E-book: 'Battle with Stories!' Otomo-style: The Essence of Direction (3)

<Questioning the Rule that "TV Dramas Are Radio Dramas">

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Takasaki: I've also worked on films, and I experienced that the methods used for making commercials simply didn't work with actors. I think the main reason is that our set environments often fail to properly create the conditions necessary for actors to build their roles. Thanks to that grueling six-month struggle, I believe I understand the difference between commercials and films. But what is the biggest difference between dramas and films?

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Otomo: That's a deep and difficult question you casually dropped there (laughs). In terms of the work of directing, the fundamentals are surprisingly similar. But, as is often said, film is for the big screen. Using the term "surface tension of the image," a small TV screen can get away with weaker surface tension. But on the big screen, you have to be conscious of every detail, every corner of the frame. It tests the strength of the image, how long it holds, and the intensity of the tension. The same applies to acting, and it's heavily influenced by the viewing environment.

TV still has that sense of being watched in the living room, you know? Even if we put a lot of effort into making something, it ends up being watched while people are doing other things, or zapping through channels as part of their daily routine.

There's this idea that "TV dramas are radio dramas." Meaning, since people watch while doing dishes or housework, there's this myth that you have to make it something you can understand just by listening. That you have to make TV dramas as if they were radio dramas. Thinking that way, it boils down to just having people listen to the dialogue, or just the music. As someone in visuals, that's pretty sad, isn't it?

For the first episode of the drama "Hagetaka," we experimented with breaking away from conventional TV sound design—like amplifying the cicada sounds to match the dialogue level. But the broadcast transmission inevitably compresses the audio range. Low frequencies get compressed and boosted, while high frequencies get smashed, narrowing the overall range. This ended up crushing the subtle sounds we'd carefully layered in, making the dialogue harder to hear. We got a flood of complaints about it. Calls saying "I can't hear the dialogue" or "The music and cicadas are too loud, I can't concentrate."

Back then, even though the broadcast was in February, I was consciously experimenting with how to convey the intense midsummer heat from the drama as a live sensation into living rooms, and how to use sound to create that immersive feeling of being right there in the drama's world. If you approach TV dramas thinking "TV dramas are radio dramas" and try to express everything through dialogue, you'll just end up making the dialogue clear and balancing the music. That way, you'll never develop what I'd call "thoughtful sound effects." If you just focus on delivering lines and music, any young person could learn that in a year and a half. But sound encompasses so much more. How you choose and apply sounds fundamentally tests the "sound designer's" philosophy. If we can't do that kind of work, the expression and direction of sound in television will just keep getting poorer and poorer.

I believe that working on television dramas is a lifelong endeavor, that there are infinite things to learn and remember, and that it must be a profession with clearly defined steps for advancement. So, at some point, I began to think that television dramas should be closer to movies than radio dramas. This idea may have been rooted in my experience studying in Hollywood from the age of 30 to 32 through a study abroad program offered by my station. In the screenwriting class, which was taught by Martin Scorsese's co-writer, Mardik Martin, I was a dropout, crying while writing my script in English (laughs).

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Takasaki: So that's why you went to Hollywood.

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Otomo: No, I didn't go there with any deep thoughts (laughs). It was more of an extension of my moratorium mindset, like, "Is it okay for me to stay like this?" Well, after everyone wrote their scripts, Martin said something like, "You guys don't know what an ideal script is," and he said it was "silent movies."

He said, "If you're making a movie, you have to tell the story with images. You can't just explain everything with dialogue. To put it in extreme terms, the ideal is to reach the finer details of people's hearts using only images and music." Well, I had just arrived there and had this idea in my head that "Hollywood is just amazing," so it was a time when I was conveniently overinterpreting everything. I was strangely impressed, thinking, "Ah, I see, the people who developed film as a visual medium have a tremendous sense of pride" (laughs). On the other hand, I was working with images, so I wondered, "What kind of thinking is this? How should I interpret this as 'radio drama'?"

