Director’s Comment: HAYASHI Kaizo

BOLT

Q: Tell us about why and how you create the film BOLT? Did you plan to make it into a trilogy?

Rather than create a trilogy, I made a single film. I was asked by the Tohoku University of Art & Design, where I was working as a professor of film studies, to shoot something as they had purchased a good camera. So I decided to make an adult fantasy film about one man over the course of a single night—and that's how I made Good Year.

The anniversary of the earthquake is also the man’s wedding anniversary, except his pregnant wife was killed by the tsunami caused by the earthquake. On Christmas Day, though, his wife, becomes a different person and pays a special visit to the husband she left behind.

I made Good Year in 2015, but I didn't plan to make other episodes at that time. I had an idea for Bolt but I thought it would be impossible to make it because of the difficulty of recreating the set of a nuclear power plant. But, in the end, we got it made and we submitted it to various international film festivals, and it won the Best Cinematography Award at the Bestellås Film Festival in Sweden.

While I was making Good Year, my main actor, NAGASE Masatoshi advised me to make another film. I've worked with him on various projects such as the Private Detective Hama Mike series. and we've always talked about how we wanted to best make our various movies.

 Good Year is about a man who lives in a car repair shop, but he used to work in the nuclear power plant. So my idea was to depict his earlier in Life, which depicts a former nuclear power plant worker who cleans the houses left behind by homeowners who forced to evacuate in the emergency.

Coincidentally, I was discussing Bolt with YANOBE Kenji, a contemporary artist, and he told me he was going to make a huge set that resembled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant for an exhibition at the Takamatsu City Museum of Art. He invited me to film on it and that’s how the production of BOLT got underway.

I think movies are dreams. Even if you use reality to make a film, you will end up creating something like a dream. I feel like, with everyone’s help, I am a dream maker.