|
Mark Brayne:
Let me start with a bit of background. Paul Wilmshurst is the programme's producer, editor and author. Gavin Rees was assistant producer and the main Japanese-speaker on the production team. Their team and I met before they got into the main production, research and interviewing phase. We talked a little about the psychological implications; the trauma that they were going to hear about and seek to portray. So, looking at the film now in the context of this growing awareness of trauma and the psychological dimension to journalism and programme making, Paul, tell us a little about your own and your team's experience of making such a powerful film. Afterwards we'll open it out to discussion.
Paul Wilmshurst:
There were different stages. The first stage for me was getting hired to do this, thinking it was a thing worth doing and that there was a lot that I didn't know. Before we had the co-production money, before we really knew what we were doing exactly, I thought the first thing I'd better do was to go to Hiroshima and lock myself into a hotel room, read accounts of survivors and try and imagine what it would have been like and what we were going to be trying to film.
In a funny way, that was the most traumatic part of the whole process. There was something about being there in a very isolated state and having a sense of events unfolding in your head without any kind of backup or support and without being with other people. I found this very distressing but then also very invigorating. There was an energy that came from that that was very useful in persuading the co-producers to invest, and in putting everything together.
Then I remember finding and meeting Gavin—knowing that I needed someone who was a Japan specialist and who spoke Japanese. Gavin had already made a film about Hiroshima, and quite early in the research he was finding survivors and they were telling him their stories on the phone.
We'd be sitting in London at the BBC on a Friday afternoon, and people would be passing drinks round and having little parties, as people do in offices. And Gavin would be talking to people in tears on the phone regressing and going through the experiences they went through 60 years earlier.
We realised that we were dealing with something very difficult. It was very hard to know how to contain or how to process this in yourself and to stay healthy through what was going to be quite a long process.
I remember we asked one of the people on the team to investigate whether there was any sort of back-up for people doing this. Was there anyone you could talk to? Was there anyone that we could bring in to the team to talk to the different researchers that were going to be together to think what this would be like and how we could cope with some of the things that we'd all end up with in our minds?
Mark came in and gave us a briefing and some brochures on trauma and journalism. And the lesson that I think I very quickly learned was that 60 years is no distance at all. If someone's alive and they tell you a story about something that traumatised them, and if the trauma is alive in them, it transmits to you very quickly. In a sense our job was to keep that trauma alive. We weren't trying to contain it or displace it or dissipate it; we wanted it to be a living thing, because it was clearly part of the story, part of the experience.
One of the critical things, both politically and psychologically, in the story of Hiroshima, is that it's such a rupture. It's such a traumatic event that on the one hand it brings about the end of the second World War—I think indisputably—and on the other hand it's a trauma that's still festering and will take generations to disappear, and maybe will never disappear.
So the question was, how do you take something, live through it without damaging yourself to the point where you don't function, and also make it available to other people to experience in a way that's going to upset them. We wanted the warning at the beginning of the film to say this was going to be difficult viewing. But we didn't want it to be so upsetting that it would be impossible to watch.
The next stage—having found the people, thought about it, written it and so on—was then working with the actors who take it into themselves and become those characters and then transmit the trauma back through what they feel. We've got (actor colleagues) Naoko and Kenji, Satchi and Haruka who all played survivors, and who all went through hell. You might say I imagined some of it, Gavin encountered the real people and had to take in their stories, talk to them, manage their feelings and interview them. Then the actors and actresses had to become these people, and do that in a way that would do justice to what they felt.
I saw what happened on the set and it wasn't just pretend; it was a very painful experience for people acting in it and for people witnessing it. So that's the introduction to whatever this discussion will take us into.
Mark Brayne:
Before I go to Gavin, can I ask one of the actors to pick up where Paul has just come to, because you, as Japanese, entered into not just the role but also the experience and the reality of the trauma. As Paul says, it isn't just acting; you were there and putting yourself back 60 years and re-experiencing the trauma and the emotion. How was that for you as Japanese and as actors recreating something that is no longer actually happening in reality? Naoko, you were the mother of the two children whom you had to leave behind in the burning wreckage.
