ryuganji: film news from japan

Right now there’s a pointed discussion going on in the comments section of Jason Gray’s blog that, amongst other things, questions the value of studio press releases that give highly optimistic forecasts of a film’s final gross after only its opening weekend. Insubstantial fluff of that nature is particularly rampant in film journalism here, which often makes it difficult to find stories worth bothering to read, let alone write about for your edification. That’s why it’s often more enlightening to cut out the middle man and read the personal blogs of filmmakers such as Ichise Taka, the Hollywood-savvy independent producer behind the “Ringu” and “Juon” franchises. His latest entry doesn’t mince words in contextualising the recent successes of Japanese films at the domestic box office, as well as the so-called ‘production boom’:

Lately, when I’m being interviewed, I keep hearing about a “Japanese movie bubble”. The large number of productions would certainly suggest a bubble, but the poverty of the filmmaking environment hasn’t changed.

Even Japan’s best cinematographers can’t expect to earn more than 1.2 million yen a month. Which means that even if they were to work full-time over the course of a year, they’d still only make 14.4 million. Worse still, even if they work on a guaranteed hit (that is to say, a film made only to make money) produced by one of the TV networks, the going rate is only about 800,000. So even if they work all year, their annual income is less than 10 million yen!

I’d like to improve the pay scale across the board somehow, but getting investors onside isn’t easy. They just can’t shake off that miserly Japanese ethos of making films as cheaply as possible, in order to make as much money as possible. With that kind of thinking, dynamic Japanese films won’t ever emerge. On top of that, the television company employees who look at a proposed budget for a film and say “These crew pay rates are too high” are often on salaries exceeding 20 million. Just like Ueki Hitoshi used to sing, “The world’s all messed up”.