 |
| Nasubi in The Contestant |
Just over a year ago, at the Toronto International Film Festival, a documentary emerged which, even though much of the footage it contained had already been seen by millions, left audiences stunned. Going on to screen at DOC NYC, the Glasgow Film Festival and Doc/Fest, Clair Titley’s The Contestant told the story of Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi. He was the star of Denpa Shōnen, or A Life In Prizes, a game show which saw him stripped naked, shut in a room and given nothing to eat or wear or occupy himself with beyond what he could win by entering competitions in magazines. Although he could theoretically leave at any time, the psychological pressure on him to remain was intense, and as his physical and mental health deteriorated, everything he did was broadcast live.
Since the end of his ordeal, which went on for over a year, Nasubi has moved on to do some remarkable things with his life. He’s a man of considerable fortitude, but still, it’s difficult to make a film about something like Denpa Shōnen without a risk of exploiting the subject all over again. When I met with Clair to talk about the film, this concern was the first thing we discussed.
“It was huge concern for me,” she says. “I think whenever you make a film, you're always conscious of not wanting to retraumatise your interviewees or contributors, but particularly in this instance, because we're making a film about a TV programme that obviously was very traumatic for Nasubi. And so the way I approached it was that consent was a really important part of this.
“We've been on an incredibly long journey, Nasubi and I, to make this film. It was a collaborative process. That doesn't mean that he had editorial control, and he was aware of that from the start. That's important as well, that he doesn't. But we were going to be on a journey together and were making this film together, you know, because it is so much about him. So that's how I attempted to overcome that, by just making sure that we endlessly checked in with each other, that he was happy, that everything was good. We were particularly conscious of the fact that I'm a white woman making a film about an Asian story that features one of two Asian men as the protagonist, so I was very concerned about it and checked in with myself regularly.
“Actually, one of the things that drew me to the subject, other than the fact that it's the craziest story that you will ever know, was the fact that everything that I'd seen online had been borderline derogatory about Japanese culture. It was a bit ‘Look at those crazy Japanese and what they did,’ and that was it. End of story. Nobody dared to dig much further, really, or ask Nasubi how he was feeling about it. Quite a basic question. So that's what drew me about to it. I really wanted to get underneath it and find more of that story.”
I tell her it seems to me that, at heart, it's not really that different from a lot of reality TV programmes elsewhere in the world.
She nods vigorously. “And one of the things that having made this film and its being out there and having had the opportunity to screen it worldwide as well, is the amount of people that come up to you and go ‘Well, did you not see such and such a show?’ And they tell shocking stories about reality TV. I think we all like to think that we've come so much further, you know, and it's all very different now. And I think you're right. I just wonder how far we really have come.”
So how did she connect with Nasubi in the first place?
“It was interesting because I wrote to him first of all, via a translator. At the beginning of the project, I was running out of money for translators. My neighbour was a Japanese interpreter I hadn't met before, and somebody mentioned that, so I basically got her involved and paid her in tea and biscuits to come and support me and help me. We made contact and we started this dialogue and as I said, I started in a very open way and said ‘I want to collaborate, I want to make it in this way and I want to make it about your story.’ I didn't want to necessarily make it just about the show, and he was open to that.
“We had this discussion and they got to a certain point and actually it was him who said ‘You know, if we're going to make this, I need to come to the UK.’ So he came over to the UK. We had this slightly crazy holiday, myself, the Japanese interpreter and Nasubi, where we went around the UK. We went to the Isle of Wight, went to Stonehenge. We spent a lot of time in the car just talking and unpacking a lot of this story and a lot of the things that he hadn't been asked before, which surprised me, and a lot of things he hadn't unpacked. So that's how the relationship started. It's been a long journey, as all these things are, and I think we're still on it.
“I'm still messaging him on a regular basis, checking in on how he is. That's the thing with documentary films. The start and end point isn't the start of filming and the end of the edit. They go on. It's a lifelong commitment.”
He is quite an extraordinary person, and has done some amazing things with his life beyond this. Does she think that's the sort of person that he was before he got involved in this, that he always had that potential, or that this changed who he was?
“He definitely had that potential,” she says, “but maybe he's been steered in a different direction. He's been asked in interviews whether he regrets the experience, and I think he finds it quite difficult to answer because he knows that he would never want to go through that again. If he could have chosen, then he wouldn't have put himself through that. But he's also very aware that it has made him the person that he is today, and actually, I think maybe he was only able to do the feats that he did afterwards because of what he went through in Denpa Shōnen, in A Life Of Prizes. I think he's found some form of therapy through the amount of charity work that he does now. I think that's part of who he is and part of his cathartic process.”
The documentary also includes a remarkable interview with Nasubi’s mother, who went through a traumatic experience of her own, seeing her son in that situation and feeling powerless to help him.
