By Mark Schilling
Kenji Uchida is about as hot as a young director with one low-budget feature to his credit can be. "He's getting offers nearly every day from somewhere -- he doesn't know what to do with them all," says producer Satoshi Akagi, whose Pia Corp. underwrote Uchida's romantic comedy A Stranger of Mine through its Pia Film Festival Scholarship program.
Selected for the International Critics' Week section at Cannes, this film about a budding romance between a brokenhearted businessman and a just-jilted woman, with the businessman's smooth-talking PI (private investigator) pal serving as matchmaker, unfolds conventionally enough in its first act. Then the story doubles back on itself, from different perspectives, and the audience starts to realize that everything it thought it knew about these characters -- and everything else -- is wrong. Uchida spent a year laboring over the comically twisty script and was rewarded when A Stranger of Mine scooped three prizes at Cannes, including the SACD Screenwriting Award.
Released in Japan in July by Klockworx, the film enjoyed a twelve-week run at a central Tokyo theatre and is now being sold abroad by the TBS network.
Meanwhile, Uchida's services are in demand for not only films, but television dramas, commercials and even a stage play. He is, however, turning everything down to concentrate on his new script, which he describes as "a suspense film, with comic elements." The story, like that of his debut feature, begins with an ordinary incident that has extraordinary consequences.
A 1998 graduate of San Francisco State University's undergraduate cinema program, Uchida won the 2002 Pia Film Festival's Grand Prize for Weekend Blues, a comedy about a brokenhearted businessman who loses a day out of his life. Uchida then made A Stranger of Mine, submitted it to Cannes -- and received the invitation letter many Japanese directors wait for all their careers, but never get.
He looks vaguely bemused by his rapid ascent , but is quite definite about what sort of director he want to be. "I'm not so particular about the genre," he says, "but I don't want to make the sort of film that chooses its audience. In other words, that only a select few understand. I want to make films that anyone can understand and enjoy."
His heroes are Hollywood makers of well-made films like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock, but in filming A Stranger of Mine he did not have anything like Hollywood resources, money-wise or any wise. As a result, he had little preparation time and only two weeks to shoot. "Given all that," he says, "I'm happy with what we were able to do," .
Nonetheless, Uchida feels he has yet to graduate from amateur to pro. "With a good script and good cast you can't go all that wrong, though," he adds. "Movies cost a lot of money to make. It's better to make them as perfect as you can at the script and casting stage, when they don't cost a lot."
