‘You’ve got the drama, now!’ I just wanted a good movie. “It was Stephen, the director, who hesitated shooting!” He laughed. Some people would have scrapped the documentary as soon as they got sick, but Sakamoto never entertained the idea. In “Coda,” he says that it still feels like a joke - we all know that we’re going to die, but so few of us actually believe it.
#Ryuichi sakamoto m.a.y. in the backyard movie#
“It was the first time in 40 years that ordinary Japanese people walked into the streets and were speaking out against nuclear energy.” He wanted to preserve the urgency of that understanding, to be able to bottle it up and serve it back to people after life returned to the new kind of normal that it always does.And then, in the middle of making a movie about how the specter of death can allow us to see outside of ourselves, Sakamoto was diagnosed with a cancer that claims 50 percent of its victims within five years. “My intention was to document the Japanese anxiety after 3/11,” Sakamoto remembered. While Sakamoto is beloved, this opinion is an unpopular one that the Japanese press largely chooses to ignore. Schible, a long-term Japanese resident who earned a producing credit on “Lost In Translation” for handling local elements of production, approached Sakamoto about making a documentary to express his views, and perhaps impact the national conversation. “I began to sense danger and get alarmed,” he says in “Coda.” “I didn’t exactly know what was dangerous, but artists and musicians tend to sense things early, like canaries in a coal mine.” He ruminates on the idea that nuclear technology made humans the only species capable of complete self-annihilation, and laments the fact that even the greatest catastrophe only leaves behind a faint echo of its carnage - a hum that most people either can’t hear or choose to ignore.Įven before his cancer, Sakamoto was keyed in to the relationship between trauma and perspective, and horrified that Japan - of all countries - would invite another nuclear calamity by trying to obtain nuclear weapons. That preoccupation is part of what motivated him to become an environmentalist in the ’90s, and one of Japan’s most outspoken activists against nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Bowles died in 1999, but he can be heard reading that quote on the seminal album that Sakamoto wrote after finishing “The Revenant” - his voice is the primary instrument on the track that binds “Async” together.Įver since working on “The Sheltering Sky,” Sakamoto has been preoccupied with the shortsightedness of being alive, and the blinding power of the present moment. In “ Coda,” we learn that he owns Bowles’ novel in more than a dozen languages, and has this passage dog-eared and underlined in all of them. Ryuichi Sakamoto is obsessed with these words.
#Ryuichi sakamoto m.a.y. in the backyard full#
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
He appears on screen at the end of the film, and reads the novel’s signature passage over the soundtrack: A melodrama about a couple who journey into the Sahara Desert in a desperate attempt to save their marriage, author Paul Bowles later prefaced a new edition of his novel: “The less said about the film now, the better.” Ironically, Bowles is responsible for the adaptation’s best moment. “The Sheltering Sky” was no one’s finest moment.
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