Top 40 Hirokazu Kore-eda Quotes

I particularly relate to the films of Mikio Naruse and Shinichi Kamoshita, a person whose work I watched very much as a child, a director of family dramas for television.

When I have been told that my films remind people of Ozu, I have never been too convinced.

I would say that ‘After the Storm’ is much more informed by my personal life than my other movies.

I am very happy that Japanese film can cross borders.

I’m less interested in death itself than in people whose lives are touched by it.

The vividness of children is easier to see when they’re completely left to their own devices.

The Japanese don’t have a specific religion, but a spirituality. A cap, shoes, and a table have a spirituality. When you eat an apple, you don’t say you eat it: you say, ‘I am receiving it.’ Kind of like you are thanking the food.

With ‘Nobody Knows,’ I consciously set out to make a fiction film, which is a different approach from ‘Distance,’ but I still applied a lot of the things I learned from making ‘Distance’: for example, how to use the camera in relation to the children and how to create the right atmosphere on set.

Yes, a family is interesting. You can get a lot of drama in the conflicts there. It’s like the sea. It seems calm, but inside there is conflict.

I have been told that… time doesn’t flow in a straight line in my films. It goes round in a circle. Sometimes people comment that the films remind them of Ozu. Maybe that’s right. But in Japan, nobody comments on how time passes in my films. So perhaps that is a different way of thinking.

We can see loss as something missing, but that missing space can be filled with something else, and that creates healing.

Tokyo is wonderful for distribution of international films, a lot of Iranian films, Taiwanese films. But most of the art films are from Europe and Asia.

I am hopeful that films can connect people who are in conflict in a separated world.

My grandfather had Alzheimer’s. He would eat everything and anything that was around; then he wouldn’t remember that he ate it and would demand to be fed again.

There’s a difference between people being free and the atmosphere of ‘freedom.’

Privacy is not really a concept in Japan.

I never want to be the all-knowing god of the story, manipulating what’s to happen or the action.

There was a time when I thought Kim Novak was the sexiest woman in the world.

When I was 27, I won an honorable mention in a scriptwriting contest and got a television job as an assistant director.

I think a lot of Japanese morals are built around what the dead would think of us.

When I watch an actress say a line, I watch how they deliver the lines with gestures.

I watch ‘Electronic Boy’ faithfully every week – not because I like the show but because I’m interested in where the smartest T.V. producers and directors are going, what direction they are headed in.

Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.

As the Japanese family gets more and more atomized, grandparents don’t live with the nuclear family, so parents of children can’t consult with their own parents about how to raise their children and rely on that to help raise them.

‘Like Father, Like Son’ gave me the opportunity to show when it is not good with a father.

I don’t really like something serious depicted in a serious way; that’s not my style.

I wanted to make ‘Nobody Knows,’ a kind of summation of the experiences I gained from making my first three films, the good ones as well as the bad ones.

I’ve been a fan of Yoshida Akimi’s manga for a long time; she’s one of a few women’s manga writers that I always read.

When I choose child actors, I chose them for their personalities. And then I work with their own vocabulary, so I’m not imposing text or dialogue on them: I’m just receiving.

A film is not a vehicle to accuse, or to relay a specific message. If we reduce a film to this, we lose all hope for cinema to ignite a richer conversation.

It’s definitely good to have a hit from time to time, though not too often. If you have a few hits in a row, people start to think every film you make will be a hit, which is a big mistake.

My mother loved films! She adored Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Vivien Leigh. We couldn’t afford to go together to the cinema, but she was always watching their movies on TV.

Fast cutting, loud music, blood spewing everywhere, and gunshots permeating the scenes does not necessarily make for a shocking movie.

The children in ‘Nobody Knows’ had a resonance with me. The children are projections of myself.

You only get back what you are prepared to put in.

Japanese society doesn’t have a god – no absolute presence.

We used to have prawn tempura: that was my mother’s favourite dish. But she had to go out to work instead of my father, so she couldn’t find the time to cook nice meals. So we ate more modern food: a lot of frozen and instant food. But I never complained about it to my mother.

I grew up without a father.

I’m so entranced by what unfolds in front of the camera. It seems wonderfully out of my control.

Reflecting on the past, where the film industry became united with ‘national interest’ and ‘national policy,’ I tend to think that keeping a clear distance from government authority is the right thing to do.