Naoko Mori:
Yes, it's really difficult to put into words. The only way I can describe it is it's very multi-layered. I've been acting for over 15 years and I have to say I have never—and this is my absolute honest truth—I have never experienced anything like this.
When I received the script, you go in as an actor going, 'Does it pay well? Will it be fabulous?' All those silly, ridiculous things. As I said 'multi-layered' as a Japanese national, obviously we have a certain—not an attachment—it's in our culture. So actually my first instinct, to be truthful, was that I didn't want to do it. I guess I knew it was going to be a difficult project, but I was compelled to do it when I read the script. But again, I didn't not want to do it just because I was Japanese.
It's really difficult to explain, but I think the first time I felt I was—for want of a better word—quite frightened, was when we were on set. Personally, when I was doing my first scene, which funnily enough, because of the way filming works, was the very last scene, so obviously as an actor you plot where and how you would be, and for the first time in my professional life, I completely and utterly lost myself. I had no idea where I was and I actually can't remember it, which has never happened to me before. Especially with television and film you always have a sense of awareness and where everything is—where the camera is you're working to. And I thought, 'Oh, my God! I'm in trouble.'
I have never had an experience like that ever, up until now and since then. Physically, mentally and psychologically I think it's changed me. I find it really hard to explain and I'm not doing a very good job here. But I think essentially, as an actor, you obviously try to be as authentic and truthful as possible. But with this one it was very different from the start. We were dealing with people who are alive, or were alive, and it would be absolutely disrespectful to them and to everything if we were not doing our utmost to tell their story. So as a starting point that was where we were at. But I have to say I was absolutely gob-smacked as to what then ensued. It was a lot more than I ever thought it would be.
Mark Brayne:
Gavin, can I ask you something at this point. For you as a Japanese-speaker, working with the narrative and going into the stories with the people you were interviewing, who were then represented by the actors like Naoko, what role did the knowledge of trauma, just the brief discussions that we'd had, play, before you went into this? Both in terms of understanding what it was you were portraying, and keeping yourself clear, balanced and safe as you developed this?
Gavin Rees:
I suppose I'd split that up into two sections. The first is more a personal sketch of my feelings, and then I'll go on to talk about what it was like to interview people, and how some of the advice that you gave us helped those interviews go well.
The first thing is the feeling I had when we started the project. I knew this material before, because I'd edited a documentary about girls who were driving trams in Hiroshima during the time the bomb fell. I'd had to read the transcripts and I edited things. So I was familiar with a lot of that experience. But most of those girls' memories have also been about their lives as a group of schoolgirls together during the war. That material was a lot easier than the stuff I was reading about Hiroshima.
I remember after only two weeks—and this was just book-reading, it was all I was doing—if I closed my eyes at any point in the day, I could see the black veil behind my eyes on fire. Descriptions, essentially like Dante's Underworld, would play on my mind constantly.
The thing I found was that that would go away and disappear, and everything would become normal. At certain stages in the production we went to the museum in Hiroshima and you'd go there and think, 'God! This is really terrible,' and it would all flare up again. You'd get used to it and it would quieten down. Then three months later you'd go to the museum again and maybe, in my case after I'd done some of the interviews, and then, Bang! It blew up again inside me and I felt extremely moved; much more violently moved than I had been the first time. The last time we went to the museum was after we'd done filming. Paul and I were both staring at each other at about three o'clock in the morning, saying, 'My God! This is completely and utterly crazy.'
There was something very odd about the way the feelings died, and then came back with more intensity and in waves. The whole project was nine months of my life, and it certainly altered my understanding of these things. It feels a bit like I've now got the ability to go, at will, into a kind of place where other people have been extremely traumatised. In my mind it's like having a room where I can understand these things.
The other day I saw about five minutes of a little documentary on the BBC about Botticelli 's drawings of the Underworld. When I'd been at school I'd read Virgil, the Aeneid and I knew all this kind of stuff. I was looking at these pictures on the television and realising that my whole understanding had dramatically changed from what it was before. I realised that so few of us can really understand what it's like to be in that environment, and I felt that I had a taste of it, as though I could touch that feeling even though, obviously, I wasn't there.
