, I interviewed Reichardt in the offices of the festival for The Japan Times, and the conversation was so lively I have decided to post the whole transcript, digressions and all. Enjoy.

This is the first time you’ve been in Japan, right?

Yes.

You must be a big fan of Ozu if they expressly asked you to come for this symposium.

I was shocked. And then I came here and I literally only spoke for ten minutes.

How did it come about?

I’d been waiting to be invited to Japan for a long time, but my films haven’t really played here much. So this was my first chance, and it was great. But I only scratched the surface.

But why did they specifically ask you?

I don’t know. I think my films and Ozu films were mentioned together in some books. 

Well, you teach, right? Do you teach Ozu?

Well, next semester, just because I’ve been studying so much. I’ve just seen 16 films. I teach production. The students in one of my classes–I teach one semester a year–we do a feature film and each student does one scene and then we suture it together. I give them scenes where they sort of…I’ve shown Ozu and talked about Ozu before, but never made an Ozu film. It’s tricky, because you don’t want to see a bunch of Americans doing Japanese. There’s a lot of Chinese students in the class, so we could do a Chinese film. They do everything, but they’ll do a lot of scenes of Sirk and stuff in Mandarin. 

But if you use Ozu in class, do you use him to teach composition?

Yes. Composition. It’s all about trying to keep a formal language alive against the onslaught of YouTube. It’s a losing battle, but nevertheless. 

At the symposium you said that in the past you had always imagined Japan through Ozu’s lens. What have you discovered since being here?

I mean, also Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, but I suppose it’s the attention to detail for everything. I’ve seen some little scenes play out that seemed very Ozu to me, between parents and kids. It’s just that I’m suddenly very steeped in it right now. Also, this constant corridor effect of looking at things. I went to Kyoto for two days. It was nice to get that kind of change, even if it was only scratching the surface.

You also said that you had discovered Ozu backwards, meaning you saw the later films first. 

Those were the ones I knew.

Jia Zhanke said that he saw Ozu films as illustrating Japan’s economic development. Is that something you could pick up from his later films?

I’m just reading into it because I still don’t know that much about it. As opposed to me coming here to talk about Ozu, I’ve just been overwhelmed with so many questions. I mean, the enormous amount of rice in the diet, is that a symbol everyone eating the same meals again and again? A symbol of economic well-being?

Very much so—having a regular meal every day. This is still only ten years after the war, which everyone remembers.

Yes, it seems incredible. 

During the war they could hardly eat at all. 

So it’s there in the meals, and the economy is built into the stories all the time—what can be afforded and what can’t be afforded. How you get married and who you get married to. Even in Tokyo Story you’re aware of the money that’s being spent constantly, and you see it at their jobs. It’s more in the later films where the situation in, like, the office buildings seem very normalized and representative. It’s not like you’re at the hairdresser. 

Work often came before family.

Right. It’s like you’re at home or working at home. And the conversations are interesting in that people talk about their disappointments with what their children are doing so soon after the war. They talk about the lack of good employment. But you would think at that time they would talk about their son and say…

Well, he’s alive.

He’s alive. Oh, and coming to terms with the death of a child—through American eyes it’s very sobering. The matter of factness of it, that incredible scene in Tokyo Story where the two men are talking about being disappointed with their sons, and the third man who has lost his son. The contrast. You’re also in cities where…it’s not like Fassbinder where you see the ruins everywhere. 

Going backwards, weren’t you surprised to see how he developed into that characteristic style?

I was surprised at how he basically came to say, “I just need these four tools in my tool kit. I don’t need anything else.” There was some film I was watching and he made a camera movement that startled me. Even in Tokyo Story there’s this one shot that’s very short and you get the feeling that he doesn’t even think it’s a good idea. It’s just startling to see the camera move at all. In the earlier films, the amount of things he’s doing. In one early film, there are some guys taking their exams and then they go on a ski trip—oh, Days of Youth, that’s the title. I mean, he’s turning the camera sideways. Having been used to all this static camera work in the later films, I was, like, what’s going on? In America, the cliche is: The more money you get, the more they do. And in his progression, the bigger the films got, the less he did. Just more succinct, and better. 

Can you show me your scrapbook?

Yeah, like I said, this is just a cheat sheet. I didn’t know how long this talk was going to be. I thought it might go on for hours, and I’m not really good at speaking about other people’s films. So this is how I can break it down. First I put together some pages of Tokyo Story, because that was the movie I was going to talk about. And then, some other movies just to do some comparisons of how he shoots certain things that come up over and over again. And how he uses people and spaces, always looking right at you. 

