Kore-eda Hirokazu ran the screenplay for his AI-themed Cannes title “Sheep in the Box” past a generative AI chatbot, then cut it loose after concluding that notes from something with no personal history with cinema were of no use to him.
Kore-eda, who is receiving the Cinema Honorary Award at the Singapore International Film Festival, says he shared the script with the chatbot because of the film’s subject matter and went back and forth with it several times. He nicknamed it “Chat-kun.”
Set in the near future, “Sheep in the Box,” which debuted at Cannes, follows a couple whose 7-year-old son died two years earlier and take in a humanoid robot built from his data. Ayase Haruka plays Otone, an architect who throws herself into caring for the robot, while comedian Yamamoto Daigo, in his first lead role, plays her husband Kensuke, who insists it is only a machine.
“It praised me a lot. Lots of praise, and then something like, ‘However, if you fleshed out the protagonist’s mother a little more, it would be a better film.’ What it said was correct,” Kore-eda tells Variety. “But it only ever says correct things. And I wondered what it was that made this so boring.”
Plenty of films are already being made by following that kind of advice, he says, pointing to action movies where a fight on the roof of a train arrives exactly when you expect it. “Situations all start to look alike: ‘They’ll go into a tunnel here,’” he says. “There are lots of films now that make you think there’s some computer serving as the model.”
His conclusion was that the chatbot has probably never lived a life that needed cinema. It may hold more film data than any ordinary viewer, he says, but it has no film that changed its life and no personal film history — not even the experience of getting hooked on something trashy before slowly learning what makes a movie good.
“However few films a person has seen, however skewed their taste, the opinion of someone who has a film that changed their life will lead to more interesting work in the end,” Kore-eda says. “After a few rounds I became convinced of that, so I ended our relationship there.”
He did not use AI on the film. The question of what humans “should” do in filmmaking is the wrong one, he says. Robots may one day outrun people, yet the Olympic 100 meter races will still be held and audiences will still be moved.
“That’s not because we should. It’s because it’s fun,” he says. “In the same way, the act of making things is fun. I’d like to stand on the human side. So I intend to keep AI out of the process as much as possible.”
The festival is also screening “Look Back,” Kore-eda’s live-action adaptation of Fujimoto Tatsuki’s 2021 one-shot manga, which competed in Venice. Deguchi Natsuki plays Fujino, an outgoing student who draws manga for her school newspaper, and Makita Aju plays Kyomoto, a reclusive classmate who idolizes her work. Their friendship, built on a shared love of making manga, carries into adulthood and ends in grief.
Kore-eda first read the manga during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a year when all of his filmmaking had come to a halt, and it pushed him back toward making films.
“In the end, I suppose it came down to: ‘I can’t quit now,’” he says.
About half of the producers and actors who helped him keep working over the years have since died, Kore-eda says, and he feels them watching him in the same way that Fujino feels watched by Kyomoto. “Realizing that was probably the big discovery for me. It’s never pressure. It’s encouragement, and it makes me want to do things properly, to make something properly.”
Of the two films he premiered this year in Cannes and Venice, he says: “If there’s a common point, I’d say it’s how we face the dead.”
Japanese cinema may be drawing international attention, but Kore-eda says challenges remain. Young Japanese directors are being noticed around the world, he says, yet filmmakers such as Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Fukada Koji often find it easier to raise money in France than at home.
“That’s the Japanese market. It’s really difficult. It’s a challenge for me too,” he says.
By his estimate, anime accounts for roughly 70% of Japan’s total box office, even though far more live-action films are made. Meanwhile, long-running independent arthouse cinemas, known in Japan as mini-theaters, have been closing one after another, and the culture now survives mainly in Tokyo and other big cities.
“Filmmakers up to the generation of Hamaguchi and Fukada grew up watching films in mini-theaters,” Kore-eda says. “When those disappear, how will the next filmmakers develop?”
Despite Japan’s shifting cinematic landscape, Kore-eda’s career has been going from strength to strength. Asked what the biggest change has been in the over three decades since his debut feature, “Maborosi,” he says: “Well, I suppose it’s realizing that it’s okay to be free.”