In terms of doing the interviews, we had a lot of conversations with Mark. He gave us a lot of information and leaflets, particularly on PTSD. The thing that surprised me about that was that the experience of war journalists—people who go to a very traumatic place and experience first-hand trauma and then interview people—that even for this kind of reconstruction thing, where you're approaching something after 60 years, that knowledge is very useful.
There's material about how war journalists become extremely boring. They go to parties and all they can talk about is death and destruction. Somebody reaches for a knife to cut the kid's birthday cake and they're going to go 'bang' and jump under the table. While not that extreme, I certainly felt like I weighed 35-40 stone. I was composed of pure lead when I socialised with people for a while, because all I could think about was how many people died.
I used to have a joke that for the next job I wouldn't get out of bed for less than a 160,000 dead. There's that kind of feeling, this kind of gallows humour that war journalists have. It's not appropriate for something that's a reconstruction. When we were doing the filming, we had these synthetic corpses, latex corpses that you see on the screen, following us around everywhere you go. Actors, extras and production people would put cigarettes in their mouths or play with things. I had this mad photograph collection of latex corpses that were just casually snapped. It was quite a thing, the reconstruction process.
Very quickly, a word about interviews. Another thing about the the material on PTSD and so on is that I realised that a lot of the people I was interviewing, even now, still have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that hadn't been adequately dealt with and maybe never could have been. The other thing I felt quite strongly was that people who were at different degrees of exposure or proximity to the centre of the bomb had different experiences.
The hardest interview for me was with Takakura-san. In order to do an interview like this, one of the techniques is that you do a kind of classic psychotherapeutic thing where you start somewhere safe, maybe a year or a few months before the incident happened. You then approach the moment the trauma happened. You go to the trauma place, talk about that and at the end you try and take them somewhere safe, somewhere where they've recovered. You close the interview in a responsible way, so you don't leave them feeling absolutely awful after two hours of talking to you.
The thing that normally worked the best was to talk about their families and say something like, 'Surely you must be proud to have grandchildren now. It must be great to have moved on.' A lot of the older women would burst out laughing and their demeanour would change and they'd start talking about, 'My grandson's doing this and yes, it's lovely to have him,' and all that kind of thing. But when I asked Taka Kurusan about her family it was the same level, emotional tone and she just said, 'Yes, well, it was very difficult having children but there you go.' And I realised that of all the people I interviewed, she was still, totally and presently caught up with the bomb.
Mark Brayne:
Before I put it out to wider discussion, I'd like to ask you, Paul, about the experience of depicting trauma. Possibly, as I said in the invitation to tonight's discussion, Hiroshima was the single most violent, most traumatic wilful act committed in the history of mankind. Trauma also brings out and reflects the worst. But it also brings out extraordinary strength.
We were talking before tonight's discussion about how the Japanese army moved in after Hiroshima, and the story of what happened afterwards—extraordinary reconstruction and resilience. What for you as the writer/producer/director of the project and the film was the most surprisingly rewarding experience of dealing with this intense trauma?
Paul Wilmshurst:
There's a thing, which bizarrely never made it into the film in the end that Takakura-san said in her interview. There was a bit where everyone was asked, 'What does this mean, and what have you learned?' She said the dropping of the bomb had taught her how fragile people are; how you can kill them like insects. And how resilient they are. They can survive anything; and that both things were true at the same time.
In an earlier edit, that was one of the things that it was structured around. In the end, hopefully, you don't need her to say it, but to come away wondering it. There's a thing about taking on board the impossible, and imagining and understanding the impossible. It wasn't a very positive experience, basically. Fundamentally, it was painful and damaging I think, really both for us and for the people that went through it.
I remember you sent out an email about someone who'd been researching the Nanking massacre in China in the 1930s. She got very involved in researching it and bringing the story to the world and had then felt very beleaguered when people criticised her work. And that's the other half of this, because of the nature of what it meant to us. It wasn't just a job. The normal process of going through production and editing and having people coming in and 'critique' and viewings, and them having their own points of view, was a very painful and bitter experience. Not at all like the way it would be on something that doesn't matter.
What I found was that I was just raging the whole time. I was dealing with what it felt like. That was very hard to deal with, because by that stage we'd all invested a lot and felt that we understood, to a degree, the story we were trying to tell.