The first time I saw that I was shocked.

I do my whole continuity class, and after I explain that the actors can’t look into the camera I show them Ozu [laughs].

“You lied!”

Exactly. Don’t try this at home. 

Do you ever find yourself, in your own films, referring to Ozu?

I don’t know if I do, but I probably will with the next film I make because I’ve just been so steeped in Ozu of late. When I was making First Cow I was looking at Ugetsu a lot, so there was some Japanese influence there. But that’s different. 

I went to the internet and typed in Reichardt and Ozu and came up with some things where you appear together, including a review of Showing Up where the critic praised its “Ozu-like intervals of adjacent activity.”

Who was that?

Somebody at Slant.

It’s funny, because I go back and realize I haven’t listened hard enough. But the movies seem so quiet to me, with the exception of the trains and stuff. I don’t think I ever feel another world encroaching on his stories. Definitely, the open doors, where any neighbor could pop in, and the way he shoots in the corridors, with frames within frames. I was thinking how Bresson is so obsessed with staircases. Ozu shows people looking up at the staircase and you see people disappear up the staircase and he leaves you in the hallway. That seems so Japanese to me. 

But there are universal themes, right?

There are. The way he anchors people in situations, the way he always gets people to sit down, as if telling the audience, “Sit down, because we’re going to be here for a minute. We’re settling into this place.” Those kinds of things are universal. And time, and just how people aren’t really saying what they feel. He reveals so little with a shot, a glance, or just giving you time to get to where the character is. In First Cow people are sitting on the ground a lot, and people talk about my films being slow and all, but he truly tries to achieve stillness, while my characters are always doing something, usually with their hands. He just lets people sit and be still, and that’s OK.

The pacing of the dialogue is so deliberate. In western movies, probably to get some realism, dialogue is often cluttered or overlapping. In Ozu there’s always a beat or two between lines.

Is that a function of Japanese politeness? 

Yes, but it isn’t necessarily how people normally speak.

Since I’ve been here I’ve really noticed how I’m an interrupter, or at least more than I’m aware in the U.S. We’re all interrupting each other constantly. Everyone has their natural pacing of dialogue. Whenever I showed Todd Haynes an early cut of a film, he would always say, “C’mon Kelly, the rhythm’s too constant. You’ve got to mix it up a bit.” Ozu really doesn’t have to mix it up.

Another interesting thing about the symposium the other day was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s discussion of The Munekata Sisters and how women were treated in Ozu films. 

I didn’t know that film.

I think he chose it because he thought most people didn’t know about it either. As an American, when you watch his movies, and you mentioned at the symposium how important marriage is as a plot point, do you feel you understand what he’s trying to say, or does it feel foreign to you?

I’m curious as to what would have resulted if Ozu had lived ten more years and kept doing films into the 1970s. Where would his women have gone? In America the idea is that every woman dreams about walking down the aisle. And I know they have that here, too. It’s a money making machine, marriage is, but in America this idea, even in the old “Lucy” shows, it’s a plus for women and allows men flexibility in their lives. The arrangement allows you to have kids, too. But in Ozu’s films, what impresses me is how much an obsession marriage is, as well as the idea that women are now allowed to participate in the decision.

That’s often the source of conflict in the later films.

But it seems that in his movies there’s something more practical about marriage, but I can’t say whether it’s about keeping the family together or making it last longer. Maybe it was a reaction to the war. It’s difficult for me to understand completely, but there is something about it that feels less idealistic than it is in America. It’s more practical.

Do you think Ozu has anything to say about class? Because you yourself are known for stories that examine class distinctions.

He tends to remain within one definitive class zone, but within that zone his characters will lament that, “Oh, my son’s only a lowly doctor.” Or those hallways where Setsuko Hara lives in that apartment and everybody’s borrowing things from one another—you feel the class parameters there as well. And the whole conversation where, “Do you know you’ll be happy with him?” and she says she knows she will be happy. She’s not marrying who the family has in mind. She marries the friend who’s been around forever. 

It isn’t always about money. Usually it’s about a level of comfort. From a practical standpoint, it’s better to marry a civil servant than to marry a doctor.

[minder signals time is almost up]

Congratulations on finally getting theatrical releases here.

Yeah, First Cow and Showing Up.

So that means you might come back?

I hope so. I’m getting old. Let’s get these movies out.