For the average person working a 9-to-5 job, the lives of struggling artists can be difficult to relate to. In Cutie and the Boxer, first time director Zachary Heinzerling gives us a fantastic insight into the lives of two ageing Japanese artists living in New York and we were delighted to speak to him and gain an even stronger understanding of the couple’s highs and lows.
The film – out in cinemas on November 1st – blends documentary and narrative styles to tell the story of Ushio and Noriko Shinohara. Ushio is relatively famous in America as well as his native Japan, but is still struggling to make money. The film truly succeeds though when it begins to focus more on his wife and begins animating her work to tell the story.
Congratulations on completing your first feature, how differently is the film being received by audiences in the UK and abroad?
The difference between places in how the film is viewed is typically how much people laugh. Here there was a lot of laughter. There’s certain things that are really crude and when people laugh I kinda like that. Noriko’s art is supposed to be funny, I think it’s tragedy exaggerated to the point of humour. In certain places people just see the tragedy and it’s like, “wow this relationship is really depressing and their life is so depressing”. I showed it in the US and I think the response was more sympathetic to a sad situation. In Japan the public was more understanding of these long ‘through thick and thin’ marriages and it just seemed natural to them. They understood the relationship and that love isn’t always this romantic thing, that it’s tied up in dependancy and practicality and that’s just as much a piece of love and marriage as what a hollywood move would tell you.
What is it about the story of Ushio and Noriko that attracted you as a filmmaker?
Originally when I started the film, it was more of a typical artist profile and more centred on Ushio’s art. He’s a very forthcoming, eager to please, attention grabbing personality. He wants to be watched and his art is more about the performance then the painting. He seemed like this undiscovered artist who was famous in Japan but who had lived in the US for 50 years and nobody really knew him in New York. There’s the irony of why he would choose to live in New York when he’s never really gained success there. So there was the question of, “why not move back to japan, why are you here and what is New York for you and what is the psyche of someone who is known as being a failure and has accepted the identity of being a struggling artist?” There’s some romantic association with being a poor struggling artist that he has captured as his own identity.
There was always an attraction to Noriko as a character she took a lot longer to understand fully and to reveal the complexities in her personality and what her identity is. There was always resentment, she would always complain about Ushio and how he’s the bane of her existence and how terrible he is and how he’s stolen all of her ideas and doesn’t deserve any of the attention. You laugh and you think they’re so cute but obviously there was more too it. So I knew that was more of a longer term goal to try to understand what kept the two of them together.
Noriko and Ushio are very at ease in front of the camera. How did you go about building such a strong rapport with them?
The more important scenes in the film were ones that were shot at the end of filming. I met them five years ago so technically it’s been over the span of five years. Most of the footage that you see in the film, though, is from the last year and a half. That was the point at which they were comfortable with me and the film stopped being about what I was filming and more that I was just filming everything. Everything had equal importance weather it was cooking or conversation as opposed to specific topics that I would come to them with. Noriko says I became like a household object, I was just around so they stopped caring.
You blend documentary and narrative styles to tell this story and tend to focus more on Noriko than on her husband. When did you take these creative decisions?
It was pretty late in the process. Originally it was more Ushio and then it became the two of them and then eventually in the edit it was this process of weeding out more and more of Ushio’s scenes and including more of Noriko’s and then kind of making Ushio almost seen through her eyes, making it her point of view. I think the reason it had to be that way is because her artwork became the basis of the conflict in the film. I love the idea of animating the comics, they take on so much more importance, and you get this idea that you’re transported from her head into the reconstructed past of their relationship and you see it through her twisted lens and you can see a lot of Noriko in that. Something that personal and something that constructed had to be the core of the film.
How did the animated scenes come about? Were they difficult to achieve?
