Zeze Takahisa Tells Tokyo: Original Films Beat the Source Material Market

Director Zeze Takahisa used a packed masterclass at the Tokyo International Film Festival to attack Japan's dependence on adaptations, telling the audience: "The industry is too focused on the 'source material market.' They think that if the source material is selling well, they should adapt it."

The talk, part of the festival's Tokyo Talk program, was held before a full house at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya. Zeze directed this year's opening film, "Sukiyaki."

From pink cinema to the 'Four Heavenly Kings'

Born in 1960 in Oita Prefecture, Zeze joined a pink film production company in 1986 as an assistant director. His 1989 directorial debut, "Extracurricular Activity: Rape," won the Pink Grand Prix Award for Best New Director. Together with Sano Kazuhiro, Sato Toshiki and Sato Hisayasu, he became one of the "Four Heavenly Kings of Pink."

The constraints were rigid. Pink films screened in specialized theaters for an exclusively male audience, and directors had to insert a bed scene every 10 minutes or so.

"I've always been pretty firm in my convictions," Zeze said. "Starting from the early 1990s the culture shifted and I had more freedom to say what I wanted. That kind of thing was important to me."

He was drawn to stories about female criminals. "It's just different from the male perspective," he said. "The motives behind the crimes and so on. I found it fascinating."

"Extracurricular Activity: Rape," which Zeze scripted, followed delinquent high school girls who hang out at Tokyo's Haneda Airport and battle the yakuza. He gave it the private title "Go to Haneda and You Will See Kids Dressed Like Pirates Ready to Attack."

Asked about the 1994 pink "Genuine Lesbians: Embarrassing Positions" — his own title, "Fallen Angels in September" — Zeze said the film, about female soulmates, reflected a broader fashion for mysticism among young people at the time. "Searching for past lives became a sort of trend, and people started seeking connections to this different world," he said. "I thought that maybe I could make a movie centered around something like that."

How the group name was manufactured

The "Four Heavenly Kings" label, Zeze recalled, originated at a pink theater "in Toyama – or maybe Ishikawa – I can't remember." He and the other "kings" saw a parallel with the "Nouvelle Vague," a tag that lent its members critical and commercial cachet.

"So we figured that, rather than work as individuals, we should debut under a group name," he said. "We decided to use the 'Four Heavenly Kings' label to our advantage."

Their films later screened in retrospectives at the Rotterdam festival and elsewhere abroad. "Actually, the overseas reception came first, and then it was sort of re-imported" back to Japan, Zeze said.

At home, he still had to incorporate a certain amount of eros — but no one censored his politics. "No one was telling us to stop doing these politically sensitive things," he said. "It was just wonderful… there really was a lot of freedom back then."

Nor was pink cinema a closed ghetto. Zeze cited collaborations with directors of his generation from diverse backgrounds, such as Aoyama Shinji and Suzuki Takuji. "We'd get together either because we'd met by chance or because we wanted to create something interesting," he said.

What does the career arc change?

Zeze crossed into the mainstream in 1997 with the teen horror "Kokkuri-san," then spent a decade alternating between pink and mainstream films. In 2010 he released "Heaven's Story," a 278-minute revenge drama that screened in Berlin's Forum section and won the FIPRESCI Prize.

"It was different from a so-called 'ordinary movie,'" he said. "I'd been working on commercial films until then, but I realized I had to do something else. Personally, I felt a sense of urgency – or maybe a sense of crisis – that things weren't going well, and that's what pushed me to take on this challenge."

Zeze has not shunned adaptations himself: his hit 2016 two-part mystery "64" was based on a bestselling novel. His argument is one of balance, not purity. "The movies we actually found interesting or the ones I personally found entertaining were all originals," he said.

His closing claim: "I feel that pursuing original concepts and making original films is incredibly important right now. They have a unique, compelling strength." Whether Japan's risk-averse studios act on it is the unanswered question — and Zeze, for now, is one of the few directors with the standing to ask it.