Concrete Playground Meets Norwegian Wood Director, Tran Anh Hung

Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood is filled with fuzziness, unreliability, landscapes that shift between the real and imagined, and the saturated sensation of tragedy. It's not the easiest thing to adapt to film, but director Tran Anh Hung (I Come with the Rain, The Scent of Green Papaya) has found a rich cinema language for it that's as affecting as Murakami's words. Concrete Playground spoke to him ahead of the film's Australian release.

When did you first encounter Murakami's work?
It was in '94. This book [Norwegian Wood], it was the first one. Since I really liked it, I didn't want to read other books from him and I didn't want to know anything about him. It's the way I work — I really want to keep my feelings for the book really fresh, and nothing can mix with it … I read his other books later on, during the editing of the movie.

And what made you want to adapt Norwegian Wood into a movie?
I loved the book because of the character and the story. Because it has to do with love and loss of love and that was a very strong thing, and something that talked to me directly, intimately.

It's also about the burdens we acquire in youth that have to be left behind for us to move into adulthood. Tell us about the journey the main character, Watanabe, is on.
It's someone who experiences love for the first time. It's a very strong feeling, and then the next day he loses it; Naoko just disappears. And it puts his life in suspense — like he's holding his breath. He's not breathing the same way as before. And when he meets Midori, she offers him her love and he cannot accept it because he has something unfinished with Naoko … [Where Watanabe's journey goes] is very disturbing, but behind it, there is something that is really beautiful, in terms of meaning and in terms of spiritual deliverance.

Murakami's works are often regarded as 'unfilmable'. What were the challenges in adapting such a story to screen?
There was one thing that was really strong in the book, and that was the feeling of melancholy ... For some scenes I need to give the feeling of something that is a little bit dreamy, that is between reality and dream ... Like the night when [Naoko] comes and kisses him and ask him if he loves her, this kind of scene is very like a dream. And this gives us the feeling that it could be something that will be later a souvenir for Watanabe; it has that texture of a souvenir. And it gives us that feeling of melancholy.

And you made the story linear, cutting out the older Watanabe we meet at the beginning of the book?
Yes, because if you keep that older Watanabe, then you have that structure of flashback, back and forth between the present time with the older Watanabe, 36 or 39, and the past when he was 20. It will give the audience a feeling of something that is very well known as a structure, so it was not interesting for me to use this.

And also because when you go in a movie back and forth, you have to show what in the past influenced the present time. Then you need to create some events, some actions in the present time, because it's not in the book. And that doesn't make sense, because the book is so rich, too rich, I needed to get rid of a lot of things to be able to make a movie, so I'm not going to add some new scenes. And that's why I didn't keep the older Watanabe.

You worked with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin, known for his work with Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love). What was the vision the two of you had for how the film should look?
What I really appreciate in working with Mark is he has this quality of being really sensual with movement of the camera ... I really need it for all of my movies because I like people to have a really sensual feeling of the image. And I ask everyone to work in a way to make the skin of the actor very obvious — not to enhance it, not to make it more beautiful, but to make it obvious — so that the people wish to touch it, to smell it on the screen.

So with Mark I really asked him to use the light in a way so we can feel the skin, because for me, cinema is the art of incarnation. We put ideas and stories, drama in blood and flesh, meaning in the actor. So we need to see the skin very precisely. That's what I'm going for, because I don't like pretty pictures; the beauty must come from the fact the feeling is right, and it's right because its right with the story, with the psychology, with the characters. If everything is right, then it's beautiful.