Shunji Iwai loves women. The camera of his long-time collaborator, Noboru Shinoda, captures their faces as they light up like fireworks, as they crumble in grief, as they watch their life flicker out, as they mourn and celebrate, as they become prostitutes and pop stars, as they write letters to dead lovers and turn away from living ones, as they leave their old lives behind and fly away into the skies of a brave new world, and as they're brought crashing down to earth by the cold, cruel world around them. Edited to the spastic rhythms of the future's digital heartbeat, no one makes films this rapturously gorgeous anymore. Pulling together influences from shojo manga, trendy Japanese TV dramas, icons from the cult of celebrity, and the eternal healing power of pop music, Shunji Iwai has become the Douglas Sirk of the new world order, and no other moviemaker seems as effortlessly modern as he does: his films exist five minutes in the future and they never look back.

Coming out of a career as a television writer, he surfaced with some award-winning shorts before his first feature, LOVE LETTER (1995), a masterpiece of romance and mourning that he then turned into a manga and a novel. Editing, and often scoring, his movies Iwai labors long and hard and is reluctant to let his subjects go as mere movies. SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY (1996), his second feature, was an immigration epic set slightly in the future where a polyglot community of scam artists counterfeited gobs of fake cash and ran afoul of psycho gangsters. It become a sensation, the size of PULP FICTION, and ran practically forever. The lead, J-pop star Chara, started the Yentown Band in SWALLOWTAIL, and the band lived on after filming, touring Asia under the watchful eyes of its producer, Shunji Iwai.

His next film, APRIL STORY (1998), a dreamy golden fable of a young woman moving to the big city and falling in love was anchored and elevated by Takako Matsu's radiant star turn. Some folks found this miniaturist digression treasonous, but his latest, ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), is a return to the epic scope of SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY. An elaborate experiment in turning a non-existent pop star into a realworld entity, CHOU-CHOU has solved more problems than most directors knew existed: giving dignity to the interior lives of teen bullies, making keyboard typing work onscreen, creating a pop icon who's never seen. The movie is maddening and revelatory, it takes big chances and for every one that doesn't work there's another right after it that lights up the screen like fireworks.

So why haven't we heard of Shunji Iwai in the US?  It's simple: the critics hate him. LOVE LETTER played to standing-room-only crowds on its release in Tokyo, SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY became a cultural touchstone in Japan, APRIL STORY was a landmark one-man show (Iwai even designed the tickets and carted the prints to theaters himself), and LILY CHOU-CHOU made big waves across the country. But most American critics are middle-aged men, and middle-aged men don't want to hear about women's feelings, or the internet, they don't believe in pop music or that teenagers have real feelings. They only want to watch movies made by other middle-aged men about the kind of things middle-aged men care about, like having sex with teenage girls (hence - GHOST WORLD).

At the end of the day, Iwai cares about women and children, and while they may get first dibs on lifeboat seats, most people who regard themselves as serious consumers of modern culture could care less. Iwai is fascinated by women because he thinks they're tough. Not because they kick ass or beat up bad guys but because they're alive in a way many men are scared to be. In Asia, audiences have voted with their pocketbooks: Iwai is regarded as one of the most successful living Japanese directors, in Hong Kong his movies are big events, and in Korea he's the only Japanese director to have two of his films in the box office top ten. In America? We barely even know he exists.

(NOTE: since this interview, way back in 2001, Shunji Iwai has gone on to make the transcendent HANA & ALICE (2004), and then he's disappeared, working as a producer on movies like BANDAGE (2010). In 2011 he delivered his English language directorial debut, VAMPIRE, which vanished without a trace, then he made A BRIDE FOR RIP VAN WINKLE (2016) which was also released as a 6-episode TV series. His latest film is LAST LETTER (2020) but these days he works at a snail’s pace and it's our loss. This interview was conducted after ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU played a press screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.)

Q: During the press conference you had talked about how people in Japan needed to toughen up, but I noticed while watching the film that most of the female characters seemed tough enough already. Do you feel women are especially well-equipped to deal with life, especially at that age?


A: Women are always tough, and I feel like they are much stronger than me, at least. In Japan, there was a tradition for women to leave the family home and go into an entirely new village, alone, and marry into an entirely new family and have children there, so if you think about that tradition, I guess the women in Japan have always been conditioned to be tough.

Q: Most of your films are centered around a very strong female performance, often a real-life icon like Chara. Was it difficult working on a film like this where the central characters were two boys, and the central female character was never seen onscreen?


A: You're right that this is the first time I'm making a film this way, and it was a nice change. It wasn't that difficult for me.

Q: A lot of your movies become more than just movies. They go on to be manga, TV shows, websites. Why can't you just leave them alone and let them stand as movies?



A: I guess I always try to explore new possibilities and that's why there're different products for my films. If I focus solely on the film I almost feel like a child doing a report for school, so I try to do different things that don't fit into a fixed pattern.

Q: Why don't Americans get your films? Do you think there's something cultural that keeps them from engaging with them in the same way the Japanese audience does?


A: I personally feel that people are the same no matter where you go, and I never have the experience where you take the same film to a different country and people receive it differently. I think people generally tend to receive films the same no matter what nationality they may be.

Q: It's just strange that most of your films can't be seen in the United States.


A: I think generally it's difficult for Japanese films to be seen abroad, and I think that's been true for a long time. I think with LOVE LETTER some buyers saw it in Toronto and later on they came to japan to acquire the film but the people on the Japanese side were not very well-versed in negotiating distribution deals. So now it's been sold to America, but you can't find it on video anywhere.

Q: You generally do more than just direct your films. You compose the music, and in the case of APRIL STORY you even designed the tickets.


A: I guess I do like wearing many hats, but it is hard to do more than one role at a time. However, as a director the more roles you can fill in the production process the better off you are. At the end of the day teamwork is essential to the filmmaking process, but it's not always the case that you can get a team of people you like or even people who are capable. So sometimes it's the case that you must cover areas which are not as strong as you want them to be. It's important to know different elements of the craft so that you can either fill in or find ways to make parts that are not as strong as you want them to be as strong as you want them to be. For example, in this film I collaborated with Kobayashi Takashi for the music, but schedule-wise he wasn't able to commit to do all the vocal chorus scenes and so, since I can write music, I said I would handle that part. and that's an example of what I'm talking about.