Turning the World to Rust: An Interview with Japanese Film Critic Tom Mes

Judge Joel Pearce

August 12th, 2005

To coincide with his recent review of Tartan Film's Special Edition of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Judge Joel Pearce had the opportunity to interview Tom Mes. An acclaimed film critic and expert on Japanese cinema, Mes is uniquely qualified on the topic of Tetsuo. Judge Pearce was able to pick his brain about the film, as well as Mes's latest book, The Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. Mes is also the author of Agitator: The Films of Takashi Miike and co-author of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film.

DVD Verdict: What was it about the Japanese film industry that captured your attention? What film was it that got you hooked?

Tom Mes: I'd been interested in Japanese film and Japanese culture since childhood. I have no idea where it came from, but I was fascinated by the image of the samurai and I remember seeing some of Akira Kurosawa's film, like Seven Samurai, when I was about nine. But what got me hooked was a procession of films that began to come through in the early '90s. There was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine and of course Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo and Tetsuo II. Essentially, that procession didn't stop.

Growing up in Rotterdam, Holland, the only way for me to see these films was the annual Rotterdam Film Festival, so every year I would try to see more Japanese films. Thankfully they tend to program a lot of them, so I was quickly introduced to other directors like Rokuro Mochizuki, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sabu, Naomi Kawase, Takashi Miike, and on and on. It just kind of snowballed, really.

Verdict: Before we get started on the questions about The Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, I want to take advantage of your wider expertise. What films do you recommend to people who want to dig into Japanese cult cinema?

Mes: There's so much of it, it's hard to know where to start. A lot of the films that have been coming out on DVD lately have been from the last ten years or so, so I assume that people reading this will already know about Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano and so on. Maybe they should look back a bit further. Anything by Yasuzo Masumura, Seijun Suzuki, Kenji Misumi, Kihachi Okamoto, Kinji Fukasaku or Yasuharu Hasebe will more than give you your cult movie fix.

Verdict: Why did you choose to write a book on Shinya Tsukamoto?

Mes: He'd been one of the first to turn my attention back eastward and ever since then he's remained consistently fascinating. His new films are just as great as his early attention-grabbers. At the same time, he's been independent for almost his entire career, which is very rare in Japan. And I mean truly independent: finding his own budgets, directing, shooting, editing, designing, and acting in his own films. He's just a fascinating guy and I wanted to know how he could keep that up for nearly twenty years, with no end in sight. On the practical side, I could get in touch with him fairly easily to ask if he would cooperate on a book, since I'd met and interviewed him several times before. And he had only made eight films that were pretty easy to get hold of, which was quite a different situation from the book I wrote about Takashi Miike, Agitator.

Verdict: Shinya Tsukamoto is often described as a savior of the Japanese film industry. Why were the late 1980s such a perfect time for him to arrive on the scene? What long-term impact have his films had on Japanese cinema?

Mes: "Savior" may be overstating it a bit, but he definitely gave Japanese films a major boost on the international scene. Tetsuo was the first Japanese film in ages to spark strong foreign interest in Japanese movies. It just so happened that around that time a couple of other young filmmakers made their debuts, like Kitano, Rokuro Mochizuki, Junji Sakamoto and so on. The late '80s and early '90s saw the emergence of an entirely new generation of filmmakers and all of them benefitted from each other's presence. Being part of a movement or a generation always has its benefits in getting publicity and attention. That emergence would have happened without Tsukamoto as well, but he was the one who attracted the eyes of the rest of the world because his films fit in so well with what was happening in science-fiction and horror in the US and Europe at the time. The others could hitch a ride, so to speak.

Verdict: The first viewing of Tetsuo: The Iron Man can be quite daunting. What advice can you give to DVD Verdict readers planning to watch the film for the first time?

Mes: Turn up the volume!

Verdict: Shinya Tsukamoto has crammed so much into a short running time. From what angle did you approach the film in your book?

