Journalist David Tracey interviewed Shinya Tsukamoto in Tokyo in April 1999 prior to watching a rough assembly of GEMINI.

David Tracey: You're admired in the indie world for having made a successful career out of doing your own kind of film, sometimes with your own money. Does having all this studio funding now make a big difference?
Shinya Tsukamoto: Well... How can I answer that? Compared to my independent films I'm now working with famous actors -- very famous in Japan -- and quite talented too. So on that level you might say I can make a higher quality film. When I did my own independent films I would choose actors for the main roles from auditions. Sometimes I could get fairly big actors that way. But this time even for the smaller roles I got big stars, the ones I wanted. And that's definitely a good thing. But in the Japanese film industry today, even making a studio-backed film doesn't mean you get a lot of money. You have more than you do with an independent, but it's not exactly "too much." You still have to watch carefully how you use it.

You really had to watch your budget on GEMINI?
ST: To be honest, it's always written that independent movies are done so differently, but it's not really like that. Independent films still cost a lot of money. It might even be about the same. Everything just takes you longer to do. In a major film you can rely on the genius of good actors and production people to do everything in a short amount of time, which saves money. Independent films really take up a lot of your time.

Does doing a major film have any effect on your filmmaking style? If it's your money you obviously have control but when you're working for someone else...
ST: For HIRUKO which I made in '92, even though I'd only made TETSUO up to then, they let me have a lot of control. Although of course they didn't have that much faith in me at that point. This time the producer has a lot of faith in me and they've let me have control. From writing the script down to choosing the actors, including the cinematography and the editing which I'm doing right now, they've let me make my film. So it's worked out well, a successful blend of the independent filmmaking style with major actors. When it comes to control of course I haven't been able to do absolutely everything I've liked, but basically I've been incredibly free. It's a major film but they've let me be experimental too, so it's a different kind of film.

Some fans lament when their favorite independent filmmaker goes major.
ST: I know. And as much as possible I've tried to make the kind of film where people wouldn't have to worry about that. I'll think they'll like this one. In any event it's just a short-term thing. Some movies are like whiskey in that they take a long time to make well. I like to think of this one like a good Chinese meal. You get all the ingredients together first and then throw them together very quickly. The result is delicious!

What about changes in your own personal life? By now you must have dropped all your former poor friends who can't keep up with your major film director lifestyle...
ST: In Japan, even if you make major movies you don't get much money... and I don't have any friends anyway (laughs). So no, nothing much has changed.

Did you really pay for your first movie TETSUO with your own money?
ST: Yes. I started with using own money but then I ran out. So I went to a video company and got the rest of the film funded.

How much money are we talking about?
ST: That one was really cheap. About 13 million yen altogether. As soon as it was done, suddenly the costs shot up to 10 million yen. About 5 million of that was my own money, and the video company put up 5 million. On my next film all it shot up to 200 million yen. All of a sudden I was flush.

Did you make money on your first film?
ST: It was a big success. For pure profit, that's been my greatest success. My other films have all pretty much broken even.

You're better known abroad than in Japan. Why?
ST: In Japan I've hardly won anything, but overseas I've done pretty well, been invited to a lot of festivals, and my films have sold fairly well in video. Maybe it's because Japanese people are shy. I don't know, but there hasn't been much reaction in Japan. It has something to do with publicity, but I don't really understand it myself.

Maybe there's something about your style of movies that appeals to foreigners more than to Japanese?
ST: Compared to typical Japanese films, mine don't have a lot of talking. There tends to be more action. More than words, they're about what people do. That might be one reason reason why.

Do you think about it when you're making films?
ST: No, it never enters my mind.

GEMINI has a very interesting look. How did you pick this story?
ST: The producer told me about the Edogawa Rampo story Soseiji (The Twins), and said that Motoki-san, who'd starred in the number one NHK taiga drama series on TV last year, was interested in it as a movie. He said that except for those two conditions, I could choose the rest of the cast and do whatever I wanted to do. I used to like Edogawa Rampo in grade school so I thought it would be interesting to try filming one of his stories. This is a just a very short story in which not enough happens to make an entire movie, so I wrote an original story based on it.

Was there something in particular about the story you found interesting?
ST: The younger brother kills his older twin and adopts his identity and marries his woman. That's good, but it alone wasn't enough. So I have him throw his older brother into a well. The older brother stays alive in the well, so now things can happen. On the opposite side, the younger brother is living in luxury. Everything gets turned upside down. In one sense it's a simple good vs. evil story, but it gets more complicated than that because you can't always be sure which is good and which is evil. I wanted the film to make people come up with their own definitions of good and evil.

TOKYO FIST also had a brother rivalry. Is there something going on in your own family we should know about?
ST: I didn't purposely think about doing the same kind of story. It's more that I was trying to decide what the most interesting story I could film would be, and it ended up being this.

Well are things with your own brother difficult?
ST: Until I made movies our relations weren't all that great, but since then they're fine.

Why do none of your actors in GEMINI have eyebrows?
ST: The makeup artist is a unique person. She was the one who said she'd like to do it this way. At first I was surprised, and I thought it might be a little hard to pull off. These are big name actors for one, and who knows what it might do to the looks of the lead actress, whether she'll still be pretty or not. But I figured I'd put it to them and if even one person objected we'd just forget the whole thing. So everyone thought it over, and in the end it came down to the fact that the makeup artist really is a rare type of person, and since we'd gone to all the trouble to pick her we all thought we might as well give her idea a try. In olden Japan it used to be said that the eyebrows were the most expressive part of the face. If someone is mad, you can tell at a glance of their eyebrows alone. You've seen how they're drawn in manga. So if we were to take away the most expressive part of the face. . . what would happen? The actors would haveto come up with totally new expressions to get the point across. Everybody thought that was interesting enough to at least experiment with it.

And they obviously liked the results well enough to go through with it.
ST: We took pictures first and then gathered around to look at them. We'd all say, 'Look, it really is pretty isn't it?' Whether they really were pretty or not, I don't know.There's a fine line there that we might have been crossed. But depending on your point of view, it can be called attractive.

It can actually become all the more attractive if the viewer has to choose, and then creates his own concept of beauty.
ST: If you put it that way, sure. There's also the possibility that by taking away the eyebrows it may not make the actors seem attractive at first glance, but the background might become that much prettier. That's one explanation. Anyway, it's an experiment.

Who's going to come see GEMINI? Girls because it has Masahiro Motoki?
ST: Well, I don't know because it is set in the Meiji era. But that might end up attracting some young people who could think of it as a 'punkish' time. That's one impression I'd like people to get. But I didn't really think about making a movie for a certain type of person. If a lot of people go and see it, I'm happy.

You don't think of a target audience?
ST: When I was making independent movies I never had a target audience in mind. I just made the kind of movie I wanted to see myself. This time, basically, it was the same, although I listened to the producer's opinions too.

Do you feel any pressure to succeed when it's not your money being spent?
ST: No, there isn't much. I always work hard anyway. I haven't had a failure yet as far as the final product is concerned. I've always been satisfied. I've never made a film where I felt I had to go and apologize afterward to the people who supported it. So no, I don't feel that kind of pressure. And in this film, I was so busy all the time I didn't have any time to think about pressure anyway.