How did Young Yakuza originate, especially in terms of financing?
I shot some bonus footage in Tokyo for the DVD version of Novo, including a discussion with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and on that occasion I worked with a Japanese translator. I enjoyed our work together. She contacted me a year and half later, saying she was in Paris with a Japanese man who wanted to meet French people to talk. I saw him that same evening. As soon as he got out of the taxi with his guide, I could see he was a mobster, from the characteristic way he walked. We went together to see an exhibition of Japanese photos, then went for a drink and began talking. He had a lot of questions about cinema and presented me with a challenge, asking me if I was interested in filming mobsters, which seemed impossible to me.
I later went to Tokyo to teach some classes in a film school and I took advantage of the opportunity to spend some time with Mr. Kumagai’s family. He asked me again if a movie was possible, and the only way for me to get out of it was to offer him a catchline that in the end could never work out, which was to follow a young man when he entered his initiation period. It doesn’t happen that often. We left it at that and three or four months later, I got a call saying that someone was getting ready to join the clan and it was perfectly feasible for me to film him. I got together a very small movie crew. I wanted to shoot it on film to create a ritual: the Yakuza are a very formal and coded society, and I wanted to have a ritual on my side as well so they’d respect it. We shot the first ten days without financing. When I got back to France with the material, frankly I couldn’t see myself getting an advance on box office receipts with a project on the Yakuza. If someone had asked me why, I would’ve said it would never go through because of the moral issues. I went to see Thierry Garrel, whom I’d known for a long time. He was immediately interested. It was a project for a feature movie, but from all standpoints, it was easier for me to get financing from TV, and perhaps that gave me more freedom. The idea was to follow this young man for a year. Fortunately, reality threw everything off-kilter and the shoot got spread out over eighteen months, with about ten days per season. The movie was financed by Celluloid, with the support of Arte, and they found a finance fund from the U.S. that works as a sort of sponsor. Some foreign TV stations were immediately brought on to the project.

Mr. Kumagai never offered to back the project?
I don’t think it ever crossed his mind. The Yakuza used to finance films for a very long time, projects for features – nearly a thousand Yakuza movies have been produced by the studios with the support of organized crime. But that era’s over, and the yakuza eiga genre has become obsolete. Also, I’ve always been careful not to get pinned down by that kind of request: if you accept, you don’t have the same freedom, and you have to make something that glorifies them. Kumagai was very good from that point of view: no matter how much he spoke like a Yakuza, it didn’t stop him from agreeing to do things that were as accurate and as close to reality as possible. There was this slightly-metaphysical vision, that he would decide what’s real. Even if I came along with loads of ideas and images in mind as part of my cinematic process, each time, reality threw everything off track.

Young Yakuza is not exactly a mafia movie, because you don’t film their business, but rather their daily life, the internal organization and hierarchical rituals. At the same time, it corresponds to the reality predicted and described in The Godfather, Part III: the transition from mafia to a semi-legitimate status, which happens especially through real estate deals… Kumagai asked you a lot of questions about The Godfather; were you thinking of it as well?
No, although I like those films a lot. Kumagai especially asked me a lot of questions about The Godfather, Part I. He’s seen the film often and it’s made a profound impression on the whole of the Japanese mafia. As an aside, after the shoot he invited me to a big kind of reconciliation meeting between the two mobs, as the result of a crime between two young men from two rival organizations. It took place in a very large room with a very kitsch side to it, which suited them to a T. There were an enormous number of telephones ringing, and each time, it was the same music from The Godfather with a different tone. It was astounding, but they didn’t seem to notice, since the film was a unifying factor for them. Not knowing anything about the underworld and not particularly familiar with their collective imagination, I had thought about doing something more concrete. For me, this boy was entering a very restrictive lifestyle and I wanted to follow him step-by-step, almost like a reporter. I would’ve done exactly the same thing if the boy had decided to enter a Zen monastery. The idea was that I rubbed elbows with this milieu, it would reveal all its melancholy. The name alone, “yakuza”, means a losing hand. It’s as though they were somehow branded by this notion of bad luck. This melancholy interested me a lot. I also wanted to show the boredom of there lifestyle: being a mobster is interesting at some peak moments in their existence; otherwise, it’s all waiting.

