Alumni Interview
Masashi Kawamata

Masashi and Nicholas shared valuable insights into how they made OUT with a crew spanning five different time zones, their interesting backgrounds, the inspiration behind the film’s story and much more. OUT will be having its world premiere at LA Independent Filmmakers Showcase where it will be closing the festival. Continue reading to learn about their exciting adventure and discover pearls of wisdom you can apply to your own filmmaking journey.

First of all, congratulations both of you on completing your first feature film! Masashi, please could you tell us a little about your experience as a screenwriting student at LFS, did it influence you as a writer-director?

Masashi: Yes. I would say, yeah, 100%. The experience that I had at London Film School definitely paved me into my directorial paths as well as the screenwriting paths. The reason why is that back then it was the Covid-19 era. So, we were doing the zoom classes and all that with other co-hosts. But one thing that stood out to me was that there were a lot of writers who were exceptional, but I just realized that I wasn’t that good at it, but I was rather a visual storyteller.

So, one of the things that my tutor said was that you might actually want to direct, as opposed to just write. That was kind of like a reckoning moment for me to just realise that I might be approaching screenplays from the standpoint of a director rather than just a writer. A friend of mine who was a was a brilliant writer from China and the EP on this project, said as she was coming from a novel writing experience, that you don’t have to limit yourself to the scope of just what is doable within the scope of a screenplay. I think you need to explore what you can do in your imagination and in your vision.

Writing a first feature screenplay at London Film School was when I realized, okay, you know what? Nobody else is writing a sci-fi, action, thriller. Because obviously that’s not a doable thing, but I realised that, okay, maybe I should give it a shot at directing and then I end up being writer, director and producer on this project.

Could you share a little about your journey from grad to feature film director?

Masashi: It definitely was not an easy journey. I think many of the people who have directed their first feature agree that financing is the biggest hurdle in the first place. And then getting it really done is the hardest thing that you can do. Everything and anything can happen on the set, or even in the post-production and I think I had to spend a few years writing the feature screenplay, polishing it with Nicolas and then basically shopping around within the industry in Japan and also outside the industry, getting in touch with private investors, which led to securing some of the financing. But then things didn’t really go so smoothly as the production company that was on board with a project from Japan decided to part ways with us as the timeline didn’t really align.

So, in the end, I had to become the producer as well as Nicholas because we lost that main production company, somebody has to operate as a producer in Japan and there was nobody else who could’ve done it. So, I had to operate as a producer as well. So, for me, in a way, it was a very tricky path. In comparison to other filmmakers who graduated and who were able to secure the financing through European film markets or other markets or even from within the industry. But this one was a very, very tiny project, with less than 100,000, USD as a budget and me being the first-time director at the age of 28, pretty much nobody would invest.

London Film School informed me of everything. Also the experiences of making it happen was definitely not something I imagined from what I learned, but in a good way, because you believe that you can learn everything in the film school, but then there would be so many things that you have to learn from the actual experience. Having gone through this, I definitely have a different perspective to how I’m working now as opposed to how I would have worked soon after graduating from London Film School. So, I think these couple of years have been the most informative for sure.

We’d love to hear more about your debut feature film, OUT, what inspired the story and what was your experience like making it? And do you have a favourite moment from production?

Masashi: So, the story is about Makoto, who is a hikikomori, a “shut-in” living in Tokyo. One day, Makoto’s best friend declares suicidal thoughts online and disappears. And because of their fear of going outside or even going out of the room, Makoto cannot really do anything but try to save her from within the room. And that kicks it off as a ticking clock thriller set in one room. The seed of the story was somewhat inspired by my own personal experience of having gone through that shut-in period.

A year or two before I went to London Film School, I was at uni in Tokyo, I had a bit of a moment where I was not really able to go to the school, since I basically had left my community, which was an English theatre club, and it was kind of difficult to see all my friends doing great jobs and having a lot of fans while I’m basically just left behind and felt like I was becoming a failure from stepping away from that community. From taking a lot of online classes, I gradually erased my contacts and thus erased my existence from it. So, it’s actually a very personal story, but also not necessarily trying to make it as just so personal because I wanted to make sure that the story resonated with a lot more people than just those who have gone through this.The film itself is definitely more than just a drama. It is a thriller. It is a mystery. It is a romance.