Any kind of input from people outside who had power over us was extremely unwelcome. At the same time, looking at it from a distance now, I think they were quite helpful. In fact because the other part of it, and the very complicated thing, is that going through all of this trauma, getting all this stuff in your head, you kind of want to punish everyone else for not knowing it already. What I found was that we were trying, in the editing, to make the film as aggressively disturbing as possible. Initially, because there was just this sense of, 'How dare you all not know this? How dare you live in a world where this has happened and go shopping and smile and be happy and not realise .'
I found that the initial instinct was to make something so violently disturbing that people would be changed by it. So what I think the executives and the people up the hierarchy who were coming into the cutting room were doing was going, 'Okay, let's just think about how this is going to work?' There were lots of things that got tampered, and this is a much milder version of the film than it was initially. But it still communicates to people quite strongly. It gets into you.
The version that we started with would have got into you in a way where probably it would have been difficult to sit all the way through to the end. It became almost like wanting to itemise anything anyone had told us. In the first cut, which was two-and-a-half hours long, there was an hour-and-a-half that was just, 'And then this happened, and then this happened!' It was like traumatised story-telling in the sense that it had no structure to it. There was just the repetition of events and slowly trying to scrape out of that a shape that would take people through in a way that would hopefully still communicate but not just bang against people's heads.
Mark Brayne:
Fascinating to hear, Paul, how you and Naoko found yourselves back in the very personal experience of what trauma does. With the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, just to put this on the record, this is precisely where we hope we can facilitate understanding in journalism and programme-making. That when you're dealing with trauma, when you're dealing with this intensity of human experience, you will be drawn in. You should be drawn in, in order to tell the story well. But if you lose yourself, you know that you lose the ability to hold that "dual awareness"—both being in and out.
From what you say Paul, it sounds like you were drawn in with an intensity, perhaps, that you hadn't entirely anticipated, where the fragmentation of the traumatic experience makes it almost difficult to hold the story together. And yet, as we've just seen, you come back out and create a narrative that blows us away. Let's put it out into the audience.
Faisal Abbas:
I'm from Arshaq Alawsat based here in London. First of all I must say, fascinating film and talking for myself, I really relived what happened there. But I would like to ask you about the American navigators. Was there any part of the interview that was left out when anyone of them was saying something about, 'I can't believe we did that!' or that anybody felt sorry, even after the cameras were turned off?
Paul Wilmshurst:
Dick Jeppson, who's the guy that arms the bomb, talks about imagining the suffering on the ground. There's another point in his interview that didn't seem appropriate because it's about a later time, when he talks about visiting the peace museum years later and feeling very moved to be standing in Hiroshima surrounded by Japanese survivors—not survivors, Japanese people —in Hiroshima and to be thinking, 'This is a city, these are people!'
But in terms of what they felt at the time, which is what the film is about, no, we didn't leave out the bits where they said something different. This is the representation of their view of what happened, and there are different ways of interpreting that. Maybe it's a defence, maybe it's what they feel. What the film is also trying to communicate is something about the context of the use of the bomb and something about the world that might have been if the bomb hadn't been used, something about what might have happened if an invasion had been carried out and something about how they felt they were contributing.
I think that what's clear about their accounts of the time and the incident is that they felt quite uncomplicated about it. Tibbets (the pilot of the aircraft Enola Gay which dropped the bomb) in particular has hung on to a very straight version of things. Dick Jeppson is more complicated. The navigator from the plane Necessary Evil gives an account that sounds gung-ho, but he's shaking quite a lot at critical points, and you feel there's a lot held inside that they can never say.
That's something to think but not for the film to say. In the end that's for each of us to take from what they say and to see what they say and how they say it. That's how documentary works. It's for you to read them in the end—and for them to have a space to give an account.
But no, we didn't leave out stuff that might have made it appear different.
Joe Bullman:
I make documentaries and I've worked with Paul in the past. Paul, I just want to ask a bit more about the broadcasters and what they said to you?
Paul Wilmshurst:
One way of looking at what goes on in the edit is that every time you've got a version of the film and you show it to people, if it's working at all, they'll have an experience. And if the experience is the experience you want this film to have, it's going to be a relatively upsetting experience. Then depending how they're prepared, what they're looking for, what's in them, it will either push their buttons in a way that makes them feel really uncomfortable and they really want to get rid of that feeling, or they'll think, 'This is part of a process that I should be going through.' We had different responses from different people who came into the cutting room.
