Interview: Daniel Raim

 

​

—Please introduce yourself and tell us about the path that eventually led you to The Ozu Diaries.

My name is Daniel Raim. I’m a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of artists’ lives and their work.

In high school, I read Émile Zola’s L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece), which draws from the lives and struggles of painters he knew such as Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet. Reading that book, I realized that while my first love was Impressionist painting, I was equally fascinated by the inner lives of the creators themselves. That realization informed my approach to documentary filmmaking.

A few years later, in 1997, I attended The American Film Institute and studied under Robert Boyle, Alfred Hitchcock’s longtime production designer on films like North by Northwest and The Birds. I was fascinated by Boyle’s life and work, and he became the subject of my first documentary, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose. Through making that film, I realized I wanted to dedicate my work to exploring cinema artists – not just directors, but production designers, cinematographers, all the artists who make cinema possible.

​

—You were interested in the relationship between the author and the work.

Yes. And when I was at the American Film Institute, Ozu’s Tokyo Story was required viewing. And I had never seen an Ozu film before.

​

—So at that time, you and your colleagues, friends, everybody watched Tokyo Story? How was everybody’s reaction?

I don’t know about everyone else’s reaction because we had to individually borrow the VHS tape from the library. I remember watching Tokyo Story with another student, and we looked at each other, totally puzzled. I thought, “Oh, it’s interesting.” You see this family on a tatami floor, living their lives. This is so different. I wondered: “This is a masterpiece, really?” I had all these questions.

I was young, maybe 21. Nothing stayed with me from that first watch. I don’t think I could appreciate it at that moment. At the time, I was interested in films by Gus Van Sant – a very different style of filmmaking, telling stories set in Portland, Oregon, where I lived.

Then, during film school, Abbas Kiarostami entered my life, and something clicked. I thought, this is amazing what he’s doing with cinema.

​

—What is your favorite Kiarostami film?

There’s this wonderful trilogy: Where Is the Friend’s House?, Life, and Nothing More…, and Through the Olive Trees. I was reading interviews with Kiarostami, and he spoke of his love for Ozu. He even made a film called Five Dedicated to Ozu in 2003. I thought, “Oh, interesting.” I remembered Tokyo Story, and then that same year, in 2003, for Ozu’s centennial, I went with some friends to UCLA for a 35mm double feature: Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, followed by An Autumn Afternoon.

An Autumn Afternoon completely changed my life. Something happened during that first viewing that is hard to describe. I was transported by Ozu’s images – the beautiful scenes in Torys bar, the colors, the design, the music, the pacing of the scene – and by Ryu Chishu’s performance. All the characters left a deep impression. It was a profound – unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I was young, and I remember thinking, “What happened to me? What just happened?” I feel like crying, just remembering it.

Then I bought Donald Richie’s book searching for answers – that was my first Ozu book. I remember reading it and thinking, “Who is this filmmaker Richie was describing as the most Japanese of all directors?” Then I watched Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga, and more of Ozu’s masterworks like Early Summer and Good Morning – and I became a bit of an Ozu fanatic. I soon felt compelled to make a documentary about this master.

Years later, in 2017, when I was going to Japan to do press for Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, I received the greenlight from the Criterion Collection to make a short subject documentary about Ozu. The result is In Search of Ozu, which explores his transition to color filmmaking and his approach to graphic design.

​

—Did you find anything new while creating The Ozu Diaries?

There’s already a tremendous amount of scholarship on Ozu. But for me, the deepest revelation happened during the editing stage, when I rewatched There Was a Father. At that point, I’d completed two years of deep Ozu study – absorbing his life through biographies like yours and others, through his own words, and through his diaries.

After all that academic research, when I finally came back to watching his films, I was stunned. Watching There Was a Father with fresh eyes, I felt what I can only describe as an “emotional autobiography.” Ozu had put himself directly into the film. Knowing about his separation from his own father when he was nine – that lingering tension – I suddenly grasped how deeply personal the film was.