Indeed, Kumagai tells the young Naoki that by entering the Yakuza, he was assured of having a hectic lifestyle, but we mostly see him serving tea.
Yes, it means losing your identity through denial, respecting your boss. And then there’s this very theatrical side to it, with strong rituals that feel like rehearsals, a tragic side of nonexistence. And yet they’re so unpredictable that any shot I tried to organize, any cinematic intention, was thrown off-track.

The main transgression with respect to the genre is that no one’s supposed to be able to get out. Yet Naoki leaves the clan. And Kumagai has an almost paternal role.
Yes, he’s like a father figure. With a lot of intelligence and perhaps a bit of perversion, he plays with that and uses it to his advantage. The young men who enter the mafia often come from the same milieu and have had a confrontational relationship with their fathers, and they’re really striving to repair that relationship, compensate for it through denial. You have to honor the master at every moment.

Certain shots nearly replicate images from Tokyo Eyes. Young Yakuza begins a bit where Tokyo Eyes lets off: the youths you film are no longer marginal, no longer lazy; here, you take Naoki at the moment he leaves his previous life of doing nothing and watch him enter a very restrictive lifestyle with a real job. Is that what you intended?
I wasn’t really aware of it, although I understand the analogy. The fragileness of the Japanese youth is indeed rarely shown in cinema, because it doesn’t present the Japanese free market in its best light.

This is the second feature-length film you’ve directed in Tokyo, and the third if you count the episode on Takeshi Kitano you did for the series Cinéma, de notre temps.
Things come about in a curious way. The documentary on Takeshi wasn’t the initial project. I had a project linked to the mafia. I really wanted to see Takeshi collect mafia stories from people he knew in the Yakuza and see how he could transform the stories and make them his own. I knew Takeshi’s father was linked to a ring, even if he didn’t talk about it a lot. He actually handles himself a bit like a ring member, a gumi. He had agreed in principle, but when we were going to shoot, he had so many TV shows to do that it wasn’t possible. I was a bit disappointed – I had expectations for this idea of him gathering stories, but also for this very special type of language. When we shot Tokyo Eyes, I remember that as we were preparing the scene, I asked him if everything was OK for him, if it worked for him, and he told me, “Yes, but I have something to ask you: two days ago in a bar, I met a member of the Yakuza who’s incredible, he’s just an employee, and we had so much fun together that I’m going to try to use his accent, and if he sees the film, he’ll recognize himself and he’ll be pleased. Do you mind if I use that accent?” Obviously, my ear isn’t good enough to detect those accent changes. So he acted with the accent of a guy he’d met two days earlier, whom I’ll never meet and who may never see the film. I really liked that. A few years later, I extended this idea: I finally wanted to meet these people, although I never would’ve tried to approach them on my own.

Who was on your crew?
There was Julien Hirsch, whom I’ve worked with for some time, and his assistant. Julien made about 80% of the movie and Céline Bozon replaced him when he left to shoot Lady Chatterley. Céline also came with this assistant, a woman – the Yakuza were actually quite pleased to be filmed by women, even though things were rather tense at the time in the family. And there was a production sound mixer, Kikuchi, who makes nearly all the films of the great Japanese auteurs, like Shinji Aoyama (Eureka), and who’d worked on Tokyo Eyes. There was a translator as well, and a young French guy joined us en route who speaks Japanese, who was already in Tokyo finishing his thesis on the body and martial arts… He had a relationship with the young gangsters that I couldn’t have had.

Doesn’t your knowledge of old-world Japan allow you to understand the language today?
No… Also, Kumagai is rather difficult to understand. He intentionally uses convoluted sentences that are difficult to understand even for the Japanese, and very complicated terms and bits of Korean slang. With the young Japanese, it’s something different. In these clans, there are a lot of people you see in the movie who are burakami, extreme outcasts, like a lower caste, people the Japanese won’t film. So there were very specific words. But my initial idea was a bit different. I bought an automatic translator that you see a little in the movie and which was supposed to have a bigger role, but which I turned it off. I really wanted to go see the manufacturer of this machine and ask him if it was possible to have voice recognition so that things would go more quickly – of course it would’ve been possible, they’re so advanced in robotics over there. But things were working fine with the translator. What was great with this film was that some things were generated internally. The fact of bringing a woman into this male setting was so out of place that they liked it.

