Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose films are known for their natural performances from child actors, said there is one thing he has decided never to put on screen: a child crying.
“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 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 presented Kore-eda with its Cinema Honorary Award at the National Museum of Singapore before an onstage conversation with festival chair Boo Junfeng, the filmmaker behind “Apprentice.” Introduced in 2014, the award is the festival’s top honor and recognizes lasting contributions to Asian cinema. Previous recipients include Im Kwon-taek, Garin Nugroho, Jafar Panahi and Deepa Mehta.
Kore-eda said his methods with children have grown more flexible. Through “Shoplifters” and the films he made abroad, “The Truth” and “Broker,” he did not hand children scripts. Instead, he rewrote dialogue around the personality and vocabulary of the children he met at auditions, so that they only spoke lines they could say with conviction, and then fed them lines on set or described a situation and let them talk freely.
On “Monster,” he gave the young cast scripts, judging that the subject was risky enough that separating the children from their roles was safer. He now decides child by child and film by film, he said.
Two directors shaped that approach. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kore-eda said, joins in when children are playing in a scene, slips out once the camera is rolling and lets them keep going – a trick Kore-eda now uses himself.
From Ken Loach, he took a lesson about judgment. In Loach’s “Kes,” a boy discovers the bird he has raised dumped in a trash can after his brother kills it, and the young actor’s reaction looks nothing like a performance. When Kore-eda met Loach about 20 years ago, while he was making “Nobody Knows” and wrestling with similar questions, Loach told him he had only instructed the boy to go and look for the missing bird. Asked how he had weighed the ethics of that, Loach said he understood the risk but was confident that his relationship with the boy could repair any hurt. Kore-eda said the lesson was that Loach was weighing each shot as he went.
“I keep it firmly in mind that 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,” he said.
He never gets angry with children or rushes them, he said, and he doesn’t 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.
Some children simply won’t listen, he added, in which case he turns that into the role. During auditions for “Like Father, Like Son,” one boy answered every question, including his name and where he was from, with “Why?” Staff thought communication was impossible, but Kore-eda was drawn to him and wrote a character who answers everything with “Why?”
Kore-eda called himself a fan of Hou rather than someone he was influenced by, but the Taiwanese director also changed how he approaches a scene. Hou read the script for Kore-eda’s 1995 debut “Maborosi,” which won the Golden Osella in Venice, and introduced him to a composer, so Kore-eda showed him the finished film. Hou critiqued it severely, he said. “I was deflated. But what he told me was absolutely right.”
Kore-eda said he had drawn up a meticulous blueprint and that his crew did professional work to realize it, but he failed to update the plan on set. Hou asked whether he had storyboarded every scene and shot it exactly as drawn. He had.
“Where you shoot a scene from – you go into the location, feel the space, see the light falling there, and that’s when you first decide how the actors move,” Kore-eda recalled Hou telling him. “Once the actors’ movements are decided, only then do you decide the camera position. You have to do it in that order. You know that, you made documentaries.”
“Now I’m truly grateful he said that to me, but at the time it really got to me,” Kore-eda said. “I swore I’d never draw storyboards again.”
Kore-eda said he sees his two 2026 films, “Sheep in the Box” and “Look Back,” as a return to his roots. “Sheep in the Box,” which competed in 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, Kore-eda said, the film is about grief work.
“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 after playing at the festival. On it, he said, he went back to the documentary thinking of his early films, treating the camera as an eye and simply asking where to watch the subject from.
“So I think the second half of my career probably starts next year,” he said.
Kore-eda said he writes best on long flights and in spare hours at hotels abroad, and has been writing on his current trip from London to Thailand and Singapore. He hopes to be shooting one project around this time next year at the earliest, or the year after if that proves difficult.
Thirty years after he started making films, the growing number of career awards leaves him uneasy, he said. “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.
Kore-eda said he has little interest in AI, even though “Sheep in the Box” features a child brought back through generative AI. At a producer’s suggestion, he let an AI read his script for the first time. “At first it told me, ‘This is wonderful, it’s a sure thing for the Cannes Film Festival,’” he said. He ended the exercise after concluding the AI had probably never had a film experience big enough to change its life.
Kore-eda said he never tries to work out what audiences want, citing advice from a senior colleague he admired in his television days, when ratings were treated as everything. “He told me, ‘If you think of them as viewers, it won’t reach anyone,’” Kore-eda said. “He said to picture one person’s face and make it for them.”
Asked what dish he would choose for the afterlife, a nod to his 1998 film “After Life,” Kore-eda said he probably wouldn’t eat anything once he was dead. His last meal before dying, though, is already decided: the tenzaru soba at Sunaba, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo’s Akasaka district, where a senior producer took him when he was a young assistant director who had gone days without going home.
“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.”
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