Hirokazu Kore-eda ‘Sheep in the Box’ interview

Imagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball, and hanging out with his friends. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. And then the worst thing that ever could happen happens: A freak accident takes your son away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to live with the grief for long, because now there’s an AI company that can bring your kid back in the form of a robotic double that looks indistinguishable from a human.

This is the world that acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, has created with his latest sci-fi drama, Sheep in the Box. It’s the type of story that might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago but feels less so as AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives. This is a tension Kore-eda is acutely aware of — so much so that he sat down with a robotics expert while he was writing the script to get some answers of his own. They told him that because of the robots overheating, “we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots,” Kore-eda recounted.

But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human film. Grief work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s vast filmography. Though it might be set in a near future, the core of Sheep in the Box is still a family learning how to move through their loss. And if we give ourselves permission to suspend disbelief and go on this journey, we might see ourselves in it too.

noti.group sat down with Hirokazu Kore-eda at Neon’s offices days before Sheep in the Box’s US debut. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda tells all about writing and directing this picture, including what happened when he fed the script through ChatGPT.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?

What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.

In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?

I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.

There’s so much noise about AI in our world right now. What made this theme feel so urgent for you to tackle?

In Japan, there’s a tremendous increase in various initiatives involving AI. When you get in the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you of all these commercials for raising your rate of productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI used toward a kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who had died was re-created through AI and then was singing a new song. I also heard about in Korea a young girl who had passed away being re-created through AI for processing the grief of the parents.

And then in the film, what started as a seed for the film was the businesses that are being generated in places like China where AI is being used to re-create people who have passed. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as a person who’s made many films around grief, one thing that I thought about was how the shape of grief would change through this use of AI in both good and bad ways. That’s what drew me to this idea of how new technologies impact this married couple who is trying to restart or redo their family life through the use of AI.

One of the big conversations around AI is about the resources that it uses. I thought it was really interesting that the humanoids don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about that decision?

You thought it was kind of ironic, right?

I actually spoke to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big obstacle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they generate so much heat in having to move very smoothly, in processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.

In order for me to write this story, I needed to clear that obstacle of the fact that they would be generating so much heat that perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. So I decided to shelve that one issue for the sake of the story. They don’t consume resources. It’s more of a means for them to become independent, that they don’t depend on these resources in order to live.

Because it’s set in the near future, I had a hard time discerning between fiction and a possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was reality, I was a little afraid. What is it for you?

It’s difficult to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I spoke to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, this isn’t possible. There’s no way that we’ll make humanoid robots because of the difference in the physicality and the construction of just bodies that humans have internal organs and bone structure inside whereas robots are built from the outside.”

So that there would be no way that we could achieve humanlike movements or that you could touch a humanoid robot and they would feel like a human. But if we were to put ethics aside, they said that we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots. And that sounded way scarier to me.

A robot is a robot no matter what way you think about it. But I think that as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope there. We’re already in an era where we can clone our pets. I think that’s already happening. So when you think about it from an ethical standpoint, even nations are dealing with it in this ethical way in different ways. So now that if cloning is possible, the way that we manipulate life is becoming more advanced and strange. And that to me is a much scarier prospect.

This film has a lot of blue in it, especially with the wardrobe. That felt intentional.

As far as the costumes and the use of blue, that might just be the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costuming. One of the concepts that I brought up to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the leads in the film. And also one of her concerns was that 10 years into the future, climate change would mean that we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothing, that perhaps there would be fewer buttons and drawstrings and zippers and fasteners and things like this.

I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI has permeated your daily life.

I don’t think I’ve incorporated AI intentionally outside of the use of translation AI. I think that it has become so skillful that I often use AI in order to translate my Japanese into English in order to send messages and communicate.

This came up in the Q&A yesterday at Japan Society. I described how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way where I fed it the script for this film and said, “Give me feedback.” And we did a few exchanges between myself and AI and every time I would make edits to the script, they would say that it’s great. They said, “You’re going to get into Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said, “I think you’ll get into the Un Certain Regard section.” And I said, “Only Un Certain Regard?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this film is a person named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, in that case, you’re getting into the competition.”

And I did get into the competition, so AI is not wrong, but I think that any person could tell me as much. So I don’t think that I found any utility in that exchange. And the fact that there’s no humanness in the background to this exchange is what makes it mostly unattractive to me.

I think that the more that you train an AI, for instance, on a person who is maybe known for giving romantic advice, then that advice also becomes more normalized. So I think that I’m not personally sold on it and I don’t find that AI is all that useful to me. What I find more problematic is that human beings are becoming so geared towards a kind of productivity mindset that this is even affecting activities on set for filmmaking. I think that safety is important, but for instance, we’re no longer filming driving scenes on the road. We’re doing it in studios by compositing backgrounds. I think that stunt work is also going to maybe fall to the side and then slowly be subsumed by AI or VFX.

It’s really not about us excluding AI from our day to day. Already we’re using things that we would have used our imagination for and then offloading that onto computers. For instance, with this film, I shot a driving scene at a studio and we composited the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require this type of VFX or compositing because I think that the more that we are being subsumed by productivity, it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.

Sheep in the Box is in select theaters Friday, July 24.