One of the things I love about this film is that we had cast and crew of more than ten nationalities working on the project. So, there was a high interest in the theme of the story and the film, and I think in a way that was kind of like a relieving factor for me to know that a lot of people would actually care about this sort of story and that it might resonate with a lot of people not only in Japan but also outside it.

On a practical level, as a first-time director, I was given such a privilege to be able to work in a controlled environment. So, because of that narrative, 80% of a story would happen in the same room where you would have full control of the lighting and the staging and everything, which would not normally happen to most of the indie first feature directors because they have so many restrictions. So, for me, what we were able to achieve within the scope of the budget definitely surpassed people’s expectations. And I love the contribution from cinematography, sound, music and edit, everybody was able to punch above their weight, and the result is quite evident in the film. So, that’s definitely something I’m quite proud of.

How did you partner with Nicholas, and what has it been like working together?

Masashi: So, we met through a friend of mine who was my senior colleague from the university in Tokyo, and he was working for this production company that had a branch office in Los Angeles. I had to censor a screenplay for their consideration, and they basically just shipped it off to the States and Nicholas read it. That project didn’t really lead to anywhere, but he loved the screenplay. Although it was a really, really not great screenplay at all. Because that was my first ever screenplay, so you can imagine the quality of the screenplay at the age of 21 or something like that. But he saw some potential in the story and reached out to me saying I love the story – can we work on it together?

So that happened a couple of years ago. Since then, we have worked on several screenplays together over Zoom on a weekly basis. And that led us to this realisation of the first feature film together. The experience of working with Nicolas is definitely not a typical experience you can get just being in Japan or China trying to just work out a screenplay with only a writer because Nicholas has the experience of working in the industry for a long time in development.

Nicholas: I was working for the US branch of a large gaming company in Japan, that had set up a film production entity in the United States, and I was employed by the film production entity in the US. Masashi’s friend was working with the game company in Tokyo and was facilitating the productions that we were putting together along with other members of the Tokyo team. So, at the point in time when we met, which was in 2019, Masashi came to the Los Angeles office, kind of almost unannounced, like I knew that you were coming I think a couple of hours before you arrived at the office.

But then in 2020, as things were shutting down for Covid and we were working on our last film project, I received the screenplay from Masashi that he mentioned. And, if I can just correct the record that this was his sixth draft of that particular screenplay. So, it was really, really well developed. And I really liked that screenplay a lot. It was more so about what we could do for the final polish, which is what we ended up doing together. But no, it was already a very high-quality screenplay. It sounded little like not giving full credit to himself earlier.

Nicholas, could you tell us about your experience producing and co-writing OUT?

Nicholas: Of course! So, Masashi mentioned how the original idea was developed by him, so we had already worked on the screenplay. We spent a good time, I think maybe like almost a year working on that draft and just getting really used to working together very well. And by working together, I mean that we would have a call on Zoom just like this every single week for a couple of hours to really think about how we will develop stories.

Even though I have never personally lived as a hikikomori in the sense that Masashi described by then I think most people around the world had already gone through the Covid 19 pandemic isolation period. And I was like, well, this is the perfect time to make a film like this, because everyone has had at least some kind of experience that is somewhat like being a commodity, even if it was only for a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

In my case, I had some experiences earlier in my life of having friends who were going through the similar kind of emotional and psychological problems and difficulties that Makoto’s friend is going through. So, I had multiple ways of relating to the story. Masashi created the first draft and all of the concepts and original ideas. And then I would come in and say, okay, how about this? And would write a pass of his work, and then he would take my screenplay and write a pass of my work and trade it back and forth and back and forth, and we kept working on it that way, all the way up until the very final version that we filmed.

It was a continuous almost two year long process of back and forth, back and forth, including all the way through pre-production and hiring everyone to work on it and raising the money and everything else. So, that’s like the kind of very hands-on collaborative experience that I think is maybe not typical, but was great because it really allowed us to reach a place where we were really happy with what we could make. And from a producing standpoint, like Masashi mentioned, this was the first time that I had produced a feature film, even though I have been involved in development of several feature films before, and I had been producing an animated short film and assisting with a documentary feature film.