So after returning to Japan, I kept waiting for an opening to try expressing things with just visuals and sound. I made a seven-minute silent scene for the morning drama and played Misako Koga's song "Tōjin" on a loop throughout it. The next morning, NHK's switchboard was ringing off the hook with people asking, "What was that song?" "Ah, I see," I realized. "If there's emotion, just music and visuals can reach the living rooms of viewers." So, the idea that visuals and music alone are the most powerful isn't entirely untrue.

Speaking from experience, having tested these things one by one in the world of television, it's a purely happy experience as a filmmaker when the audience comes to the theater intending to stay until the end, immersing themselves in every single note of the sound I wanted to express, not just passively, but fully focused in the darkness.

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Takasaki: When you were making dramas, were you conscious of preventing viewers from changing the channel?

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Ōtomo: Absolutely. There are different approaches, but I build my work across multiple layers—the narrative layer, the visual layer, the sound layer, the acting layer—and I also consider entertainment value and throwing in unexpected twists. I constantly think about whether the audience will watch without looking away for even a second. And I feel that approach still holds true in today's environment.

I firmly believe directing is a service industry for the audience. I think it was in Seven Samurai, but I recall Akira Kurosawa saying something like, "This film is about serving the audience completely; I want them to be completely satisfied." That's the mindset I want to keep for my work right now.

The core aesthetic sensibility in Japan isn't necessarily "wabi-sabi," but I think its essence lies in stripping things down to simplicity. It's a philosophy of subtraction, where you highlight only the truly important elements. Surprisingly, I think that might actually be the mainstream approach.

But in these increasingly incomprehensible times, when visual culture must compete with other content, other countries' offerings, and all sorts of things, I sometimes feel that what sustains a certain intensity is actually something bordering on excess. Personally, I tell my staff things like, "I'm going to make a chanpuru movie." Well, I'm trying out that stance with Rurouni Kenshin.

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<The Perspective of the Audience Within Myself>

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Takasaki: Watching Rurouni Kenshin, I felt like I'd boarded an entertaining ride that was fun and exciting from start to finish, while also being immersed in a great world filled with real, writhing human beings.

My friend, cameraman Takuro Ishizaka, told me that on set, Mr. Otomo would constantly be on his intercom shouting things like "Camera, do your best!" His booth was the farthest away, making him feel like an audience member. I also get the sense that there's an audience inside Mr. Otomo. Does that "sense of being watched" stem from your experience in drama?

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Otomo: It's scary, you know. The fear that you're creating based solely on your own assumptions. The question of whether it will reach others or not is something that's already inherent in every single step of the creative process, right from the preparatory stages. Even when I hand the script to the staff, I see them as my first audience. In other words, the first thing is whether they find it interesting. At that point, I tell them, "You're the audience first, so you better give me your honest feedback."

Conversely, staff who can't give feedback here are no good. Those people have already started to become subservient to me at that point. Instead, I want them to have solid opinions beforehand, as individual creators. The first day of shooting is the same, right? After the first day wraps, I ask, "How was it? Are we doing okay here?" Of course, what "okay" means varies for each person. I have this bottomless, endless desire to push things as far as they can go, but the only real limit is the deadline. I keep striving for the best, but somewhere along the way, I'm being tested by each of my inner customers. It's like asking yourself, "If I were the audience watching this story, these characters, this action—what would I think? Would I think it's fake? Would I be satisfied?" But when you're in the creator's seat, the moment you think, "I want to take it easy" or "I want to be done with this," it becomes "OK."

But you know, on the other hand, the audience doesn't care about the creator's logic. What really matters is whether someone completely unrelated to Rurouni Kenshin, someone like me who just happened to see it in a theater, someone with zero interest, stops and thinks, "Wow!" Simply put, what grabs people's attention most isn't about liking or disliking—it's about something "amazing." If I were to selfishly say, "How do we get to that amazing thing?" as a director, I'd go all the way to the edge of the universe (laughs). But from the audience's perspective, the desire for something "amazing" and the customer's sense of "You don't have to go that far" sometimes rein in the director's ferocious desires. So it's always this back-and-forth battle. I don't want the staff to just be subservient to the director; I want people who will sometimes kick me in the butt or tell me, "You don't have to go that far." Only through collaboration with people like that can we reach the finish line.

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