Chloe Zhao and Kore-eda Hirokazu move each other to tears in Tokyo
Before Chloé Zhao and Kore-eda Hirokazu sat down for their chat at the Tokyo International Film Festival, they were crying over each other’s work.
Kore-eda watched Chow’s “Hamnet” in a small screening room with just one person, and was grateful that no one else was there to see his tears. “I couldn’t stop crying,” the Japanese auteur admitted, moved by the film’s exploration of the reasons creative people tell stories and the collective act of experiencing tragedy together.
On the morning of their conversation, Chow had woken up at 4 a.m., jet-lagged, to watch Kore-eda’s 1998 masterpiece “After Life.” She cried for an hour while her makeup team worked on her before the event. “I said to Kore-eda-san, ‘I feel like ‘Hamnet’ and ‘After Life’ are pretty much the same movie,” Chow told the TIFF auditorium audience. “Because it’s about how we see our lives, whether joyful or painful, reflected back at us, it gives these experiences meaning and makes the human experience a little less difficult.”
Mutual admiration sets the tone for an intimate conversation between two authors who share more than they ever expected. The discussion took place as Zhao’s latest film was preparing to close the festival, while Kore-eda is currently in production on his new film “Sheep In The Box” starring Ayase Haruka and comedian Daigo.
The emotional connection revealed a striking similarity in the way both directors approach their work: neither knows how their films will turn out when they start shooting.
“When I go to produce a film, I never know how it will turn out,” Chow explained. “I’ll write it on the page so it reads well, so it’s greenlit, and I get the money to make a movie. But I know deep down — and the lead actors often know — that it’s not there.”
This creative philosophy almost proved disastrous for Hamnet. Four days before the production wrapped, only two people at the Globe Theater knew there was no practical ending to the film: Chow and her lead actress, Jessie Buckley.
“I shot the ending that was in the script,” Chow recalls. “I looked at him and said, ‘This isn’t working. We don’t have a movie.'” She recalled Buckley’s reaction: “Jessie looks at me and says, ‘Is this it? I’ve been through all this and this is the end?'”
The breakthrough came the next morning during a drive through rainy London. Buckley sent Chow Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” the haunting song featured in “Arrival” and other films. “This song has a very special ability to align your entire body with the world around you,” Zhao said. “You suddenly feel one with everything.”
While listening to the song, Zhao found herself reaching into the rain outside the car window. “I wanted to reach nature so that I wouldn’t be afraid of losing my love, because if we were all one, you wouldn’t lose love. It turns into something else.” It was in that moment of personal grief and creative despair that the film’s true ending revealed itself.
“I’m always waiting for the end to come out, which is very stressful because you’re always away from not having a movie,” Zhao admitted. “But that’s life.”
Kore-eda expressed his understanding, revealing his unconventional process. He creates storyboards but abandons them once on set. “I always look forward about two weeks,” he said through translation. “I look at the schedule to see which actors will be on set, and I think about what I can do. I actually write and rewrite the script on set in that space. The staff may be nervous, but what comes out that way rarely looks wrong.”
Zhao distinguished between her latest work and her previous films. “‘Hamnet’ is about the interior scene, unlike ‘Nomadland,’ which is about the exterior landscape,” she explained.
Working with first-time cinematographer Lukas Zall, Zhao moved from the wide-open vistas of her previous American films to something more contained. “In my previous films, I was in my 30s and I was very interested in chasing as many horizons as possible. So it was about expansion. With Hamnet, I was interested in how to confine everything to one frame, one stage, one room, so that the water could go deeper.”
This theatrical approach led Chow to ask Kore-eda for his carefully composed frames, which often recalled stage backdrops. The Japanese director explained that he exchanges some words with the cinematographer on set, and prefers to explore each other’s intentions through the camera itself. “It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “If you just follow the storyboard, it’s just a matter of consuming a tight schedule.”
When asked why she works in fiction and not documentaries, Zhao gave a surprising answer about courage—or lack thereof. “I think when you make a documentary, you say: ‘This is me and this is what it’s about,’” she explained, citing Werner Herzog’s “Into the Abyss” as an example of bold documentary filmmaking. “I didn’t find that courage in my 30s to do this work.”
But there was another reason, rooted in representation and dignity. Chow spoke about America’s marginalized communities — people on reservations or living in pickup trucks — who are often documented with harsh digital cameras under unflattering lights, and studied as social issues rather than as human beings.
“If you are with them in their way of life, you will see the most beautiful scenery in America,” Chow said. “And the cinematic treatments, these pictorial images, are usually—because of the circumstances of history—reserved for certain demographics.”
Working with her cinematographer, Chow insisted on capturing these faces with the same cinematic treatment as any Hollywood star, filming in the golden hour. “The quality of the lighting makes us feel like we’re at one with the light. And those kind of sunsets and sunrises, those people who aren’t in big cities, or have the privilege that many of us have, experience every day.”