This was my first time being on set and being really, really hands on. And my first time raising more than 50% of the budget. There was a lot of challenges. I was definitely supported by a lot of people along the way, and it was a great learning experience. I think that we were able to achieve what we did because we had so many collaborators and co-creative voices who came to us or who were willing to join us, and who were willing to give everything that they had to us, even though we didn’t always have the most resources or the most luxurious shooting schedules or anything like that. I credit everyone, especially Masashi, with the ability to produce it as well as I could and the quality is 100% created by everyone, it doesn’t come from any single place.

What was your biggest challenge and your favourite part of production?

Masashi: Challenges were everywhere, every single day in the production. But I think the biggest challenge that I personally had is that, because we weren’t such a luxurious production, we had to operate in a semi-professional way where we weren’t able to recruit the professional first assistant director, which meant that I had to ask my friend, who is just such a smart, smart person, to step in and operate as the first AD. The people that I recruited were my friends and my friends’ friends. So, I had a responsibility to make sure that everyone was okay in this production. Because of the nature of the bilingual set, not everybody’s bilingual so I became the agent between all the crew. It was almost like one side of me was a director and the other side of me, the producer side of the brain, was making sure everything is going smoothly on the set. So, the challenge was the juggling of everything that happens on the day and then once you’re done with the production on the day, you have to think about the scheduling and so on.

My favourite bit was that we were so, so lucky to do it and with such nice people. We were friendly to each other, and we were able to explore so many things in a way that might not be possible on strictly professional sets where you would have to abide by so many rules. The average age of everyone on set was 26, everyone was pretty young, so we were able to just explore so many things in such a way, and we were able to stay in touch with one another and work on many projects together.

Nicholas: For me, the biggest challenge was from the very start trying to make sure that the story would be constructed in a way that was both true to Masashi’s experience and point of view, but also would be accessible to everyone around the world, and that people who might not be aware of hikikomori issues would be able to understand it intuitively. I think that Masashi solved a lot of those problems, even from the first one or two drafts of the script, but it was something that came up when we would meet with other people or get advice during the development. And so, it was always the foremost thing in my mind to make sure, is this going to work in the most accessible way while still feeling very specific and authentic.

And the challenge of raising the money for a project like this, especially in the world that we’re in right now, there isn’t as much space for independent films as there were maybe ten or fifteen years ago. But we were able to find help and support from a lot of unconventional places, people who had never worked on a film before but believed in this project, even if they had no direct connection with Japan or Japanese social issues. So that was very helpful.

As for the best moment, it wasn’t a singular moment, but rather it was seeing everyone come together and solve the challenges during the production, like I mentioned before. Every time something came up that we were like, we don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this – someone was always rising to that moment and being like, I’ll help. And it was that great ability to just be creatively and collaboratively scrambling to the next answer, which was stressful in the moment but amazing in the final result. It made me so grateful for everyone and really made me determined to keep working with everyone again. Because when you can really rely on people like that, you know that they’re the best possible collaborators.

Nicholas, it would be great to learn more about your work in film development and pre-production within Japanese companies operating in Hollywood, as well as your experience producing animation! How does it differ from producing live-action films, and what do you look for in screenplays/projects as a producer?

Nicholas: So, after I graduated from UCLA, I was looking to work in the film industry

and pretty much had been since I was a child because both my parents also worked in the film industry and I was very fortunate to be able to do some development internships with a variety of different companies, including a Japanese animation production company that was operating in the US at the time. I worked there for over five years, and we created relationships between American producers and Japanese rights holders of different intellectual properties.

My area of expertise was Japanese animation because I had already known people from the industry and was wanting to work with them in various capacities. So, at that first company, which was called All Nippon Entertainment Works, we went through about well over 2000 different intellectual properties that existed at the time. And I think I must have worked on

at least 700 of them, learning how to approach from a development standpoint. How would you take the original story from Japan and adapt it for a global audience without losing the core appeal of it and without turning it into something that it wasn’t.

