DepressedBergman@DannyDrinksWine
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi explains how he was inspired by his daughter's ideas for making 'House' (1977):
"My daughter who at the time was only 11, she loved films. She actually had never seen any Japanese film at the time yet. When I start making a new film, I always ask suggestions from young people because young people have a great future before them. So I asked my 11-year-old daughter’s suggestion. What if I make a commercial film for Toho cinema society, what kind of film should I make in your opinion, I asked her.
At the time in the US, a new cinema director, Steven Spielberg, was shooting the film, 'Jaws' (1975). At that time, together with the shark film, there were other films where, for example, there were rats attacking people, there’s different animals attacking people, those were the kind of films that were being screened all over the world. I believed at that time, Toho Production expected to see films where, for example, cute bunnies would eat human beings.
So that day, my daughter Chigumi, she was combing her hair looking in the mirror and then she said, what if my image would come out of the mirror to eat me which is a horror. And I thought it was an excellent idea, it is me eating myself. Because war is dark, is eating oneself so I thought I could get to know the image in the mirror, an image that would bring to peace and not to war again. So reflecting in the mirror what is that I can do in my life, and this reflection, this thought, can lead us on the way to peace.
So I made a question to my daughter and she said, when she used to exercise at the piano, she thinks that sometimes the piano is actually about to eat her hands when she is playing badly. So, all the seven episodes were actually invented by my daughter, suggested at least by her. I added also my own ideas by inserting a poor woman who had lost her beloved in the war. So 'House' is our cooperation between the generation who has experienced the war and the generation who had never experienced the war."
(Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's interview with Andrew Daley, Easternkicks, 2017)