“I think that was one of the interviews I was most anxious about,” Clair confides. “Even more so than Tsuchiya, maybe, because she's definitely a person who shies away from any kind of attention. It was very brave of her to talk to us, to tell her story for the first time. She put a lot of faith and trust in us in order to do that. And there was a really lovely moment when the film was screened at a festival in New York and she and her daughter, Nasubi’s sister, came over to see it. It was the first time that they'd seen it and I was really nervous. We were all really nervous about what they would think, and afterwards they just came up and thanked us.
“It was a really emotional moment, after making this film. Not just to see the story, but I think also for her to see Nasubi through different eyes, because she'd seen him through maybe Japanese media's eyes. You know, the fact that he had gone and done something that she wasn't really very happy with, and not followed the path that she wanted. But to see it through these entirely different eyes, our eyes, I think that was really powerful for her and it's probably changed their relationship in small ways as well.”
We discuss the challenges of getting the film made.
“There were what felt like years of lawyers talking to each other in LA and Tokyo,” she says. “That was horrendous, trying and very long. That's the process, however. Actually, one of the key people in helping us get access and smoothing the path for us was Toshio Tsuchiya, the producer, who was still working at the channel at the time and was able to just make sure that we were put in contact with the correct people. He let people know that he was involved and that it had his blessing. I wonder whether without him it would have been a lot more difficult. I don't know whether it would have happened. Interestingly, he was quite keen.”
One of the things I like about the documentary, I tell her, is that it's not just looking at the psychology of Nasubi's experience, but it's also looking at the viewers’ psychology to an extent, and at Tsuchiya and the way that he seems so calm about it, so relaxed, as if it were just any television programme, even now.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, he’s arguably the most interesting character and one of the most interesting people I've ever interviewed. But it's difficult, with Tsuchiya, to grapple with your feelings about him. One thing that I do have a lot of respect and admiration for is the bravery that he had in taking part in this film. We didn't have to beg him to take part. Nasubi asked him and he said yes. Tsuchiya made it very clear that he was taking part for Nasubi and not for me. But he's a documentary filmmaker himself now. He's been there, done that, and he's not naive.
“He knows how a Western audience might perceive him, how he might be painted or portrayed. And he took part anyway. He took part and he didn't hold back. We didn't hold back in any questioning and he knew that we wouldn't. And I think he'd have been disappointed if we had. He didn't hold back in what he told us, which was fantastic. So I do have a lot of admiration for him and his bravery in that regard.”
How much footage did she and her team have access to?
“All we had access to was what went out on air. We didn't have access to any dailies or any rushes, which was in some ways a huge challenge. I mean, obviously in hindsight it cut a load of workload down. It was enough to go through 15 months’ worth of footage. However, there were two things I wanted to do and one was I really wanted an English speaking audience to get that immediacy of what it was like to have all this text everywhere.
“If you don't speak Japanese, you just didn't get a sense of it, so that's why we painstakingly translated all of the VFX, all of the graphics on screen into English, because we just had a flat image that was of VHS quality, to be honest. Jason Martin, the VFX person, did an incredible job on that. And also Fred Armisen dubbed the original narrator.
“The other thing we did is that we stripped back all those VFX as well, so that we created what we were referring to when were in the edit as fake rushes - what we imagined the rushes to be like if we took everything back. And that was quite poignant, that moment when we first did that. We took everything off, so all the noises and everything else and took it all back to basics and then rebuilt the soundtrack as well, you know. And that's when you got him naked, alone and in a room. That's those really poignant moments. When we first had that footage it was covered in all the canned laughter and everything.”
Millions of people watched it live when it was happening, I note, and yet it doesn't seem that anybody really tried to intervene to help him.
“It's really interesting, isn't it? It's like a kind of wilful blindness mentality. I wonder if it’s something that we were all relatively complicit in. I think there's all sorts of things. There was a lot of trust in the media. It was potentially partly a Japanese thing, but I think generally we all had a lot more faith. I mean, don't forget, we only had a few channels. We also didn't have the legacy of reality TV or that baggage. We hadn't gone through a season of Big Brother and had Nasty Nick and all that – there hadn't been a great deal out there. But yeah, I think I'm hoping that people come away from this film questioning their own relationship to reality TV, to media, to social media.”
The film has been getting a lot of attention, and is now widely considered to be an awards contender. How does she feel about that?
“I’m absolutely over the moon,” she beams. “It's really lovely. You put in all this blood, sweat and tears, particularly with independent films. You do it all and you never even know whether it's going to get seen. There's always a part of you that's like ‘We might not sell it.’
“When you're making something in that way, you have a lot more creative freedom to do all these crazy things with the VFX and everything else. But also you're taking so many more gambles. So when those gambles pay off and somebody gives you a pat on the back and says ‘That was a good job,’ then it's like it literally means the world. So I think it's really great for the team as well, just to finally have it out there, for starters. To have it recognised as well is just...” She catches her breath. “I’m giddy with excitement.”
The Contestant will be in UK cinemas from Friday 29 November.
