The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

54 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
producers and I ended up driving all over Southern California to
every Japanese language school in existence. I also went to the large
Japanese communities in downtown LA and Orange County during
their O-Bon festivals and passed out fliers. The response was very
thin. We hit the jackpot at two schools south of LA where the
students are the children of Japanese executives that are in the US
temporarily and are learning completely in Japanese as if they were
still in Japan. The second and third generation Japanese Americans
were either not good enough at Japanese or not good enough as
actors. I originally was looking for a Grandfather for the mother role
(as it is in the original story) but I simply couldn't find anyone. The
location was a big stumbling block until a fellow USC student
recommended the school that we eventually used in Pasadena.
Except for the Northwest however, I think California is the only
place in America I could have made this student film. I got a lot of
support from the local Japanese community in Little Tokyo, where
we found some of the props, textbooks, and the temple which let us
use their Tea Room for Taro's living room in the first and last scenes.
You edited as well as directed Bean Cake (not to mention co-writing, coproducing
and sound editing the film). Sometimes editors want to trim
away shots – kill the darlings – that directors feel are essential. Did you
make special efforts to see your film through new eyes when you worked in
the editing room?
Probably not. I edited together basically what I had storyboarded.
For the most part I was lucky and most things just fit into place the
way I had imagined it. In some scenes however I think I definitely
tried to use every angle that I had shot at first and gradually
realized that simpler is better. I would sit at the Avid and watch the
cuts with a friend and decide whether or not the shot was going on
too long. You get a new perspective when you're forcing someone