Kore-eda Hirokazu Vows Never to Film a Child Crying — and Explains Why

Kore-eda Hirokazu has one fixed rule after three decades directing children: he will not put a child crying on screen.

"It's not that I can't, or that it's difficult. I don't shoot it," the Japanese director said at an In Conversation event at the Singapore International Film Festival on Saturday. "The ideal is that after viewers finish watching, they remember that child's smile and cry."

The festival had just presented Kore-eda with its Cinema Honorary Award at the National Museum of Singapore. Introduced in 2014, the prize is the festival's top honor for lasting contributions to Asian cinema; previous recipients include Im Kwon-taek, Garin Nugroho, Jafar Panahi and Deepa Mehta. Festival chair Boo Junfeng, the filmmaker behind "Apprentice," hosted the onstage conversation.

How does he direct child actors?

Through "Shoplifters," "The Truth" and "Broker," Kore-eda gave children no scripts. He rewrote dialogue around the personality and vocabulary of children he met at auditions, so they spoke only lines they could say with conviction, then fed them lines on set or described a situation and let them talk freely.

On "Monster," he handed the young cast scripts, judging the subject risky enough that separating the children from their roles was safer. He now decides child by child and film by film.

Two directors shaped the approach. Hou Hsiao-hsien joins in when children play in a scene, then slips out once the camera rolls and lets them continue — a trick Kore-eda now uses. From Ken Loach he took a lesson about judgment. In Loach's "Kes," a boy finds his bird dead in a trash can, and the young actor's reaction looks nothing like a performance. When the two met about 20 years ago, while Kore-eda was making "Nobody Knows," Loach said he had instructed the boy only to look for the missing bird, accepting the risk but confident his relationship with the child could repair any hurt.

"Judging things that way — it worked on the last shoot so it will work this time, or a method that worked with the last child will work with this one — is the most dangerous thing in directing children," Kore-eda said.

He never gets angry with children, never rushes them, and does not lie to them. "The ideal is that a child ends the day saying, 'Today's shoot was fun, I'm looking forward to tomorrow,'" he said.

Uncooperative children become material. At auditions for "Like Father, Like Son," one boy answered every question, including his name, with "Why?" Staff thought communication impossible; Kore-eda wrote a character who answers everything with "Why?"

What did Hou Hsiao-hsien change?

Kore-eda calls himself a fan of Hou rather than a protégé, but Hou's harsh critique of his 1995 debut "Maborosi," which won the Golden Osella in Venice, reshaped his craft. Kore-eda had storyboarded every scene and shot "Maborosi" exactly as drawn. Hou told him a director enters a location, feels the space, sees the light, and only then decides the actors' movements — and only after that, the camera position.

"I was deflated. But what he told me was absolutely right," Kore-eda said. "I swore I'd never draw storyboards again."

What comes next?

Kore-eda sees his two 2026 films as a return to his roots. "Sheep in the Box," which competed at Cannes, follows a couple whose 7-year-old son died two years earlier and who take in a humanoid robot built from his data. Despite the AI element, he said, the film is about grief. "It's a story about how to properly say goodbye to the dead, so I feel it actually ended up closest to what I tried to do in my debut," he said.

"Look Back," his live-action adaptation of Fujimoto Tatsuki's manga about two girls bound by a love of drawing manga, played in competition at Venice and opens in Singapore on Oct. 29. "So I think the second half of my career probably starts next year," he said. He hopes to begin shooting a new project around this time next year, or the year after if that proves difficult.

The awards leave him uneasy. "I feel like I still have about half my career left, and yet it kind of feels like I'm being told it's time to graduate," he said.

He has little interest in AI despite "Sheep in the Box" featuring a child brought back through generative AI. At a producer's suggestion, he let an AI read his script. "At first it told me, 'This is wonderful, it's a sure thing for the Cannes Film Festival,'" he said. He stopped after concluding the AI had probably never had a film experience big enough to change its life.

He also never chases audiences. A senior colleague from his television days told him: "If you think of them as viewers, it won't reach anyone. Picture one person's face and make it for them."

Asked, in a nod to his 1998 film "After Life," what dish he would choose for the afterlife, Kore-eda said his last meal is already decided: the tenzaru soba at Sunaba, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo's Akasaka district. "The soba I ate there was the best I've had in my life, and it still is," he said. "I want to eat that one more time at the end."