James Hadfield, 'Lost in Translation' at 20: A Tokyo perspective, Japan Times, September 9, 2023.
The opening paragraphs:
In the autumn of 2003, Japan was having a bit of a moment at the movies. That October, cinema audiences were treated to the spectacle of Uma Thurman clashing with the Crazy 88 yakuza gang in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.” A few weeks later, Tom Cruise could be seen getting in touch with his warrior spirit in Edward Zwick’s period epic, “The Last Samurai.”
But first out of the blocks was “Lost in Translation,” the sophomore feature by Sofia Coppola — a celebrity kid already well on her way to becoming a celebrated filmmaker in her own right.
Released in U.S. theaters on Sept. 12, this tale of a brief encounter between two lonely souls at a luxury hotel in Tokyo was a resounding critical and commercial success. Produced on a modest $4 million budget, it went on to pick up four Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, with Coppola taking home the Oscar for best original screenplay.
The director, a frequent visitor to Tokyo, had intended the movie to be a love letter to the city. Not everyone took it that way, but even the film’s most ardent detractors would have to admit that it remains one of Hollywood’s more enduring depictions of the Japanese capital. Shooting with a handheld Aaton camera — and without obtaining permits — Coppola and cinematographer Lance Acord captured a vibe that, 20 years on, people are still chasing.
“Before, people came to Tokyo for work,” says writer and editor Kunichi Nomura, a friend of Coppola’s who appears briefly in the film and also helped out behind the scenes. “But after ‘Lost in Translation,’ people started to come here for a holiday.”
An incident:
Official oversight was less stringent at the time, meaning that movie productions shooting on the streets of Tokyo often had to worry more about attracting the attention of the yakuza than getting reprimanded by the police. Ishizaka was with the production’s second unit — helmed by Coppola’s brother, Roman — when they had one such encounter with some local heavies.
“We decided to never talk in Japanese,” he says. “So all of us would be only talking in English — (pretending) we don’t speak Japanese. We would walk around, keep shooting, and they would keep chasing us.”
A technical point:
Acord preferred to film in a documentary style, using shallow depth-of-field and minimal lighting. He achieved the movie’s distinctive look by shooting on high-speed Kodak film stock that he deliberately underexposed, then compensating for this when making the print, giving the images a soft, low-contrast texture that would be frequently imitated in the years to come.
From shooting location to must-see destination:
The most consequential casting choice, if you can call it that, was for the film’s main location. Coppola had stayed at the Park Hyatt Tokyo in Shinjuku before, and managed to secure permission to film at the hotel — something that had never happened prior or since. After its release, “Lost in Translation” turned the hotel’s 52nd-floor New York Bar into an essential stop on tourist itineraries; customers can still order a pink-hued “L.I.T” cocktail.
“I was working there during that time, and I clearly remember the changes there, day by day,” says Yasukazu Yokota, now the hotel’s Food & Beverage Manager. “It was already popular and loved by guests since opening, but after ‘Lost in Translation,’ I felt a big wave of people visiting because of the movie.”
Miscommunication and improvisation:
There were cultural misunderstandings happening on both sides of the camera. The production was constantly having to navigate what Schible calls a “cultural/linguistic barrier.”
“What that basically meant was that everything takes twice as long, in terms of communications — if not more,” he explains. “Everything needs to be translated, the answer needs to be translated back, and that still didn’t have any effect on the fact that we only had 27 shooting days.”
Given his background in live TV comedy, Murray was accustomed to making things up on the fly. Much of the dialogue that made it into the final film was ad-libbed, smoothing out the occasional stiffness of Coppola’s original script.
“Bill was just great — he used anything,” Ishizaka recalls. “Whatever happened, he’d just keep going. Every day, it was so much fun watching him: ‘What’s he going to do next?’ And then Sofia was always like, ‘Hmm ... something else?’”
Japanese work ethic:
“God forbid, I don’t know what would have happened if the film was not shot in Japan,” he says. “We had a fantastic art department — which was all entirely local, except for the department head — and I don’t think they slept for days. Where else but — maybe Korea, I don’t know — but certainly not in Europe or not in North America are you going to get away with stuff like that.”
There’s more at the link.
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