It’s very different from Tokyo Eyes, where you had a French screenplay that was translated and the work tended naturally more towards sonority and intonation.
Yes, we had three screenplays, in French, in Japanese, and a phonetic version. I liked the musical side of the screenplay more. Obviously, for Young Yakuza there wasn’t a screenplay, but it’s still a very impure form of documentary, in that at some points I asked people – without actually writing dialogs – to clarify things and add a bit of truth. So it’s not a truthful way of doing things, because I prefer getting at things indirectly; some things are written. The impurity is that we paid especial attention to certain things and others are pure reporting, but you always have to come up with things yourself, and I find the whole mix very interesting. There’s not this idea of going out to film truth, even though everything in it is accurate. There’s not this idea of trying to be completely transparent, because the milieu is totally opaque. Even though I was tempted to do that, it’s impossible. The scene in the subway is a good example: some people standing up are reading newspapers and magazines with things written on them about organized crime. I included this sequence so that you understand what was happening. Inside the mob, people couldn’t talk to me: I had to go outside to get information for the movie. So I filmed that. But Kumagai told me, if you do that, I’m dead. If the bosses find out, now that he’s been demoted, he could be killed. Therefore, I’ve put a cover on the newspaper for the time being: on this digital cover you can read the character “Mu,” which is on Ozu’s grave – the character means flash, whiteness, nothing – and I hoped that I could one day remove this digital cover to show what’s underneath. Even though I wanted to give more information, the mob wouldn’t allow it. I’d like to remove it, but I gave my word to Kumagai. I have to respect my word.

In almost all of your movies, there’s a sort of “formal operator,” an object that more or less shapes reality, as in Tokyo Eyes, where the hero has cast himself in the role of an upholder of the law and wears glasses that make him nearsighted so that he can’t aim his gun accurately. Here, what exactly was your idea with the automatic translator?
The idea was to put the object to a different use. I think it’s an incredible sign of progress to have a machine that gives a simultaneous translation, with practically no intermediary. What’s good about the devise is that it can be used in any setting, including settings that are outside of morality. This is great. It’s a prosthesis, in Virilio’s sense of the word. I don’t know why I like that. I don’t have a gift for languages and it helps me overcome my weakness. And this idea that the ultimate use is unforeseen, and it’s used for emotions. I would’ve liked to speak more easily to Kumagai with this electronic translator. With someone translating, you can’t do everything. The machine removes obstacles. I was also very interested in the prototype for a GPS for lovers I used a little in Novo: it’s impossible, because one person becomes the target for the other. In civilian life, it could be considered a weapon.

But you strive to use it in a positive way, and not, for example, to point out lies in the image, as it would have been used for a very long time.
It’s not the image that’s lying, but rather – and this is bit of my 21st century reporter coming out here – I use it to go beyond the veil, in my own little way. When I used this kind of thing in the documentary I did on Kiarostami, it was to show that he wasn’t the great naturalist that everyone talks about, but a director. I’m especially interested in shifting, or exposing, reality, but not in a militant way.

In your approach to a town like Tokyo, starting with Tokyo Eyes, you show that it’s completely opaque for a foreigner, and yet everything’s much more out in the open than in Western cities.
That’s right, everything’s out in the open. What I enjoy every time I work there is that I don’t have any interface with the people. Everything’s direct. In the discussions and the behavior, there’s no way to lie for either side. You can hide things, which Kumagai was good at. But we had a specific type of friendship that made it impossible to feign things. And when you have that, particularly in Japanese society, there’s room for irony, the kind of irony you see especially in Ozu’s movies. It’s possible with them when you have a special rapport – a simple, human rapport. There’s a bit of that in the film. In that rocklike environment, seemingly frozen, there’s an extraordinary humor and irony. I never forgot, of course, that there were victims, and that if I were Japanese, I surely wouldn’t want to be in their presence and fall prey to them.

