By Mark Schilling
Directors in the West often reference Asian genre films to up their coolness quotient. The coolest of all, Quentin Tarantino, borrowed from a long list of Hong Kong and Japanese action movies for Kill Bill Vol. 1, though it was not always clear which shot of a madly charging assassin or flying severed limb came from which film.
Katsuyuki Motohiro, in his smash hit thriller Negotiator, has returned the favor -- though not in the way one might expect. A self-proclaimed action otaku (geek), Motohiro, together with scriptwriter Masashi Sogo, has larded the film with quotes from, not the work of Tarantino and his fellow Western purveyors of cool, but mainstream Hollywood action product from the 1970s and 1980s. His villain -- a movie fanboy turned subway terrorist -- chats with the negotiator hero about Richard Lester's Juggernaut (1974) and Joseph Sargeant's The Taking of Pelham 123 (ditto), while the film itself references everything from Steven Spielberg's Duel to Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet. Motohiro even inserts a scene of a police bomb squad officer agonizing over which color wire to cut, while a red digital clock ticks down the seconds.
Instead of snickering at this and other oh-so-eighties clichés, Japanese audiences have been lining up at the box office. In its first ten days since its May 7 release, Negotiator recorded more than 1 million admissions and is on track to pass the Y5 billion ($47 million) mark.
Negotiator benefits from being a spin-off of Motohiro's two high-grossing Bayside Shakedown films about a feisty beat cop who defies the police powers-that-be , with the later earning $162 million in 2003. Its numbers, however, are yet another indication that not only Japanese conceptions of cool, but local formulas for box office success often differ radically from Hollywood's -- or the rest of the world's, for that matter. Another example: both Negotiator and the Bayside films have extremely low body counts - only one victim in Negotiator, who is never shown. No deadly violence, please -- we're Japanese.
Which does not mean that Hollywood formulas no longer work in Japan -- obviously they do -- though more and more it pays to have a Japanese connection. The Last Samurai profited to the tune of $128 million from its bows to the local market, including the casting of Ken Watanabe and other local stars in key roles.
The latest is Peter Chelsom's Shall We Dance, which recorded 1.3 million admissions in its fourth week on release in Japan, while ranking second at the box office, after Negotiator. Based on a 1996 film by Masayuki Suo, Shall We Dance garnered praise in the Japanese media for its faithfulness to the original. Meanwhile, star Richard Gere, who also appeared in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody In August (1991), was effusive in his praise for both Suo and his film in interview after interview, while performing a much-photographed pas de deux with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (whose actor son has a supporting role in Negotiator). Though Shall We Dance will probably not equal its $58 million US domestic total here, it may well beat Suo's film, which earned Y1.6 billion ($15 million) for distributor Toho.
Plans are reportedly afoot to make The Fast and the Furious 3 and remake The Omen in Japan. If the producers hope to score as strongly here as Motohiro and Chelsom have, they may be wise to not only cast Japanese or Japan-friendly talent (Gere in The Omen's Gregory Peck role?), but play up to Japan's large and growing movie fanboy population. What to reference? Why not ask both Tarantino and Motohiro -- and split the difference?