From that point on, during the writing and editing process, I realized The Ozu Diaries needed to operate at 50% opacity of Ozu’s life and 50% opacity of Ozu’s work – like two transparent layers overlaid on each other. Where they intersect, where the light passes through both, that’s where the documentary film lives. Part of the joy of reading his diaries and watching his films in parallel was seeing where his life and mind were during the making of each film.

 

—Especially in There Was a Father, Ozu’s own life may be reflected.

Yes. When we were filming at Mugeiso, Fujimori-san, the caretaker, told us that Ozu didn’t invent anything – all of his films were based on people he knew or himself.

I think the aspects of his life that most shaped his work were the war, impermanence, and family relations. His parents, and his close friend Yamanaka Sadao – those were powerfully important figures in his life.

Going back to L’Œuvre, right? I wanted to find out who Ozu Yasujiro really was – who was the kid dreaming about having coffee with Mildred Harris? When I first encountered the hundreds of photographs of Ozu in Shochiku’s archives, I realized I needed to truly understand his entire life journey, from birth until death. That realization sparked a deep, years-long research project before I ever sat down to edit the documentary. But by the end of that immersion, when I looked back at those same photographs, he wasn't a stranger anymore. I finally knew him, and I was ready to make the film.

In this respect, The Ozu Diaries is like a pointillist, impressionistic painting. The paint is Ozu’s words, but the image that emerges is a portrait shaped by how I see him and how I feel about him. It’s not an attempt to hold a mirror up and say, “This is Ozu, definitively.”

​

—So far, The Ozu Diaries has been screened at Venice, Busan, Rio, LA, and at the Tokyo International Film Festival. How have the reactions been in each country?

It’s been humbling. We’ve heard from film students, filmmakers, and critics who have had very profound reactions to the film. I think, ultimately, the documentary gives Ozu a platform to speak for himself, allowing audience members to meet Ozu the man for the very first time, in his own words.

When you see Early Summer and hear Ozu talk about his intention in directing the child actors, or about the difference between where the emotion lives in Late Spring versus Early Summer, you realize he’s working to communicate something in the spaces between scenes, in the margins. The emotional undercurrents are part of what makes an Ozu film so powerful and deeply moving. Audiences have told me it's a revelation to hear him articulate those intentions.  

​

—Is there any footage you reluctantly cut?

We interviewed Wim Wenders, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Tsai Ming-liang, and each had such profound insights, far more than we could include.  

There’s also a treasure of Ozu’s own words – his internal battle when making the Kihachi trilogy, how he was dealing with the arrival of sound cinema while watching King Vidor’s films. Vidor was like his North Star. I would have loved to expand on that formal struggle, to juxtapose what Vidor was doing with what Ozu was doing. But ultimately, we had to find the right balance for the story we were telling.

​

—What do you think of Ozu’s wartime experiences?

Ozu’s war was the most difficult part of the research. The war must have been a harrowing experience for Ozu, and I think that it permeated his work for years afterward.

I built the wartime section almost entirely from his own diaries, interviews, and photographs – he carried a Leica through the war, and of the roughly four thousand pictures he took, only a handful survived a later fire. I wanted the war rendered from inside his mind and eyes rather than narrated about him. The numbness, the first enemy corpse, the moment he describes himself as no longer a filmmaker but a soldier. Tanaka Masasumi, in his book Ozu Yasujiro and War, reads this not as ideology but as a mind defending itself: Ozu’s humanity entered a crisis under the conditions of war, and he passed through it. 

And yet, in the decades following, he made films of extraordinary tenderness, humor, and restraint. Making this documentary, I found myself looking at those films through the lens of his wartime experience – alongside everything else that shaped them: his parents, his losses, the changing society around him. The film doesn’t editorialize on what Ozu believed or prosecute what he did. It places the work alongside the life and lets us sit with the complexity.