Director Tran Anh Hung and lead actress Rinko Kikuchi talked to an audience last week about the process of adapting Haruki Murakami’s novel for the screen…

Director Tran Anh Hung and lead actress Rinko Kikuchi were in town last week to promote the release of Norwegian Wood, the first feature to be made from full length Haruki Murakami novel. At a discussion chaired by Eve Gabereau, managing director of UK distributor Soda Pictures, they talked in detail about the process of adapting the book.

First came the author’s approval: Murakami has been notoriously protective of his work, only previously allowing a couple of adaptions of his short stories (including the cute but touching Tony Takitane by Jun Ichikawa). ‘I think I was lucky!’, Tran told an audience at Asia House in West London. He reckoned he asked at just the right time, as Murakami now had enough distance from his work to allow it to be made. He asked only to see a script from Tran, which Tran felt reassured by, as the author defended his vision of what the film should be and even helped make sure he got the budget he was looking for to make it.

Working together with Murakami on the script, Tran discovered that the author was full of new ideas he wanted to add, putting him in the unfortunate position of having to remind him the book was already to rich to use everything. But this also showed how open Murakami was to reinterpreting his work, giving Tran an opportunity to cut several scenes from the book and replace them with something new. The biggest omission he made from the original was losing  the political aspects of the book.

Both director Tran and lead actress Rinko explained they had a passion for the book since they first read it. For Tran, he avoided reading any other work by Murakami or even finding out more about the author himself so he could keep a fresh, uninfluenced perspective on the film – though he couldn’t avoid some of the blogs that rallied against the decision for him to be director or for Rinko to be cast as lead, though Tran was initially reluctant to cast Rinko himself.

Rinko had connected with Murakami’s work since she first read the book as a teenager. When she learned that the film was being made she became determined to play the role of Naoko, but was rather disappointed that Tran wouldn’t even let her audition, feeling that she was too old and she did not seem appropriate from her previous roles, such as her Oscar nominated appearance in Babel. Happily, though, Tran relented, mainly due to Rinko’s stubborn perseverance that she was right for the role, and when he saw her he agreed.

There were some happy coincidences that Tran was unaware of (since he’d stayed away from learning too much about Murakami). One of those was in the choice of Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead to compose the soundtrack, mainly due to his score on There Will Be Blood – Murakami is a self-admitted Radiohead fan! Of course, as these things often work out, despite being Tran’s first choice for composer, for much of the production it very nearly didn’t happen, with a last minute availability for Jonny coming just in time.

Norwegian Wood is released in UK cinemas today by Soda Pictures.

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This entry was published by Andy H on Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Events, Filmmakers, News, Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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