And then I started working for a private gaming company, Akatsuki, which was how I ended up meeting Masashi. We produced two feature films in the US that were based on Japanese properties. One was based on a novel and one was based on a video game and in those I participated more directly in the actual development of the projects. So that involved a lot of work with sitting with the writers, helping to facilitate the producers on the US side, navigating the challenges of what they felt needed to be done in order to make the projects commercial for a US audience. Also trying to make sure that the Japanese side was having their priorities protected and going to be satisfied with the resultant work.

After that, I became independent and I worked with a Japanese animation studio called Science Saru. And at the time, they were making episodes of a Disney+ series called Star Wars: Visions. I became an associate producer of their episodes, along with two other people on the Japanese side in the studio. That involved helping to shape the pitch for those storylines that went to Disney and Lucasfilm for approval and then also helping at the end of the production.

I’m on my fifth year of working on The Flower, a animated short-film, and that’s only a four-minute film. When you spend five years working on a four-minute film, and you compare

with how relatively quickly Masashi and I were able to make OUT in comparison, it feels like you’re kind of operating at light speed in comparison. So that is probably the single biggest difference between working on animation and live action films. When you’re doing live action, you have to understand that you’re capturing what is happening within that moment, you also have to accept and embrace the unpredictable nature of performance and of capture and of life, which is different than animation and that has been very, very interesting to me.

What’s next for OUT? I understand it’s in post-production, how’s it all going?

Masashi: We’re just wrapping it up and we’re making a final delivery of the DCP, the shows and a package. We are currently in the middle of film festival submissions, so hopefully we’ll get some hopeful results this year. We’re also developing English and Japanese novels of the film, artwork and other subsidiary, products as well.

What kind of stories do you feel are missing in cinema right now that you’d like to tell?

Nicholas: I think that it’s not so much about the content of the story as it is about the ability for the story to connect with people and for them to feel like they’re seen and respected by the story right now. Framing the character and the story in a way that even people who might

not think they could relate will be able to see in that character, in that story – oh, this is like what I went through, or this is like me. It’s more important now than ever, maybe in cinema’s history that we be as representative and including as many voices as possible.

Masashi: Just authentic and very rewarding to watch as opposed to let’s go to the cinema just because there is this talent or idol or TV personality. Although I do understand the business side of the industry, but sentimentally, I think what might be missing deep down is the films that can captivate people a lot more than just the people who are in it. I think we really have to be conscious of what would be important to the viewers and audience members.

And finally, what advice would you give to aspiring screenwriters, directors and producers?

Nicholas: I think that it’s important that no matter what the scope of what you’re trying to do, that you be bold and that you not be afraid of tackling the things that feel very important and timely and relevant to you, that make you feel like you should be doing this. Because if you don’t feel like you should be making this right at this moment, telling this story at this time, for this world, then you’re not going to be able to create something that is filled with the passion that you need in order to stand out from all of the other people who are creating things that they might not care as much about.

And sometimes people can feel a little uncertain about that because they think, oh, I need to do something that feels safer and more conventional and that’s what the industry wants. But I think ultimately what the industry wants, especially from a young filmmaker or a first-time filmmaker, is a sense of enthusiasm and passion that reflects that. They will be able to keep doing this for the long term, and that they care deeply about the world that they’re interacting with.

Masashi: If you want to make it, I think you should make it, because there would be no right moment for you unless you decide, okay, this is a time I’m going to make it. If you think about some of the legendary filmmakers, Ridley Scott or even Denis Bernard, they didn’t make a so-called great first feature films until they turned 40. So, a lot of different people would have a different right time. If you really, really want to make it and if you’re impatient, I think there is no reason for you to just wait for a couple of years to work it out.

People on the screenwriting course would say you cannot make a screenplay perfect because you will always want to rewrite and rewrite and I think you could probably bring it to your grave. I will do that with some of my screenplays for sure! But another bit of advice is that the people you meet at London Film School whether they’re just good friends or whether they are your collaborators, they are always, always so supportive and they are the people you want to work with. The people you meet there are your pals to work with.

I could not have done it without having gone through the screenwriting programme. So, I definitely would like to thank Sophia and other people, especially Henry, who was my screenwriting tutor and biggest mentor.

Thank you to Masashi and Nicholas for your time and the valuable gems of knowledge you shared. If you’re interested in learning more about our MA Screenwriting programme, be sure to follow the link.