Sho Miyake answers life’s greatest questions

Acclaimed Japanese director Sho Miyake has arrived in the States. He’s brought with him two feature films: Small, Slow But Steady and Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a pair of naturalistic portraits that deal with the uneasy human desire to relate to other people. Seclusion and unease are bedrocks to Miyake’s growing filmography. “I like these characters that have a sense of discomfort that slowly starts to distance them from society,” he tells noti.group.
I first saw Small, Slow But Steady at New Directors/New Films (lowkey one of the better film festivals New York has to offer). It’s an affectionate story of a deaf boxer, Keiko (Yukino Kishii), who is on the heels of winning her first bout. Miyake delicately balances the tension of Keiko’s ambition with the tepid malaise she feels from her success, exacerbated when her longtime trainer’s health deteriorates and her routine is upended.

Sho Miyake’s latest feature, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, has its own friction to resolve. The film starts and ends with a screenwriter, Li (Shim Eun-kyung), writing at a desk. But in the middle is Miyake weaving in separate stories of human connection and isolation based on renowned cartoonist Yoshiharu Tsuge’s A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo — a film within a film, or a manga within a manga. Its structural innovations is earning Miyake praise; he recently took home the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.

noti.group sat down with Sho Miyake ahead of Two Seasons, Two Strangers US theatrical debut. (Small, Slow But Steady is available on demand now.) Speaking through a translator, Miyake answered the big existential questions — like why we, as humans, tell stories — and what he thinks about AI.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

You did an interview recently in Nowness Asia where you said you really liked characters that are clumsy but honest. What about that do you like?

To be honest, I think for myself, almost in a bad sense, I’m a bit too slick in that I can find ways to kind of be dishonest with myself or lie to myself. So I think that it’s aspirational when my characters are clumsy, but at least very honest. It’s something that I aspire to.

Small, Slow But Steady was the first film of yours that I saw. When you look back on it, are there any lessons that you take away?

I think that there are many things that I learned from making Small, Slow But Steady, but I’ll give one example and I think it’s just reflected in the title. I feel that that is how I approach filmmaking. I think that Small, Slow But Steady reflects not only my approach to filmmaking, but also how I see that the world might change. When I was younger, I thought things don’t change overnight, but now I see that these small invisible efforts, the culmination of these can lead to greater changes both in society. But also when I think about my filmmaking, each cut, each scene is incredibly important that I need to approach them very carefully so that maybe that one scene isn’t enough to impress anyone. But the culmination is what creates a good film.

There’s a moment in Small, Slow But Steady where you just show the dust that’s in the boxing gym. It felt like such a relaxed decision.

That’s actually one of my favorite shots in the film and it felt very indulgent in a sense because I had all these stars and actors on set, but there we were waking up early in the morning to film dust that’s clinging to the air. So I think that shot is an example of how I want to show these ordinarily invisible things and make sure that we don’t overlook them. And I feel myself and the staff were really caught by how moving and important that shot felt, just to be able to film dust that’s illuminated for a second in the morning.

Your latest film, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, opens with a protagonist writing a script. It’s a very serene, picturesque setup. What’s your ideal writing environment?

First and foremost, I want to be able to walk around my neighborhood and find a really pleasant street to walk down, because of course when I’m writing, I want to be at a desk in the quiet. But as I’m walking is usually when I get my best ideas.

These characters are grappling with a lot of existential human questions. Why was that imperative for you to explore?

That’s a very deep question and it’s hard to answer, but I think that even from when I was very young and even when I was a child, I thought a lot about why we are alive. And I don’t mean to say that in, like, a depressed sense. It was more just a genuine sense of curiosity around that question.

But then as you get older, I find that the question gets weightier and heavier. And when I think too much about it, maybe it leads me to feel a little down. But if I try to change the form of that question: Why do we make films? Why do we make photographs? Why do we paint pictures? Just changing the format of that question makes me feel very positively about that. And I think that in this new film, it’s about: Why do we write stories? Why do we go and travel?

I think in those ways it is thinking about human existence, but kind of from this oblique place. And of course in Small, Slow But Steady, why does Keiko want to continue boxing? So I think that around those questions, the foundational thing is like, Why are we alive and why do we do what we do?

Two Seasons, Two Strangers is a structurally ambitious film, in that we’re following the screenwriter’s personal story and the film she’s written. I saw a bit of Hong Sangsoo and Ryusuke Hamaguchi in it. Were those directors inspiring for you?

Of course, the two directors that you mentioned are incredibly important to me, but I think the base of this film and the biggest inspiration was Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. In the film, Buster Keaton is a projectionist and he’s trying to enter into the world of films. And I think that film is exploring the idea of what is cinema and what is cinema’s relationship to life. It’s also kind of the first moment that we see a film within a film. So I think that was my biggest inspiration.

Your films tend to rely on characters who are struggling with something low stakes that feels very high stakes. Is that thread continued in your next project?

That’s an interesting thing that you point out about my characters. Actually, the film that I’m currently editing features a protagonist that instead of acting for themselves is acting for others. So that has really shifted the structure of the film, and I think it’s a new approach for myself. Whether my characters are acting out of interest for themselves or for others, all of my films are about how a character interacts with and tries to better the community around them. So I guess I’ve shifted from characters that focus on the happiness of themselves to perhaps with this new film, a character that’s mostly focused on the happiness of others.

This is a nerdy question, but your last two films before Two Seasons, Two Strangers were shot on film. But Two Seasons, Two Strangers is on digital, yeah?

Why did you choose to shoot this one on digital?

There are two reasons, the first being very technical that the film was going to be shot in the ocean and then very like subzero temperatures, and I think it was too risky to shoot on film.

And the second is kind of more at the core of this decision, but it comes down to this question of like, Why adapt a manga into a film? And I think the answer to that became shooting on digital because obviously manga, illustrations, comics are still images. But if I were to shoot these scenes on film, there’s always going to be those subtle movements of the grain. The shot is always going to be moving, but with digital, as long as nothing is moving within the scene, it really truly just looks like a photograph. So that also allows for the smallest of movements to be very surprising and shocking for the viewer. It’s as if the manga has come to life.

How are you thinking about technology right now? Is the noise around AI impacting your work at all? Is it inspiring it? Is it sort of detracting from it?

I don’t think about it at all.