Variety spoke with Kiyoshi Kurosawa the day after the world premiere of his World War II suspense drama “Wife of a Spy” in competition at the Venice Film Festival. A frequent invitee to Venice, Can…
. A frequent invitee to Venice, Cannes and other major festivals, Kurosawa did the interview via Zoom from the Tokyo office of his Japanese distributor. “This is the first time I haven’t been able to go to a big festival like that,” says Kurosawa. “I would have liked the three main cast members see the film with the audience. It’s really regrettable that they couldn’t go.”
Yes, I wanted to make the scary parts scary, but this film was not my idea from the start. Two of my former students – Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Tadashi Nohara – wrote the script. Their original story was really interesting with the suspense and the melodrama both well done. I just added a bit of scariness.
You shot the film before the pandemic, but Higashide’s military policeman is something like the coronavirus – lurking in the background, but with the power to upend lives in an instant. He and his comrades give the film an atmosphere of anxiety that feels somehow contemporary. That feeling is also present in some classic Japanese films made during and after the war. Did you give your cast advice about what to watch to better understand the period?
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