Actually I felt that it was everything that Mark had been talking to us about, which was that we were introducing trauma into their minds.
Simon Ryder:
Having to deal with the people who actually went through the experience, did you find that being involved in the dramatisation parts, the acting parts, was that downtime for you or was it just as traumatic? I found it really hard to watch some of the people in the interviews and I also found—particularly when the lady had to leave the kids burning—that was really terrible for me. But actually being involved in the process of recreating scenes, was that like time out for you or .?
Paul Wilmshurst:
No. I've said that the dramatisation, certainly for me (and I think it's different for each of us), was much the hardest, the most tricky and the most painful part of the process. In a funny way, when you're dealing with a survivor, it's 60 years later. They're older, they've got a life; certainly they're not completely healed. But there's something about seeing someone and you think, 'My God! You lived through that! Look at you.'
And there's a kind of calm and peace in some of them I found it very moving. But it wasn't a destructive emotion; it's that feeling of resilience. And I had an admiration for them. I was just thinking, 'Good God, you've lived through that and you're there and you can still walk, talk, have a family. Sure you're suffering but there's something that holds you together.'
The scenes after the bomb has gone off were all shot in Poland, which is a very strange place to take 50 to 100 Japanese people.
The production logistics were complicated and traumatic in themselves. We've got Japanese actors based in London who we shipped to Poland and then surrounded by Japanese artists, performance artists, poets, housewives, business people, yoga teachers who all lived in Berlin. We shipped them over in buses from Berlin ! They were dropped in this little village in Poland and they didn't know what had hit them because it was a very strange village. But it had good rubble.
So we were all in Poland because of the rubble. Polish people are wonderful, but it's not a multi-cultural country. It's basically Polish people. I love Poland but these guys from the cast were wandering around being poked in the streets. It was just funny given what they were doing that when they weren't working they were being poked. And what they were doing when they were working was being covered in burns and sitting around in radiation sickness hospitals.
But in terms of trauma, it's an anecdote. The thing that sums it all up, really, is that people are vulnerable; people are resilient. You've got 50 to 100 people slightly going mad in a small village in West Poland, living through Hiroshima, and then what do they do when they're not working? They make mad surreal videos and drink themselves stupid and do strange performance things. Using our costumes and make-up, off set, Kenji and another actor did the most fantastic performance stuff with a little video camera. They made all these little films and we'd show them every few days and they were the funniest things. There's a thing about comedy and humour and how you survive difficult thoughts and difficult feelings. In the end, alcohol is helpful but comedy is fantastic!
Mark Brayne:
Kenji, this is your moment.
Kenji Watanabe:
Thank you. Actually my home is quite close to Hiroshima city and when I was a primary school student we went to Hiroshima to visit the Peace Museum in Peace Park.
So there is in the shooting lots of responsibility on my shoulders, because they are still living. Because of that, off the set, I felt I had to release this pressure and oppression somehow.
It was a fantastic crew and fantastic people. What struck me was, yes, there are a lot of Japanese people on the set and they've got special make-up and they made fun of it. I was thinking these must be people 60 years ago in Hiroshima, in chaos. There was absolute chaos in Hiroshima after the bomb had dropped. But I do believe that, wouldn't those Japanese people try to have some fun in those circumstances?
I was watching from outside, and lots of extra people from Berlin were pretending to be victims of the war, and they were just having fun. And I just felt that there was a good sense of humour in Japanese people, too.
But even today I would confess that this is my fifth or sixth time to watch the film but it's still very moving.
Georgina Holmes:
I'm a PhD student from the School of Oriental and African Studies here in London. I know that some documentary film-makers like to not use sound or special effects, and they like to have it appear as real as possible. So obviously when you're recreating the history you're trying to recreate it as truth. But what were your decisions on that, because it's a bit of a dilemma between how to present reality but also keep it as real as possible and entertain?
