Vancouver international Film Festival, various locations until Oct. 10. For Dragons & Tigers schedule visit viff.org.
Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tony Rayns has played a big part in introducing East Asian cinema to Western audiences.
Before VIFF started screening films in the Dragons and Tigers competition in the early '90s the subject rarely came up. East Asian cinema as an entity didn't exist. Individual countries had established film industries - Japan and Hong Kong even found a niche for some of their product overseas - but not much of what was produced made it outside linguistic and cultural borders.
Rayns talked to the North Shore News about starting from scratch to help East Asian filmmakers develop a worldwide market for their work.
North Shore News: First a couple of big picture questions. Your name is inextricably linked with Asian films. How did you become interested in East Asian cinema?
Tony Rayns: That's a very simple story: the answer in two words is Bruce Lee. I think anybody who was interested in movies of my generation probably saw Japanese movies first. I mean Kurosawa and stuff like that which I had certainly done in my film society days, even my school days. Also BBC
Television in Britain would occasionally show foreign language films in those days. So I would have seen some Indian stuff, probably some Japanese stuff but for me the turning point was Bruce Lee. Early '70s. You may know there was a big marketing push by the Hong Kong film industry because of the Bruce Lee films. He'd been a child star in the '50s but when he came back to Hong Kong around 1970 to make grown-up films, action films they were a big hit locally and regionally and then the Hong Kong company started to make a big push to make the West aware of them as well and I was the sucker who took the bait. That led me to an interest in Hong Kong cinema, that in turn led me to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong I started travelling to other countries in the region and started meeting filmmakers and started to get to know film industries that were pretty much unknown in the West at the time. It was a very interesting voyage of discovery but I can't say I had a plan. I didn't have an agenda when I did this, I was just following my nose. If I saw something interesting I tried to find out more about it and took it from there.
North Shore News: How did you get involved with the Vancouver film fest?
Tony Rayns: They approached me. Alan Franey took over I think it was in '88 as the director of the festival. It was still pretty young in those days. It was still only the seventh or eight edition. I wasn't here that year but in the spring of '89 he was travelling in Europe looking for films I guess and he contacted me and I think we met at the Berlin festival or someplace like that. We had lunch and he said would you be interested in doing some programming for us. We batted around some possibilities and what exactly the deal would be and we came to an agreement and here I still am all these many many years later.
North Shore News: Then you set up Dragons and Tigers?
Tony Rayns: We didn't call it Dragons and Tigers at the start. When I started working here we had something called Cinema of the Pacific Rim - a name I didn't like very much at all but which included Australia, New Zealand and other stuff as well. After we'd been doing it a few years Alan came to me and said how about we have a separate East Asia section and bracket Australia and New Zealand with the rest of the world? He came up with the Dragons and Tigers title because he thought it sounded kind of attention grabbing.
In those days, to be frank, the cinemas of East Asia were not very well known outside the region and they weren't even very well known amongst themselves. There was not much internal traffic except for Hong Kong films which went pretty much everywhere. Most films made in the region didn't travel outside their own borders. There were very few people like me who were travelling around the region looking for films, looking for interesting films, looking for something that might play well with a foreign audience and so we ended up in the early years premiering a lot of films that had never been seen outside their own country before. Alan thought this was quite notable and he wanted to draw attention to it more in some way and so I think that's where the idea of a separate section came up.
North Shore News: Are there places now that Showcase East Asia cinema like they do at VIFF?
Tony Rayns: It's become much less of an exclusive thing nowadays. As I said in the early days when we started doing it kind of nobody else was doing it really. Nowadays a lot of people do it. Toronto plays nearly as many East Asian films as Vancouver does. That was not the case 20 years ago.
I think the rest of the world has kind of caught up and people have begun to realize that there are quite a large number of interesting filmmakers in that region and are clamouring to show their work.
At the same time there has been a big change among the filmmakers. When I started I would see a film I would think, "This is pretty interesting maybe we should get this subtitled and bring it to Vancouver," and I would sit down with the filmmaker and discuss it.
Most filmmakers that I talked to at that time were amazed that anybody foreign was interested at all and were thrilled and delighted they could have some kind of showcase overseas. Now I don't think there's any filmmaker anywhere in the East Asia region who hasn't given some thought to which festival they want to premiere in before they even start shooting. There's been a huge change. The fact that we made such progress in 20 years means the people there think of things differently now.
North Shore News: Early on you were involved with production aspects as well?
Tony Rayns: I did a lot of stuff. If I had to write press kits . . . we had to do a lot of work, basically unpaid work helping the filmmakers to get the thing into a showable condition just because none of the mechanisms were in place to make this happen. Nowadays there are sales agents in the area and they look after things like this - they produce press kits, they supervise subtitling, they take out ads, they know how to market things. That was not true 20 years ago, so yes, we did have to pitch in and lend an awful lot of help.
North Shore News: At some point in 2006/2007 your role changed at the film festival. You stepped down as a programmer but you still continue to have a significant role.