Have you had any reactions from the Japanese?
Very little. In the 1992 anti-gang law – this isn’t spelled out, but you can read into it – the Japanese don’t have the right to film real Yakuza because it could serve as propaganda. Like the Marcellin laws in France for groups on the far left. I have some Japanese friends who’ve seen it and who’ve skirted the issue by saying they like the rhythm a lot or that it’s very original, but I haven’t heard anything on the experience itself. Even at Cannes, where there are the largest number of freelance Japanese reporters, they didn’t write a single article.

Isn’t the movie going to be shown over there?
For the time being, we don’t know. That’s what happens when you deal with reality. I know Kumagai opened his door to me for a reason. He was convinced it would create a bond between the young man and him, that they’d share something. He didn’t imagine for a second that Naoki would run away. When it happened, he was on the verge of depression, extremely shaken up. Because of his position in the mob, he was afraid of the reactions the film would elicit. For the time being. There were Japanese distributors at Cannes who were ready to take a risk on the film – taking risks in Japanese distribution is a tricky business. Neighborhoods are controlled by different groups, and there are problems with funds and racketeering. The producer for Tokyo Eyes, who’s had three movie theaters built, has to pay off the mobsters every month. He can’t do anything about it because the whole neighborhood is controlled by the mob. Since Kumagai was stripped of his functions after the movie was shot, he asked us not to release it in Japan and not to screen it in festivals there, although we could have shown at Yamagata, for example. I told him the movie would circulate anyway: it has aired on Finish TV, there are bootleg versions of it and some Japanese are sure to download it. Also, in the movie business, people expect a little that everything will go through Shigehiko Hasumi (editor’s note: historian, critic, academic researcher on French literature, professor emeritus and former president of the University of Tokyo). But I can’t get Hasumi involved in this kind of film. So the movie’s on hold.
What happened with Kumagai is that in one scene, he showed some favorite objects of his ex-godfather, who was dead – sweatpants, things like that. Several months later, a year after the godfather’s death, there was supposed to be an election. That day, like in a Johnny To movie, there were two competing elections with two rivals. Kumagai chose the founder’s grandson, whom he was very close to and with whom he had planned to share the power. The police gave press conferences announcing there was a lot of tension and a potential gang war. Ultimately, the rival clan to Kumagai’s brought the 91-year-old founder out of retirement, and the founder voted against his grandson; so Kumagai lost. He was stripped of all his duties, including control of the mob’s “military” business. They kept him in the mob because he could be dangerous; he’s still responsible for his own family, but he’s been weakened. I went back to Tokyo in December and the day after I arrived, the founder of the ring died at the age of 94. Kumagai wanted to take back control. He didn’t think it was right for the name of the dynasty to come to an end and thus wanted to put in the grandson, although he’d dropped out of organized crime. The grandson, who was thirty years old, who had studied in London and speaks perfect English, went back to Japan to take over. He was basically learning to become a mobster, dressing like someone out of the 1970s, with white socks. That’s what things are like now.

How did Kumagai end up going to Cannes, where Young Yakuza was shown in 2007?
I invited him. I told him that if the movie went to Cannes, it’d be good for him to come along. We put our agreement in the movie, and said that we wouldn’t film anything illegal and place the audience in the point of view of the police – that happens a lot with TV. It’s an untenable situation to be in, and can be quite dangerous. Inviting him was a way to make things more concrete, and to endorse the work a little. I showed him the movie as we went along, and I think he likes it, even though it’s not always to his advantage and shows him a bit weak. The movie could help his image, and that’s why he agreed at the time, when he was taking things over, but now that he’s been stripped of his duties, the movie doesn’t help him at all – it’s not an asset. He came to Cannes at the last minute, and we weren’t really prepared. But that’s one of his of his virtues: he doesn’t act like a legend.

How was Tokyo Eyes received in Japan?
The film was made with stars, young talents of the day, and it was a bit of a change for them because it’s not the kind of film you see them in the rest of the time. The audience just didn’t get it. It wasn’t very successful, but it stayed in theaters a while, people remember it and they come to the Shimokitazawa neighborhood where the movie was shot. Commercially, the change was too big for them.