Animation is a tiring and expensive process. Noriko now wants me to animate her entire Cutie and Bully comic book but I haven’t signed up for that yet. I had the idea as soon as I saw the work, I think, and then talked about it with Noriko and she really liked it. It’s a very manipulative process, you’re taking someone’s art and totally rearranging it. But, they always treated this film as my creation, my version of the story. As artists I think they understood that more than non-artists would.
I always wanted to push the fairytale aspect of the story and of her comics and to get the tone in a cinematic environment using sound design and animation to push forward this imaginative fairytale quality to both her art and to some degree their life. Beauty & the Beast or Lady & the Tramp, thats were the name of the film comes from.
Ushio is ‘the boxer’ of the title and in one early shot we see him creating one of his works by pummelling the canvas with paint. Having had such an in-depth look at his life and relationship, what do you think his art says about him?
I’ve always thought the boxing painting was, to me, the most interesting work of his. It sort of defines his personality, it defines his way of being which is to be expressive. To be the art itself. The idea that action is art is interesting to me, the idea that a body can be a performance. You can’t know his art unless you know the person. I love art where there’s this direct connection between the artist and the painting.
That first shot was one of the first things we shot, you see him struggle through it. There’s this 80 year old who’s coughing and slows down at a certain point in the middle of it. you can see that he still has this crazy energy and intensity but he’s still slowing down with each punch. It’s like his life retraced through these punches.
How important is New York to this story?
I think New York is an essential character in the film. There’s obviously a question of why are they in New York, why do they stay there? I think seemingly life would be easier in Japan if that’s where they can sell their work but they never would move back. It also relates to the 70s era of downtown New York where so much was happening in the art world and so much of today is a reflection of that time period. People from all over the world came to this spot. If you asked them they would tell you it’s the grit of the city, they came from Japan and I think they felt very constrained and that the critics there were all of one mind. Ushio makes his art with junk and you couldn’t find enough trash on the streets of Tokyo to make anything. In New York he’s like a rat feeding off of the muck of the streets and repurposing it for the public in a new way. He’s always been a champion for redefining street art and making it something that is deserving of a claim as opposed to amateur art. I think NY is the only place that they could exist in this weird equilibrium of just surviving but constantly being inspired to create more. I couldn’t see them anywhere else.
Life doesn’t seem easy for the couple, they are constantly struggling to sell their works and get their rent paid on time. Do you think they are comfortable with their situation?
I wouldn’t say they’re comfortable, they’re ok with being uncomfortable, they’ve learned to exist in this precarious way. In the film it all feels very desperate but I think in reality if you talk to them they’re very optimistic people. They do think things are going to work out and if they’re in a crunch they can rely on some help from Japan. They’ve borrowed money at times, they live in a loft space where they don’t even have a lease, the landlord and them have this long symbiotic relationship. They don’t complain about the fact that their roof is caving in and the landlord isn’t complaining about the fact that they don’t pay their rent on time. I don’t know how long it’ll last, I’m always worried that they’re going to get kicked out because the area they live in is now one of the highest priced neighbourhoods in NY. They’re surrounded by glass and steel, it’s the last of a dying breed of this kind of existence. It’s amazing to me that they are still so comfortable with that kind of situation.
The closing scene features the couple punching each other with paint-covered boxing gloves. How willing were they to participate in a scene like this?
Noriko was! I had a friend who had rented this camera and had an extra day. The idea was we would have Ushio do a boxing painting on a big piece of glass and film it from the other side so the effect would be slow motion, coming right at the lens, paint flying. We shot that and the footage is really amazing but at the end of the day I mentioned this idea, we’ll have them box each other and Noriko liked the idea so she went out and bought a pair of boxing gloves. There’s something really cathartic about the experience of using his art against him and releasing all of this comic anger in a sort of silly but traditionally not so silly act of boxing. Visually there was this release and explosion of colours at the end of a film that had been severe at times. We only shot for 10 minutes and Noriko just went at it and we couldn’t even get her to stop.
Cutie and the Boxer is released on November 1st, and our review can be read here and find out more on the official website here.