Mes: I look at every film in the context of his entire body of work. So I wanted to show how Tetsuo contains the seeds for everything he's done since then, but also how it was influenced by his activities before that, like his short films, his theater work, his childhood fascinations, the urban environment he grew up in, and so on. Because Tetsuo isn't the start of Tsukamoto as a filmmaker. It's not even his first feature, because he had already made a two-hour movie on 8mm when he was 17.

Verdict: What were Tsukamoto's influences for Tetsuo: The Iron Man?

Mes: They range from Japanese monster movies, to David Cronenberg, to Blade Runner and Alien. There's obviously a lot of cyberpunk and body horror in there. He was, and still is, a huge fan of American science fiction. At the same time, there's some really unexpected stuff in there, too. There's clearly a flavor of experimental theater and dance, and a lot of emulating of silent film, especially the style of the German Expressionists. It's the noisiest silent film ever made.

Verdict: Where has this visual and conceptual style led in his later films?

Mes: His films have become much more polished and professional-looking, but up until very recently he has stuck to that very recognizable, manic style. Even if the budgets have gone up, he still makes films much the same way as during the time of Tetsuo, filling all the important slots on the crew himself. His latest movie Vital sees him calming down a bit, but it's still unmistakably a Tsukamoto film. He's still willing to go the extra mile to freak you out. He's a true independent filmmaker, so he has been able to grow and develop very gradually and do his own thing. The concepts are also still there, you could easily put Tetsuo and Vital side by side and spot the similarities in the themes and the preoccupations.

Verdict: Was the rough, low budget look and feel of Tetsuo: The Iron Man an artistic choice or a financial necessity? How does it play into the film's success?

Mes: On the one hand it was a choice, because he said he consciously tried to create the grainy black-and-white look. On the other hand, shooting on 35mm was never an option, so it's not like he had a whole range of choices and then decided to go for the grain. It works really well for the film, though. I think it reminded a lot of people of David Lynch's films, especially Eraserhead, which helped in getting Tetsuo recognized abroad.

Verdict: Is Tetsuo: The Iron Man a purely visceral experience? What deeper meaning can be discovered below the surface?

Mes: The experience of watching it ties in with what's being said below the surface. It's the same thing. All of Tsukamoto's movies deal with how the human body has become numb by living in the sterile, lifeless city environment. In his films he always treats a case of somebody breaking out of that grind, and usually the way they do it is by awakening their senses through pain. They wake up violently, so to speak. When you watch the film, you really get to feel the way the character feels; you get shook up, turned inside out, your eardrums shattered. When it's all over you've experienced something, you didn't just sit on your ass for two hours staring at a screen.

Verdict: What influence has Tetsuo: The Iron Man had on the Japanese film industry?

Mes: I'd love to say that it influenced lots of directors since, but oddly enough his style hasn't been copied all that much. Maybe it's because Tsukamoto usually takes up to six months to shoot a film and most Japanese directors get four weeks at most. Nobody has the luxury to fiddle around with their films as much as Tsukamoto does. What Tetsuo did do was make it easier for independent and self-financed films to find distribution, which benefited a lot of different directors working in a lot of different genres, especially the more arthouse oriented ones like Hirokazu Koreeda or Makoto Shinozaki. But the biggest effect it had was in breaking down a lot of barriers for foreign exposure. Tetsuo found Japanese movies a whole new audience abroad, a much younger audience than the one that had been watching Akira Kurosawa's films before.

Verdict: What other directors and films should fans of Shinya Tsukamoto seek out?

Mes: There's only one Tsukamoto, but if you like his style you will no doubt also love Sogo Ishii, who was experimenting with a very similar visual sense ten years before Tsukamoto came along. Unfortunately most of his early and best stuff like Burst City and Crazy Thunder Road is almost impossible to find, but his recent one-hour audiovisual extravaganza Electric Dragon 80,000V is widely available on DVD. Make sure you have a good sound system, though. Two other directors that Tsukamoto fans might be interested in are Shojin Fukui and Kei Fujiwara. They both worked with Tsukamoto on Tetsuo (Fujiwara is the lead actress in that film) and their styles are heavily influenced by him. Try Fukui's Rubber's Lover and Fujiwara's Organ for a real cyberpunk/body horror fix (or overdose).