Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Places We Knew’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I studied Electrical Engineering and worked as an embedded firmware engineer at Tesla Energy, which was a dream job. We worked on ambitious projects that felt useful to humanity. Despite my love for engineering, I’d come home and immerse myself in drawing, photography, and music. My wife and I wanted to have kids, so I explored ways that would allow me to fulfill my passions while also being present at home.
At the time, I was seeing a therapist to manage the immense stress from work, and that’s when the idea of filmmaking first came up. Filmmaking combined organization and planning from engineering with creative expression. Philosophically, I wanted to devote my life to a noble cause, and storytelling felt the most humanistic.
With the support and guidance of a mentor, Dean Patrick Kriwanek, I directed my first short film BENTO, a story about a Japanese American middle school student who deals with bullying on his first day of school in America. The experienced reinforced my commitment to the craft. From there, I attend the London Film School for formal training.
Tell us about ‘Places We Knew’. How do you describe it?
As a Japanese American, my perspective is neither one culture nor the other but rather a tangled hybrid. The search for identity is rooted in who I am. There is beauty in having a diverse heritage, but the flip side of spending time in one place is that it requires not being in the other. Without the renewal of lived experiences, memory can outlive and even overtake reality. "Places We Knew" was created to question the power of memory versus lived experience when forming identity. The film attempts to stir the difficult feeling of loss to a once familiar place.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
This is never an easy question - there are so many influences! Werner Herzog’s idea of how certain ecstatic truths, as he calls them, can only be reached through the imagination rather than just facts, resonates. Ruben Ostlund’s unconventional shooting style to maximize performance challenges me to think about process and result. Hirokazu Koreeda’s humanistic and family-centric narratives are an ultimate inspiration of how the resilience of the human spirit can be simultaneously delicate and profound. To name some others, Robert Eggers, Sean Wang, and Lulu Wang.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
When thinking about my ideal project, words like absorbing, honest, and challenging come to mind. But then I focus less on the specific content and more on the approach to creating it. For me, the essence of the ideal project lies not in the WHAT but in the HOW.
Given a generous budget, I would prioritize a tailored approach to serve the story, even if it conflicts with conventional or efficient methods. Yes, films exist in the market as a commodity and process standardization enables an industry to thrive. But films also exist within the context of history, serving as time capsules of culture and our human experiences. I try to focus on this apsect as much as resources allow.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Planning and previsualizing are crucial. There are times when it is cheap to have ideas (development) and times when it is expensive to have ideas (on set during production). LFS introduced me to a workflow of pre-shooting the entire film in extremely low fidelity. Reviewing the pre-shoot is a nice way to see develop that bridge between intent and execution. I find it is a way to spend cheap hours to save expensive hours.
Previsualization acts to exercise and condition that vision but is ultimately dropped when production arrives. After preparing as much as possible, I trust the team, myself, and the moment.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Places We Knew’.
Places We Knew was developed during COVID, and due to Japan’s entry restrictions, I was unable to bring any crew from London. This meant I needed to find everyone from within Japan, but my network was nonexistent since as I had never shot a film there before.
English Language Film School Japan was hosting an online networking event, so I joined from London and met a few people. I connected with a Canadian filmmaker, Philippe McKie, who was releasing his first feature. He had worked as a fixer in Tokyo and introduced me to cinematographer Hans Bobànovits and editor Milène Ortenberg. From there, Hans really helped crew up while I focused on casting.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
“Places We Knew” is a proof-of-concept for a feature and is essentially the inciting incident that launches a bigger story. I’m currently revising the script while also shooting a few shorts to help establish myself as a director in Chicagoland area, where I live now. I’m excited to be a bridge between Chicago and Japan, and explore the Asian American experience at large.
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