by James Mottram
Pressure can tell on even the calmest of directors. When Japanese filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu arrived at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it was his first time back since winning the Palme d’Or. His acclaimed 2018 film Shoplifters took home the top prize, when the jury was headed up by Australia’s own Cate Blanchett. Before the screening of his new film Broker, as is tradition, the festival’s logo played on the screen – the camera gliding up a staircase, each step engraved with the name of one of world cinema’s greats. “My name was on there and then I felt the pressure!” he gulps, when he speaks to FilmInk the next morning.
The quietly-spoken Kore-eda, 60, is a filmmaker of gentle, meditative films – like After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), the two movies that truly established him on the international stage. Lining up against other filmmakers, though, is not something he particularly relishes. “I’d hoped that I could leave behind the race for the prize and this view that that’s the only worthwhile outcome of a film festival… if you come home with a prize. I was hoping to leave that behind, but it hasn’t been as easy as I hoped. Honestly speaking.”
Whether he appreciates it or not, Broker ended up claiming two awards – Best Actor for its star Song Kang-ho and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It also marks his second film in a row away from his native Japan, following 2019’s detour to France to make The Truth with Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche.
He’s known Korean actor Song for years, ever since they met at the Busan International Film Festival some fifteen years ago. Since then, Song has become one of the biggest stars in Asia, notably for his lead role in the Oscar-winning Parasite.
Likewise, Kore-eda also befriended fellow Korean Gang Dong-won and worked with Bae Doona on 2009’s Air Doll. They’d all talked about collaborating, but nothing ever happened.
“Initially, it was sort of lip service. But then in 2016, I came up came up with this short plot which featured Song Kang-ho as a priest, who was also a baby broker. And it centred on this baby box. The lip service turned into an actual idea for a film and it’s taken six years since then for it to come to fruition but it just so happened that the actors that I wanted to work with were Korean.”
A ‘baby box’, in case you were wondering, is a very real thing in both Korea and Japan. It’s a way of leaving unwanted children anonymously, usually at churches – a literal hole-in-a-wall with a cosy-looking box.
When Kore-eda was researching his 2013 adoption drama Like Father Like Son, he discovered there was one in Japan. “Then I learned that they have the same thing in Korea, but that ten times as many babies are put into baby boxes in Korea as they are in Japan. And then I thought, ‘Well, this is maybe an idea that I could do with Song Kang-ho and that I could maybe film in Korea’.”
Song and Gang Dong-won (star of the zombie thriller Peninsula) play, respectively, Sang-hyun and Dong-soo, two church volunteers in Busan who secretly sell babies that they receive via the baby boxes, on the black market. Then they meet So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a mother who initially abandons her infant at the church. Doona Bae and fellow Korean rising star Lee Joo-young, meanwhile, play two detectives who are looking to break this circle of illegal baby brokering.
What some might find difficult to swallow is that Sang-hyun and Dong-soo are child traffickers. But then they team up with So-young, venturing on a road trip as they try to find a suitable home for her baby. On this trip, they’re joined by Hae-Jin (Seung-soo Im), a young boy from the same orphanage that once homed Dong-soo. Recalling Shoplifters, with its makeshift group of thieves, this oddball group become something of a surrogate family. Their intentions are honourable, in spite of everything.
“I wanted it to be an opportunity for the audience to think about their own views on mothers who abandon their children and about the children who’ve been abandoned,” says Kore-eda. “And then hopefully, it might be a film that could start to change their views. In my case, I think it did change my opinion of baby boxes slightly, making this film, or rather meeting the children and the people that I met in the process of research and that had an influence on the ending of the film.”
Shooting at the height of COVID-19 in Korea wasn’t easy for Kore-eda. “Because this was a road movie, we had to figure out where the places in Korea were that Coronavirus wasn’t so prevalent, so that we could go to those places. It was difficult administering and managing the extras because they had to come to Seoul for testing and then go out to rural Korea. I think it was probably harder for the producers than for me in that respect to make sure we kept everybody safe, so I’m grateful to them.”
He also had to cope with the young actor playing Hae-Jin. “I think he was very, very good. But I’ve never met a child who didn’t do as he was told as much as this child did!” says Kore-eda, with a smile. “Children are very different to adults. It’s like being a teacher – you really need to come up with a new method, a new approach every time. You need to figure out as you’re filming, how much stamina they have, how much concentration they have, what makes them tick, how much they actually understand, and you need to figure all this out as you go along.”
Kore-eda will likely be back in Cannes in May with his top-secret new Japanese-set film Monster. Scripted by Sakamoto Yuji (We Made a Beautiful Bouquet), it has a score by the legendary Sakamoto Ryuichi, whose work includes Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and the Oscar-winning music for The Last Emperor. Beyond that, and the fact that it stars Shoplifters’ Ando Sakura, little is known. “After that, if possible, I’d like to make something not in Japanese again,” he says. “Somewhere outside of Japan.” Right now, he’s very much a citizen – and filmmaker – of the world.
Broker is in cinemas now