“Sometimes poetry can capture the truth better than facts,” Zhao concluded. “It’s an emotional truth, not just a fact.”
Zhao found unexpected freedom in her overseas situation. “I only saw two and a half Westerns when I made my own Westerns,” she laughed. “I didn’t have the burden on my shoulders that Americans do in terms of making a Western. When I did this Shakespeare, I didn’t know Shakespeare very well, so I don’t carry the burden as a British person. Everything about Shakespeare is very sacred. I just do what I want.”
This cavalier approach hides a past conflict. When Chow first came to America to attend school, her insecurities about the language were so deep that she gave up storytelling and studied politics instead. “I didn’t think I could tell stories. How could I do that if I didn’t speak the language?”
But her favorite films were characterized by a lot of silence. “There is a language that explains how your face moves and how your body moves,” she realized. “And if you don’t speak the language, you actually develop additional sensitivity to nonverbal interactions.” What was once a challenge has become an advantage.
Before the conversation, Chow had watched Kore-eda’s 1998 masterpiece After Life – a film about recently deceased people who must choose one memory to take forever, while workers at a way station produce a film that reproduces those memories.
“I was crying for an hour,” Zhao admitted, explaining how the film resonated with her work on “Hamnet,” which deals with how Shakespeare and his wife deal with the death of their son. “When we see our lives, whether happy or painful, reflected back at us, it gives those experiences meaning and makes the human experience a little less difficult.”
I was introduced to the characters in “After Life” who choose not to choose a memory, and instead stay in limbo to help others. “My favorite memories of my life are actually while making beliefs, while creating unreal fantasies, for the sake of other people’s memories,” Zhao said. “When you watch ‘Hamnet,’ you see that Shakespeare is also a man who has a lot of trouble communicating and communicating in real life. But when he’s on stage, he can relate to everything. So there’s a sweetness and bitterness to a lot of us who choose to be storytellers.”
Kore-eda, who produced “After Life” in his twenties, admitted that this tension still exists for him in his sixties. “I want to keep working without making this feeling ridiculous,” he said.
Chow praised Kore-eda’s films for their focus on mundane details—washing, cooking, daily routines—that create a meditative rhythm before the emotional tsunami arrives. “A lot of times, cinema skips the 80% in between, and only shows the super highs and lows,” Chow noted. “But you invite us to enjoy this comfortable, daily ritual. And in doing so, you go and push us away. It’s like a kind of ritual and the piece comes in a loop. And then when it hits you, it’s in the body.”
Kore-eda humbly accepted the praise, saying that he hopes to build stories out of the small emotional ups and downs of everyday life, though he’s not sure how successful he will be.
The conversation also touched on practical matters. Kore-eda’s filming lasts for about two months, and then he tries to finish before dinner when the children are on set, adhering to improved work rules in Japanese productions. He also edits at night during production, sometimes sending footage to his team for feedback the next day — a practice that creates nervous anticipation in his crew.
In contrast, Chow needs eight hours of sleep and does not interfere with the editing process during production. “I am easily influenced by everyone around me,” she explained. “If I edit something early on and it doesn’t quite work, it might change the way I want to do things.” “Hamnet” was filmed from late July through September.
When asked about the tension between collective theatrical experiences and streaming platforms, both directors acknowledged the paradox. Kore-eda said he still cannot separate watching a movie with someone in the dark from what cinema means to him. “That’s why we need film festivals – so that this experience doesn’t cease to exist.”
Chow agreed on the importance of collective viewing — it is central to the themes of “Hamnet” — but he also celebrated how access to content has been democratized by technology. “Thanks to iPhones and technology, a teenager in South Dakota can watch ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me’ on a Lakota reservation. I think that’s incredible.”
Looking to the future, Zhao said she believes stories choose filmmakers, not the other way around. “When the conduit, the lightning rod is ready, you will come.”
She noticed certain patterns: her first three films explored identity, home and belonging, while “Eternals” and “Hamnet” dealt with loneliness and dissolving the illusion of separation. “I think that’s what I’m looking for — how do we remove the illusion of separation that we feel with each other, and feel that kind of loneliness that you feel at the moment you’re born or when you’re out in nature.”
“I believe in the power of threes,” she added. “Since I’ve made two about it, I think there’s a third. I don’t know what it is.”
As for Kore-eda, he continues to produce “Sheep In The Box,” maintaining a work-life balance that isn’t really a balance at all. “I have become a person who is always working, which is not something that bothers me,” he admitted. But he wants young filmmakers to know that they don’t have to be 60-year-old workaholics to make films. “If they think filmmaking can be fun even as a career, that would be good.”