00:08Hello everyone, I'm Hirokazu Koreida. I've come from Japan and I'm here in Toronto with my latest
00:14film, Look Back. This film is based on a manga by Fujimoto Tatsuki. It's quite an autobiographical
00:21story following two protagonist young girls as they pursue their passion in manga. My first
00:27encounter with this book was just walking into a bookstore and being drawn to the cover which
00:32depicts a young person's back as they're sitting at their desk drawing manga. When I bought the book
00:39this would have been around the period of the pandemic where all of my film projects that
00:45were in production had stopped. I remember feeling as though my work that I had spent my whole career
00:53on film was being discarded by the world and being told as if it wasn't needed. This film
01:00and the story is about a young protagonist who stops drawing manga after a specific incident
01:08and then how they regain the courage to return to drawing manga. I was very moved by this and I
01:16felt
01:16very encouraged. So I hope that people that watch the film also kind of share in that feeling.
01:24The manga is about these two young girls, one named Fujino and the other named Kyomoto.
01:30And if you kind of take apart their names, it's Fujimoto but split into two different names. And I
01:36remember when I met him he described that both these characters exist within him. And of course he decided
01:43to write this story as a depiction with two characters. But as I was making the film I also
01:48found myself relating to the girls and thinking that I also have elements of both characters within
01:53myself too. So while it is kind of autobiographical in a sense for the writer of the manga, I also
01:59felt
01:59like I was overlapping a lot of my experiences and feelings onto the two girls as well.
02:06Yeah, why am I drawn to this idea of youth? I think that in my films I've depicted children and
02:13young
02:13people in many different ways. Sometimes the children serve as a way to critique adults. Sometimes in some of
02:21my films children are being made invisible by society. Oftentimes they are also a symbol of the kind of passion
02:30that we
02:30lose as we become adults. And there are also the films that I've made where you know it's just about
02:35the beauty
02:36of a child running towards something. So I think with this film myself and the staff we really wanted to
02:43highlight the beauty of just kind of observing young kids as they pursue something with all of their
02:51passion. And I really wanted to be able to clearly depict that. I think that's why I was drawn to
02:56this theme.
02:58So the role of Fujino and Kyomoto as adults, that I already had a very clear idea of who I
03:04wanted to
03:05cast as soon as I started working on this project. So that wasn't a difficult element. But with the two
03:11younger versions of Fujino and Kyomoto, I held auditions, you know, just like many, many auditions.
03:17And I think that there was part of that decision was just trying to figure out
03:21how the natural progression from them being children to being adults would make the most sense.
03:28Part of that has to do with, you know, maybe a similarity in their face, but it was really more
03:33about a similarity in their presence.
03:34And so it needed to the the the younger roles needed to connect to the older roles. If I use
03:40a
03:41baseball
03:43metaphor in the film, Fujino is a pitcher and Kyomoto is a catcher.
03:48That dynamic was really important. And so when I was casting for the the young kids roles,
03:53that's something that I was keeping in mind as I was trying to find the two actors.
03:58It's interesting because the title Look Back has many kind of overlapping meanings held within it,
04:04which I'm not sure makes sense so much in the translation or from to an English speaking audience,
04:10because it's kind of a Japanese style understanding of those two words. So
04:14look back obviously can mean looking back into the past, but it's also about looking kind of literally at the
04:21back of
04:22the two characters. I think I'm not sure that that meaning is completely conveyed through the the title,
04:29but those are the the things that I was thinking about as I was making the film. And that's why
04:33that motif is very important.
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