NORWEGIAN WOOD directed by Tran Anh Hung, written by Tran from the novel by Haruki Murakami, with Kenichi Matsuyama, Kiko Muzuhara and Rinko Kikuchi. A Mongrel Media release. 133 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (March 2). See listing.
It’s good to be talking to Tran Anh Hung.
The Vietnamese-born, French-raised director who made his name with the Oscar-nominated drama The Scent Of Green Papaya dropped out of sight after 2000’s The Vertical Ray Of The Sun. He’s spent a little time teaching, he says, and then he lost a couple of years labouring on his English-language debut, the Josh Hartnett thriller I Come With The Rain.
When I ask about that film, he says he’d prefer I didn’t bother tracking it down the version released overseas doesn’t reflect his intentions, and he suspects it’ll never reach North American screens.
Better to focus on his new film, Norwegian Wood, which played the Toronto Film Festival in 2010 and is finally getting a theatrical release here a year and a half later. If that seems like a long gap, it’s nothing compared to how long Tran’s been trying to bring Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel to the screen.
“I read it in 1994, and it stayed with me,” he says, easing back on a couch at the Sutton Place. He wasn’t able to start filming for a decade and a half, but he believes that actually helped him get a handle on the material.
“The movie and the book have this quality of melancholy,” he says, “this sudden feeling you have of knowing you have lost something forever, something that will never come back again. That feeling only comes with age. You can’t have it when you’re 20. It’s impossible.”
In his mid-40s when he made the film, Tran found the only way he could get the tone right was to stop himself from thinking about it on the set.
“I never work precisely on the melancholy,” he says. “I say to myself, ‘If I’m doing everything right, the melancholy will come out of it.’ It’s an extra quality that comes to the movie, like poetry. You can see, in some movies, that they try to make poetry by showing a nice landscape with rain falling, things like that. And it’s bad.”
It’s all about getting the rhythm right, he explains.
“I have to follow the music that is inside of me,” he says, “try to be as close as possible to that music. It’s my only guide when I’m shooting a movie – a very vague feeling, but a very strong feeling. When you can see it, then you recognize it, you know? It’s not something I have in mind before coming to the set.”
normw@nowtoronto.com
