SADO TEMPEST
Sado Tempest is a SF rock musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” completely shot on the island of Sado, blending Japanese rock music with elements of traditional Japanese culture, including Oni Daiko and Noh.
This is a film about exile and regeneration . . .
The Emperor Juntoku, Nichiren and Zeami were all exiled to Sado, leaving a rich deposit of culture and history. The stark beauty of the volcanic coastline in winter, the ruins of the Gold mine and the primeval forest in the interior are all stunning locations, which form a natural stage for a re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s last play about exile and regeneration.
STORY
It is the near future. Dangerous rock music is banned. Rebel singer Juntoku is exiled to an island where permanent winter reigns. There he is thrown into a brutal prison, but becomes intrigued by a mysterious young woman, who appears to have lost her mind, who sings snatches of ancient “Demon Songs.”
Jun escapes from the prison and flees to the interior of where he meets a man with a mysterious past, who seems to know something about the Demons and their songs. Jun begins to piece together the fragments of the “Demon Songs,” trying to create a new work.
As he does so he begins to understand that the songs contain a terrible power. Maybe the Demon songs brought the terrible storm that destroyed the island? Maybe nothing is really as it seems? Will Juntoku complete the song? Will he sing to bring the storm or to bring back the Spring?
E. THE TEMPEST
Shakespeare’s Tempest has been filmed hundreds of times in many different languages. Notable film versions have been made by Julie Taymor, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and Paul Mazurzky. There is also a famous adaptation of the play in Japan by Yukio Ninagawa.
The play has a fantastical, magical atmosphere and a very simple plot.
Prospero and his daughter Miranda are exiled to a strange island because of an intrigue at the court in Prospero’s country. On the island Prospero defeats the Witch who rules the island and enslaves the spirit Ariel and the Witch’s monstrous son, Caliban. Prospero uses Ariel’s power to call up a huge storm and shipwreck his enemies, who wash up on the island. Prospero seems intent to get revenge on his enemies, but his innocent daughter, Miranda, falls in love with a Prince, the son of one of Prospero’s enemies and Prospero’s plans are overturned. Prospero renounces magic and revenge and agrees to the marriage of the Prince and his daughter.
In this version we have used many elements of the Shakespeare play but tried to find different ways of expressing them. For example, the Storm at the beginning of the play is replaced by the “storm” of a rock concert. Also, we have played with the plot, keeping all the characters but asking a simple question: what would have happened if the storm had gone wrong?
So this is a kind of post-Tempest. This is the Tempest gone wrong. Maybe Shakespeare’s play seems too simple for the current complex times we live in, but still he must be right that we must move beyond revenge and confrontation and think about how to build and forgive.
F. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
When I visited Sado in 2009 I was in a bit of a slump. Two of my film projects had collapsed and because of the Lehman shock the film industry in Japan was not in good shape. I joined a hiking tour to the Primal Forest and walked for several hours up the mountain to the center of the island where I saw beautiful Cedar trees bent into strange shapes by the wind. Suddenly my slump lifted. My small problems seemed very small compared to the life span of these trees and I realized I could go on creating films or doing some kind of imaginative work, and that if I kept this forest in mind I would not feel defeated.
Over the next couple of years we (me and Producer Shohei Shiozaki) visited Sado more than twenty times. The more I visited Sado the more I was captivated by the strangeness of the place. The island really is also full of “strange sounds and music” from Noh and Drumming, just like in “The Tempest.”
I had immediately thought of setting the Tempest on Sado, but I was also intrigued by the story of the exiled Emperor Juntoku, and in the end I decide to mix everything up in a very eclectic hybrid mix of rock and Noh to capture the “deep strangeness” of Sado.
To purists about Japanese culture this may seem a bit irreverent and batty, but one of the things I like best about Japan is the country’s ability to assimilate and accommodate so many different cultures and styles at the same time, without apparent contradiction or confusion.
Sado itself, with its long history of outsiders settling there, is also a kind of hybrid zone, and very culturally diverse, and I see the film as a kind of celebration of this cultural diversity, whilst at the same time being an ironic comment on the kind of cultural desert of mainstream pop culture and TV in Japan today.
This is not really a film about the near future … it is a film about now.
DIRECTOR
John Williams studied French and German Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he began making films. In 1988 he moved to Japan and has lived there ever since. He began making short films in Japan and set up a production company, 100 Meter Films and wrote and directed his first feature, Firefly Dreams (Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu), which was released in 2001. Firefly Dreams won many awards at international film festivals. He wrote and directed the cult film, Starfish Hotel in 2007, Starfish Hotel stars some of Japan’s major stars, including Kouichi Sato, Kiki, Tae Kimura and Akira Emoto. Sado Tempest is his third Japanese feature film. He also teaches Film Production, Scriptwriting and Translation at Sophia University.
G. PRODUCTION NOTES
We began development of the film in 2009, after visiting Sado at the invitation of the Sado Film Commission, which promotes the island as a location for films. Sado Tempest is the first feature film to be entirely shot on Sado. Even the opening concert scene, which is supposed to be set in a futuristic Tokyo, was actually shot on Sado.
We worked closely with the Sado Film Commission to develop a story around the locations on the island, blending the story of the exiled Emperor Juntoku with Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Since Sado does not have any movie theatres, we agreed we would not make a typical “Regional Film” but a film about Sado for young people in the big cities in Japan, a film that blended the “spirit” of Sado with an entertaining premise. We wanted to make a film that would encourage young people to come to Sado and reconnect with nature and with the Japanese culture and history.
We began pre-production on the film in December of 2010 and started to shoot in March of 2011. Five days into the shoot the earthquake struck and the Fukushima nuclear reactor exploded. For several days we had no idea what was really happening on the mainland. All the film and TV shoots in Tokyo were cancelled and many films were abandoned, but the key actors in this film, who were still in Tokyo at the time, called and confirmed that they were prepared to continue the film. In particular Hirotaro Honda called personally and said: “We must finish this film now, and the ending must clearly offer hope.”
We finished shooting the winter scenes at the beginning of April, one day over schedule, then returned again in May to shoot the late-flowering cherry blossoms for the final shot and again in July to shoot the flashback sequences in the primal forest in the center of the island.
Post-production was postponed for several months for various reasons, and the film was finally completed in June of 2012. The film had its domestic Premier at the Earth Celebration (Kodo Drummers) in the summer of 2012 and then had its international Premier at the Raindance Film Festival in London in October 2012.