One of the stars was Hinano Yoshikawa. She acted a couple years later in a film by Sori Yanagimachi that was part of the Directors’ Fortnight in 2005.
Hinano was mixed up in a big financial scandal with a golden boy who was her boyfriend. But I haven’t seen her since the movie, unlike Shinji Takeda. But when you’re slightly involved with the mob, you have to be a bit careful with old acquaintances, even if it’s only a question of working on a movie together.
I’ve had the idea for a long time. Documentaries are linked to duration, in Bergson’s sense of the word: every time I make a film and finish shooting, it’s only a preface, and the real work begins. For example, it’s time for me to make the second part to Cinéma, de notre temps about Kiarostami, especially because of our differences of opinion. The big difference between a documentary and fiction is time: the rest is the same, the way you shoot, the equipment… Both have the same way of “lying truthfully.” I know the work with the Kumagai-gumi isn’t over – I completed one story when Naoki ran off, and his running off marked a break in time.

You didn’t know that Naoki was going to leave the clan?
I knew he was sick and tired of it all. The kid’s a bit foolhardy and very brave, and isn’t afraid of risky experiences. When he was in the first office, there was a laundry room below it, where he did his wash. Every night, he’d tell the guards that he was going to the laundry room to do his laundry, while he was actually going to play pachinko (editor’s note: slot machines), and he’d win big. He’s an excessive gambler. He’d come back in the morning when everyone was still asleep and no one would say anything because he had a great sense of humor. He told me about it, but I couldn’t go and film him – it would’ve put him in danger. I thought of a lot of different scenarios, and especially one in which he left the clan after a year. If he hadn’t escaped, they wouldn’t have let him leave, because of a complicated question of honor. So I organized a meeting between Naoki and Shinji Aoyama in a park, which I filmed, so that he could meet the boy and perhaps take him on to move equipment, as a grip or an assistant, on Sad Vacation, which he was supposed to shoot. Shinji agreed and I’d planned to film the job interview; Kumagai would’ve accepted to let him leave if it were to work in cinema. So he had this way out, which had been set up, and planned out. The last scene Céline Bozon and I filmed with Naoki was the karate scene. He was ill at ease, which paradoxically put him in a euphoric state. We had a mad evening, a hilarious one, with him laughing and imitating everyone. We took him back to the dormitory and everything was going well. I never thought he’d skip out. Naoki was aware of my scenario to get him out of this mess. His friends called him to go to a party in the afternoon, and he lied to the clan, saying that his grandfather was ill. They let him go out, he went to the party, got drunk and when he left it around 10 pm, he was staggering, and he lost his phone, which contained important numbers. He took the Yamanote Line (editor’s note: a circular subway line that never stops), went around Tokyo six times and ended up in a public park where he sobered up, and decided it was too late to go home. That night, he went to the dormitory to pick up his things, and without anyone noticing, he left with his walkman, his reggae albums and his clothes, and hid out for nearly a year at people’s homes. It was hard for me too: without Naoki, I had no film. I even thought about hiring and filming a private investigator to find him, but that would have been complicated because I would’ve been forced to get the mob involved… So we filmed Kumagai’s decline and the arrest of Naoki’s friends. He got back in touch while I was doing the sound mixing – in fact, he got in touch with his mother through some go-betweens, that’s all. He’d been gambling for a year and had won a fortune. We weren’t very worried about him; we even thought he’d end up buying out the family. But he was tired of hiding out, even though he’d ended up staying in the same neighborhood of Shinagawa, where he could have bumped into members of the family. He decided to stop gambling and get a job. He’s currently working on a construction site. But with respect to the movie, he took a huge, and reckless, risk by going against the mob’s laws and their moral judgment.

When the characters say at the end of the movie, “The empire of beauty is more vast than the moral world,” is the quotation about him?
In a way, yes. It’s a fragment of Nietzsche’s Daybreak, a passage where he’s asking why we’re never drawn to people who do bad things, why we can’t bear that sort of thing. You can write about a bad landscape, but not about a bad person. We translated it into Japanese, and it sounds quite good, so the rappers sing it at the end. Naoki adopted it immediately, and made it his own. It’s all part of the cinematic process.

Paris, 2008 March 13, by Antoine Thirion