Tony Rayns: I didn't step down as programmer. What I said to Alan was that I didn't want to carry on being solely responsible for the section. It was becoming too much. It hovered for several months, it wasn't quite clear how it was going to pan out but I wasn't trying to give up completely at that time and the arrangement that we came up with was we would split the Dragons and Tigers programming so Shelly Kraicer, who is Canadian but at that time was living in Beijing, would take charge of the Chinese-language programming. He would look after films from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and also Malaysia and Singapore and I would do the rest of the region which includes Japan and Korea the two largest film producing territories that come into our ambit. I would also retain control of the competition and so even if it was a Chinese film I would choose the film for the competition and that's the arrangement we ended up with and it's worked out quite well I think.
It was a dramatic moment in a sense because I even had a speech at the awards night saying, "Well I think this is my last year doing this, goodbye it's been wonderful working with you guys," and then of course I was back the next year doing it again. It was slightly embarrassing but anyway it was on slightly different terms. I was less overall responsible for it than I had been.
North Shore News: Some of the Asian films such as The Vancouver Asahi are outside the section. Are you responsible for those as well?
Tony Rayns: The Vancouver Asahi is a special case. I saw Vancouver Asahi in Tokyo in not-quite finished form, I went to the lab to see it. Because of the very obvious Vancouver connection the company hoped there would be interest from the festival in premiering the film. They thought it would be good for promotion in Japan because the film hasn't opened in Japan yet. They are bringing over quite a number of people. Two of the young stars who are very hot in Japan right now will be here and they're obviously going to have camera crews out in force. They're going to be sending this footage back to Japan because it will serve as part of the promotional push in Japan for the release there.
North Shore News: They rebuilt Vancouver's Japantown on a set in Japan.
Tony Rayns: When they decided to go with this thing I think they did check out Vancouver and realized there's nothing left of '30s Vancouver. There's no location in Vancouver that would pass for the 1930s without a huge amount of modification and also it would not be very practical to shoot today on the Vancouver waterfront. I don't think anybody would agree to close down their businesses for weeks so a film crew could move in. What they ended up doing was building a huge outdoor set in Japan. It's in quite a rural place but it's based meticulously on photos from the period which I saw. It was really quite impressive on a very big scale and the film was essentially shot there.
North Shore News: The cast apparently had to know their baseball.
Tony Rayns: It's even more complicated than that because they have to play baseball badly - at least at the beginning. We have to see their learning curve because as far as I'm aware this is a completely faithful recreation of what actually happened. When the team started they were a disaster. They achieved absolutely nothing but they rethought their strategy, they developed techniques and so on and they got better and then started to win games. The film has to reflect that. They have to play competent baseball and get better as the thing goes on.
North Shore News: The film looks great, very old school.
Tony Rayns: I thought so too. I think I said in the program guide, it's old fashioned but in the best sense. This is the kind of filmmaking that doesn't happen so much anymore in these days of CGI and monsters and superheroes. Very beautifully done and with a modern spirit.
North Shore News: Ishii developed as an independent filmmaker. What's his status now?
Tony Rayns: He's one of the most in-demand filmmakers there is in Japan. We've charted it. He came here for the first time seven years ago with his first feature which was actually his graduation film from film school. A film called Bare-assed Japan, which is quite a modest, indie feature. It's very small scale, small cast but very quirky, and interesting with unusual characters especially for a Japanese film where things tend to be rather conformist, I think it's fair to say. His films were never at all conformist or they were rather critical about conformism. He stood out from the pack in some ways.
We showed his first film in competition, it didn't win as I recall but it was wellreceived by the audience and he enjoyed his visit to Vancouver. We kept showing his films, not everything he made, but quite a lot. Three or four years ago we premiered what was his last big indie film, Mitsuko Delivers, as an awards night gala film. He came back to Vancouver and that was in The Vogue as I remember. It went down extremely well with a packed house. Last year he wasn't here but we showed his first major commercial film The Great Passage, which is sort of a star-led film about the unlikely subject of compiling a dictionary. It has big stars in it and he made something very fresh and surprising with it. We've followed his progress from a small indie filmmaker fresh out of film school through to making big budget films with big stars. He's in seriously big demand. This guy could make three films a year if he could find the time and the energy to do it because there are that many companies clamouring to have him make things for them.
North Shore News: He came onboard The Vancouver Asahi project after it was well underway?
Tony Rayns: He is not a Vancouver historian. He knew nothing about this particular history. There's a woman who I think lives here, a Japanese woman who's been here since the '30s, now quite elderly, who somehow (had information on) The Vancouver Asahi and made it known to some writers in Japan. They came up with some script ideas, at least an outline, I don't think it was a full script to begin with. Companies became interested in developing this thing and then somebody had the idea of approaching Ishii with it. I think because Ishii had a personal connection with Vancouver - this festival having been quite useful to him in developing himself and establishing his name - he immediately perked up his ears and thought, "A Vancouver story how interesting." And one thing led to another.