Paul Wilmshurst:
The entertaining bit I'm not so worried about. The thing is that the task is to communicate the experience. You have a set of tools and they include music, sound design and computer graphics. Otherwise there were things we could never have shown; special effects, flame effects, wind machines—we just threw everything at it. It seems such a big thing that if you didn't try and do it justice you'd make it seem less. I watch this and I think, 'Yes, but those are 300 mile an hour winds, really.' And actually the streets should be full of carbonised people. Lots of the people should have had their stomachs exploding because of the pressure changes.
There are terrible things that happen that we can't get close to, because they're very expensive. If we'd had more money, we could have done. You certainly can't do them by just filming them so you've got to make them happen somehow. Then again I'm still going back to this horror film version where I'm trying to bludgeon people with the trauma of what really happened. It's probably a good thing that we had this budget and no more because exploding stomachs wouldn't really have helped.
It's not documentary in the sense that we weren't there at the time, but no one was. The thing that was critical in thinking about why to do this and why to take it on in the first place is that I've seen a number of documentaries made about Hiroshima. If you use the traditional documentary structure, if you use eye-witnesses and archive film, then there's this huge gap in the middle of the thing. What actually happened on the day of the bomb?
They filmed the plane taking off. They filmed the plane landing afterwards. There's some footage of life in Japan before the bomb and life in Japan before the war. There's footage of Hiroshima after it's been evacuated and destroyed. But it's like it happens by magic. So the only way that documentaries can edit that is to jump from before to after with a little bit of shaky footage from the point of view of the aeroplane seeing the mushroom cloud rising.
Then everyone's gone and everything's quiet and all the buildings are flat and there are no people and the sun's shining again. It's actually weeks and months later that that footage was filmed. I think there are two ways to get into what happened—one is dramatisation and the other is to look at the pictures drawn by the people who lived through it. Japanese television has made a number of documentaries using those pictures and they are phenomenal. They are visions of hell; they are Dante.
Just to sidetrack. One of the things that we talked about when Mark came to talk to us about the film and what we were dealing with was the fact that all of this is kind of familiar. Basically, that the things that happened in Hiroshima are ingrained in our memories or in our ideas of hell. Across cultures, the idea of a burning environment where naked people are struggling around in the heat, function as images of hell. One of the difficult and painful things about Hiroshima is that when people describe what they went through you feel that you know it already and that it's ingrained in you as the worst thing that can ever happen.
So in a sense, there's this weird thing where you're kind of coming into contact with something that shouldn't be possible, that's meant to be a mythic experience, and shouldn't really have happened. But again, I think it goes back to this sense that it's really so extreme and so unimaginable. It also has the political effect of bringing about immense change. Dragging the Emperor into the determination of how to end the war, over-ruling the army, leading to the failed coup and army minister Anami's suicide, and so on.
All of that is just as important as the experience of the victims. Otherwise it has no context and no meaning. It's just an iteration of suffering, which was the thing that, at a certain point, seemed to take over from everything else. And the standing back thing is about saying, 'Yes, the suffering, yes, the suffering,' but —the suffering within everything else that's happening. You could equally go to any of the other 60, 65, 70 cities that have been fire-bombed and find terrible, terrible suffering that has, in historical memory, less particular meaning now.
Mark Brayne:
I'd just like to use Chairman's prerogative to ask John Durkin a question here. John was a fire fighter who now works as a psychologist with fire fighters and emergency responders, and who has worked in visions of hell. Can I say, John, that you've been through your own experiences as a result of that? Can I ask you, before we come to Gavin and the others, to respond to the film from the position of someone who's been through a different version, obviously, of what we've just seen, but something in the same territory?
John Durkin:
Yes, thank you. It's really from my more recent experience as a psychologist that I developed my interest in reactions to trauma. What I'm aware of, and what you describe, struck me as a very authentic description of a traumatic reaction, even though arguably it was only a secondary, imaginary, but nevertheless subjectively real experience. I think one of the defining features of a traumatic recall is the spaces, the gaps in the narrative. Like with magnets on a fridge, it's the gaps and spaces and trying to make sense of knowing that everything that's there has got its place. But how it fits together doesn't actually allow us to make sense of it at the time.
