Baby Warukyure” Yugo Sakamoto’s motivation for starting to make films

When I was a child, I was not particularly enthusiastic about anything,” says film director Yugo Sakamoto, 26.

Says film director Yugo Sakamoto (26), looking embarrassed. He began making films in earnest when he was in college, and has now made five commercial films, including “A Certain Office Worker” and “Baby Warchure. His style seems hard-edged for a man in his twenties, with a reputation for full-fledged action and violence films reminiscent of karate and other martial arts. However, his reason for starting to make films was quite simple.

When I was in high school, the movie “Kirishima, Bukkatsu Yamerutte yo” was a hit. I had watched a lot of movies since I was a kid, but I didn’t have any friends I could get together with and talk about movies with. But “Kirishima” was the talk of the town on the radio and Twitter, so I was very interested in the movie. It was a lot of fun to have a lot of friends to talk about movies with after seeing this movie.

As an extension of that, when I was in high school, I shot a gag horror film with four or five of my friends using just a video camera, in which friends who were supposed to have left repeatedly came out of the kotatsu, and we screened it at a cultural festival. That was the first film I ever made.”

He says that he originally preferred a contrived style to films with violence and action.

I was in the drama club in high school, so I had a lot of opportunities to watch high school theater competitions. In high school theater, productions based on social issues tend to be evaluated highly, but I was more interested in parodies of “Journey to the West,” which would have been eliminated from the regional competitions. I really liked the worldview of “Tokyo03” comedy, but no one else in my high school was doing that.

He says he started making action films because he wanted to make something interesting like that.

I love action, but in Japan, if you shoot it like a straight Western film, it gets buried. I think that the action scenes are what make the banter more interesting. I think the gap between the two is one of our strengths. Thinking back, when I was a kid, “Die Hard” and “Spider-Man” were very popular, and they were often broadcast on TV.

During the summer holidays, there was a “Terminator Festival for three weeks in a row! It’s hard to imagine that nowadays (laughs). (laughs). For my generation, I think we saw a lot of movies like that that weren’t animated.

In his third year of college, Sakamoto, who tended to pursue shocking films, had a moment of pause.

I was getting carried away because my films were getting attention, but that was because the cruel films I made were shocking, not because I was being evaluated for any technique or idea. Then, when it came time to look for another direction, I decided to stretch the action elements that my films have in common.”

After deciding on a direction, he also made a new attempt at story structure.

I try not to bully the weak. It’s an action film, and it’s easy in terms of the script to make one bad guy in particular and beat him up. But I don’t want to do anything goofy now. I want to take on the challenge of making a new film with action as a weapon. I would like to make a film that switches from a daily life story to an action story while you are watching the film, or something like …….

At the 31st Japan Film Critics Awards, he won the Best New Director Award. He continues to pursue “interesting” films with action as his weapon.

From theJuly8, 2022issue ofFRIDAY