Miwa Nishikawa’s US Film Premiere of “Dreams for Sale

July 27, 2013, San Francisco Japanese Film Festival, San Francisco—Director Miwa Nishikawa director and screenwriter for “Dreams for Sale” talked about this latest film.
Previous feature-length films include Sway (2006), Ten Nights of Dream (2006) [SHORT], and Dear Doctor (2009). Dreams for Sale (Japan: Yume uru futari), 2012 was written and directed by Nishikawa, and stars Teruyuki Kagawa, Yûsuke Iseya and Takako Matsu. This was the first time I tried to tackle a woman’s film, but it is not a romance or motherhood movie. This film is about choices and the fact that most of our choices are not happy, but about competition.

The cryptic ending tried to indicate that the female protagonist Satoko was, after over two hours of a movie, showing her determination to move on with her life. The initial ending was envisioned as the couple dieing in another restaurant fire after serving time in prison. The restart of their lives was repeating as a fire destroyed their livelihoods, and represented an ending.

This original ending was based on a newspaper story about an elderly couple who owned a yakitori stand and were preparing to go to the Meiji shrine to sell their food. They checked out all of their equipment, but forgot to turnoff the fire, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This tragic ending was still possibly happy, since they stayed together until the end of their lives.

When the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami hit, I realized that I had to rethink this work. the news stories were of a single survivor who lost all of his family showed that survival could be a happy event. As a result, the Satoko character glares at the audience to show her determination to survive. Most audiences take away different ideas of the ending. Women see the hope, but without the husband, while men think the couple got back together.

The movie soundtrack was set to dissent with the action on the screen at the beginning to set a tone for the whole movie. The visual and audio contrast provides greater depth and engagement. I asked the composer to keep the music sweet and simple, so he only used 2 guitars with a bluesy undercurrent to play under the action. The score was purposely simple.

The two main characters show elements of beauty and ugliness at the same time, since this a the normal human condition. The music provides a counterpoint to the ugly part of the dreams. The inspiration for the movie came from the women around me. Some have careers, others are housewives, some have children, others don’t. Most of these women have to face difficult issues, and are unsure of their path. Happiness and suffering are a duet that is chronicled in our media and magazines, but the stories in the media are not really how our lives proceed.

I related with the characters as a part of myself. I would like to be the weightlifter for her determination. I think the characters are more determined with their career choices, but now have an issue with new challenges. They have to take on new occupations and challenges to move on with their lives.

I like to choose topics like swindling and evil in my films, but I’m not sure why. I pick criminals because their actions are a part of all of us and possibly, I was a criminal in a past life. I cannot make a pure evil villain. Usually my characters are normal people doing something bad. Society views these actions in a black or white filter, but all of us have some capacity to commit evil acts. This is just part of human nature.

Finally, in Japan, there are lots of events, leading to a loss of energy to attend all of them. San Francisco and the US are interesting and encouraging. This has been a good experience for me.