Interview

with Japanese writer-director Sion Sono and actress Sakura Ando

How do you research a film like this? Did you spend months locked in your room watching porn?

Sion Sono: I didn’t need to. I knew a lot of it already. The main character Yu is based on a friend of mine who makes Peek-A-Panty films professionally. I used to make them with him, when I was poor. 

Professionally?

SS: There’s a real market in it. A good Peek-A-Panty DVD can cost 10,000 Yen (about €73). People make a lot of money with it. Plus I was in a religious cult for about a month, just like the Zero Church that Yu joins in the film.

Why?

SS: I was lonely and poor and I had nothing to eat, and they picked me up when I was wandering the streets. I had to clean and do a lot of the humiliating stuff shown in the film.

How did you get away from them after that month?

SS: Well, I didn’t give them my real name, and I didn’t have an address at the time, so…

The movie has a very dark view of religious cults.

SS: There are many religious cults in Japan. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it is said that one in every four or five people is in one. In fact, put together, these new sects have become larger than the traditional religions like Buddhism or Christianity. I’m very interested in this phenomenon.

How big is Scientology in Japan?

SS: We don’t have much Scientology – we have much crazier cults like sex cults and so on. The Zero Church in the movie is really influenced by the notorious Aum [Shinrikyo] sect that carried out those terror attacks on the subway [in Tokyo, in 1995].

Is there a tradition of pervert films in Japan?

SS: No there isn’t. Usually Japanese films are about family, a normal love between man and woman, that sort of thing.

Love Exposure has a very conflicted attitude to mainstream religion. Were you brought up Catholic?

SS: I was thinking about becoming Catholic, but I’m not normal enough for the Church. I like Jesus Christ, but I can’t get too close to Christianity. If there was a fan club for Jesus, I would be in that fan club.

Are you influenced by film-makers like Takashi Miike, who also has a sick imagination?

SS: People always ask me this. I’m impressed by the number of films he makes, but apart from Ichi the Killer and Audition, I don’t really like his stuff. Visitor Q  is good too. He is an interesting director, but there’s no connection between us.

What is really good about Love Exposure is that it is very cynical about almost everything except its own characters. They all have good hearts, no matter how evil they are. And we get learn all their back stories. It’s a film that loves its characters. Was that your 
intention?

SS: That developed later in the writing. At the beginning, this story was a simple love story between a boy and a girl, but then the father and the mother came in, and the evil one, and I found I had to tell all the stories. The film just grew and grew, until it was four hours long.

Sakura Ando: I don’t think my character is evil, by the way. It was very challenging to play this role, but I also enjoyed it a lot. I put all my love into this character. It’s very rare to get a role like this and it’s very different from the other roles I play.

How different?

SA: Well, I made another film at the same time where I played a virgin school girl who hadn’t had her period yet. I've never had a role like this before.

Whose idea was the Bond villain-style pet budgie which she carries around with her?

SS: That was in the script, and the idea was that it was the only friend she had for her whole life.

SA: And I was allergic to it. I got a rash every time it sat on me. I hated that bird.

Love Exposure opens August 13

March 2010 [issue 81]