In my therapeutic work now, what I wait for to determine that some recovery has occurred is that the narrative becomes coherent, the spaces actually close, the words make sentences, the sentences make sense. Once the narrative is coherent it can then be expressed, and in both a theoretical and in a practical sense, the trauma is resolved. We still remember the events but they don't upset us in the way they used to when they were disturbed and broken and fragmented.
And I wonder if the metaphor for the film being produced and screened was, in a sense, an expression of a coherent narrative that you clearly described in a fragmented way. And the arguments with those who commissioned the film at times almost sounded—I'm sure you'd agree, Mark—like the bad therapist that can't take what he's hearing and starts to manipulate the client because it's not what he wants to hear. You used the phrase 'pressing buttons,' which I think you clearly did with some of your superiors.
And this again, I think, fits in with the description that I would call recovery. In my experience in the fire service, when we did literally get burnt because water failed—the pumps failed for whatever reason and we found ourselves unable to stem the spread of a fire that we felt duty bound to actually fight—it was something about being in there with somebody else that somehow kept us sane. I felt that I could do almost anything as long as my team, my group, my people, were in there with me. The prospect of being isolated in hell was a far greater dread for me than being part of something. I wonder whether for members of your team, that sounds familiar or authentic?
Gavin Rees:
One of the things is that when you interview people, they lock into a kind of time frame in which they go back very much into almost contemporaneously reacting to what they're describing. So particularly Kinuko, who is the nurse with the glass shards embedded in her body, she would start doing things like this with her knees and you could see that she was there in the moment.
I was a bit concerned that maybe she'd exaggerated something, so I re-asked the same question. She basically, word for word, reproduced the same 20 or 30 minute section of interview she'd already talked about before we'd broken for lunch. It was quite extraordinary. There were a few verbs in different places and some details were different. It wasn't a rote-learnt thing but all of the images were there.
In her case the weird paradox about it now is that up until her death—she died last year—she worked as an artist using glass; she used stained glass. I asked her if she thought there was any connection. I was trying to do it in a relatively off-key way over lunch and she looked at me as if the question didn't make any sense. She said, 'No, no, I just like working with glass,' even though she'd had several hundred pieces of glass extracted from her body over a period of more than six or seven years.
The interviewees, if you asked the question bluntly, 'Do you think you're being traumatised or did you suffer from any kind of trauma?' they'd just say, 'Oh, no. I just feel grief because I lost my father,' or they were not able to move properly. In Japan it's quite hard to talk about these things because the whole question of mental illness has a slightly different status. For instance, to call somebody crazy—well, crazy is okay but the proper word for mental illness—is not a word you're supposed to use in conversation at all.
In terms of us, I don't know. It's a lovely idea that you're in an editing room or a film making situation, you have these fragments of trauma and then the narrative is a way of pulling them together.
The other thing that Paul talked about a second ago was the question of realism. For me there's a really interesting problem working on a film like this. You simply cannot take a kind of severely, let's say French 'hauteur,' attitude towards realism. A lot of the things that people were talking about during the interviews—it's just hard to talk to them in front of an audience anyway—were so utterly horrific. I can't imagine any way of filming them or reproducing them for an audience and not have people turn off instantly. It's an artist's impression, it's like a paint stroke of what there was and that's all that can be done with it.
Maria Marro-Perera:
Hi! I'm Maria from NBC News and I've got a question about you and the people in your team, about what you've done in your day-to-day life now that this is over, to kind of get back to normal life and get over whatever? Little things, you know, rather than going to therapy or things like that.
Paul Wilmshurst:
Yes, well I finished this film on Hiroshima and about a week later started a film about the Khmer Rouge and a guy who was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge de-mining in Cambodia and then had his leg blown off in Mozambique and dealt with that. So that's what I'm doing at the moment to get back to normal life. It's like Gavin's joke about the 160,000 dead; it was like a holiday. There was something about going to Cambodia and dealing with that history that seemed very manageable. But it was very odd.
While I was editing this I got offered a thing about the Somme and I remember saying, 'No, no, no, no more death.' And then I got offered a thing about the sinking of the Lusitania and I said, 'No, no. It's just people dying again. I don't want to do dying, I want to do a romantic comedy!'
