Tokyo Q&A: Shane O'Sullivan

Shane O'Sullivan, a young Irish film-maker, was in Tokyo recently working on his latest film, a documentary about 1960's counterculture in Japan. Mr O'Sullivan has written and produced two other films, "Second Generation" and the short drama, "Lemon Crush."

TQ: Tell us about this documentary.

O'Sullivan: It explores sixties counterculture in Japan and tries to connect the spirit and idealism of the time with the current Japanese younger generation. We interviewed filmmakers Koji Wakamatsu (father of the Pinku Eiga genre), Toshio Matsumoto ("Bara no Soretsu"), artist Tadanori Yokoo, Butoh dancers Akaji Maro and Natsu Nakajima and critic Donald Richie as well as a number of ordinary and extraordinary working Japanese and young people on the street in Shibuya.

TQ: Will this film be shown in Japan?

O'Sullivan: We will screen the film at the Horse Hospital in London at the end of March as part of the Japan 2001 Festival and hope to show it in Japan later this year, though I don't think the Tokyo Film Festival takes documentaries.

TQ: What sparked your interest in the 1960s student movement in Japan?

O'Sullivan: I'm very interested in this time culturally and politically, especially 1968. It feels like the political consciousness and spirit of invention are re-emerging slowly now throughout the world with the anti-globalisation protests and cheap art allowed by the digital revolution. So in the sixties, this political and cultural revolution was going on but Japan always seems throw up a more complex and extreme set of events to everyone else. It's never as simple as left and right, hippies on one side, pigs on the other. Things go through a warp and come out more subtle, complex and sublime, be it political events or the films themselves.

So for example, Tadanori Yokoo told a story about Ken Takakura gangster movies. In the films, Takakura always played a very right-wing stereotypical Japanese gangster but the left-wing students loved his films. They'd pack the cinema, come out feeling recharged and put on their helmets and go back into battle. Matsumoto took the Oedipus myth and applied it to transvestites in Shinjuku in "Bara no Soretsu" ("Funeral Parade of Roses"). Here, Oedipus is a "gay-boy" bar-madam who subverts the Greek myth by killing his mother and sleeping with his father. Cultural subversion taken to an extra level.

I'd seen some Japanese film and Butoh from this era -- Oshima, Terayama, Imamura, Matsumoto, some Hijikata dance films -- and thought they were pretty amazing, so I wanted to know more, find out about the student movement, the political backdrop to the art explosion that happened in and around Shinjuku at the time. So I made the documentary to make sense of this time for myself really and try to find how much of this spirit has been inherited by the current younger generation.

TQ: What do you think about the current state of Japanese film?

O'Sullivan: I think there's a lot of interesting young directors. We've seen their work this year in London during the Japan 2001 festival. Films like "One Piece" and "Body Drop Asphalt" use cheap DV cameras for very sharp, innovative, irreverent takes on the younger generation.

There also seems to be an increasing number of political films, be they documentaries about Aum or the Manchurian campaign or features harking back to the Japanese Red Army in the early seventies. Donald Richie said there was a level of political enquiry going on in the younger generation that was really quite recent.

TQ: Is there a particular Japanese director that you admire?

O'Sullivan: I was really impressed by the two sixties directors we met -- Wakamatsu and Matsumoto. They were so passionate, open and articulate in their opinions about their work and political movements of the time and the direction of Japan and the younger generation now.

They both made politically-charged, formally-anarchic films but came at it from opposite directions. Matsumoto from documentaries and avant-garde filmmaking, Wakamatsu using softcore porn as artistic expression, smuggling terrorist plots into pink films.

Unfortunately, subtitled versions of their films aren't widely available but Image Forum have released them unsubtitled in Japan and you can find them in Tsutaya.

TQ: Tell us about your next film.

O'Sullivan: It's called WEEKEND, a feature film following three immigrants in London -- a young Chinese waiter, Senegalese minicab-driver and Irish rasta -- over one weekend as they come to turning-points in their lives. By chance, all three countries qualified for the World Cup, so that's a backdrop to the story. We hope to shoot in September.

TQ: Thanks.