And then this other thing came up, a series about survivors. I was looking at the treatments for the different stories and one was someone skiing . and then there was this one about this guy in Cambodia, de-mining in '95 just when the UN were in transitional authority. I thought, 'That's the one for me, and I went home and told my wife. I was saying, 'this is really interesting. I really want to do this.' She said, 'Do you know what you're doing?' I said, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, Genocide?' And I thought, 'Oh, ****! Yeah, lots of people died didn't they?' And I'd missed it because it just felt like 'Oh, that's home territory now.' It's a bit crass but it's true, there's a bit where you think 'I know what to do there now.' And that was fine.
The personal thing that I remember talking to you about, Mark, when we talked during the edit was a very odd thing. I remember having very difficult times coming home. Right in the middle of the shoot, we came back from Japan the night we'd been filming in the Peace Museum. We'd been staying up all night there because it was the only time when there weren't other people. The whole Japanese crew were there, crying as they laid tracks. And you'd have 20, 30 people that you'd been working with for a few days, very upset by being there and hearing the loops of the video films over and over again. These things are designed to be heard once; you're not meant to hear them 30 times, reiterating the same stuff and you just think, ' Please! '
It's small stuff in the sense that it's only your feelings; nothing is actually happening. But your feelings get quite charged. Then coming back here, I remember my wife giving me a hard time because we hadn't booked our holidays. I was really difficult with her. In the middle of quite a bad row, much worse than we would normally have, I suddenly thought about Mark 's briefing and about how you can end up taking out on other people the stuff that you're feeling. It was actually nothing to do with her, nothing to do with the family and everything to do with what we'd just been living through, so I suddenly said to her, 'Don't you realise where I've just come back from? I'm sorry I'm being such a shit!'
She said, 'But you said the shoot was going really well.' And I said, 'Yes but .' Suddenly you realise how hard it is to remove yourself from what you've been going through and get back into your life; it just took a while. It probably hasn't quite happened yet. There was a really dodgy bit where it was quite painful and quite tricky, and when we got to the end of the edit, my wife was really happy that Hiroshima was no longer in our household as a kind of overwhelming theme and as a set if images and anecdotes and thoughts that were constantly there. The children would start asking about Hiroshima in a way that they didn't really know what they were asking about. There was this thing hanging in the air.
Mark Brayne:
Just to wrap up, can I ask each of you four, briefly—what, above all, is the single most important thing the making of this film has left you with? Naoko, first to you?
Naoko Mori:
You know what? It's a lot of frustration, pain, anger towards the world. Perhaps I haven't fully overcome what I've experienced and what's come from the experience. Not just as a re-enactor, not just as an actor but also from a Japanese point of view. Like I said, it's multi-layered. The world is not a nice place.
Kenji Watanabe:
I would say carved in your memory. As an actor I researched quite a lot and there's a lot on the internet, so I got as much information from as many web sites as I could. I got lots of poems, which the kids wrote and as they said, 'My father died in sunny days; I don't know why.' That is so strong and as an actor to represent some history is a kind of duty. So I would say, it's carved in my memory.
Gavin Rees:
I'm not a pacifist, by the way. I think on some occasions the use of military forces is justified. But what work on this project has left me feeling is that people should be graphically shown what nuclear weapons and conventional bombs do to people. That's the feeling I've got for myself—is that I've acquired an understanding of what that is.
Paul Wilmshurst:
I think at a personal level, it's left me thinking that there's not much left that I'm frightened of any more. That there are very few things that I'd want to keep out of my mind because I feel that I've now got this thing in my mind that will always be there, that in fact you can live with. You can live with the idea of it and you can live with other people's experience and you can digest it and you can carry on. And it's all right.
There was a period in the early stages when that didn't seem necessarily true. It seemed that discovering exactly what people had been through and hearing their accounts was unbearable and would lead to the impossibility of sleep. The fact that that isn't the case is rather sustaining, basically, and I think that everything can be digested. Nietzsche wasn't stupid, and everything that doesn't kill you leaves you feeling a bit stronger and a bit better to cope with anything else. So that's roughly where it left me.
Mark Brayne:
Thank you all very much, each of you, and to the audience for coming. I feel very privileged to have been part of this project in a small way and to have accompanied you and seen this develop and seen quite an extraordinary production come out of it. Thank you for some very thought-provoking and wise comments tonight.
|
