Long Day’s Journey into the Night (2018), dir. Bi Gan
A lot of walking, that’s what stuck with me after watching this movie. There’s a hypnotic quality to it if you do it long enough. The architecture of lights in the night scenes of Guizhou and the way the protagonist walks through the streets surrounding it is what I envision as the walking scene in Love Hotel. It’s not just one scene that I can point it’s the whole feeling of the night of this film.
Vibrator (2003), dir. Ryuichi Hiroki
The opening shot of Love Hotel was inspired by the opening shot of this film. Vibrator is a story about a lonely woman on Valentine’s Day who meets an enigmatic truck driver in a convenience store and pretty quickly they become each other’s ‘vibrators’ both emotionally and physically. The handheld shots of this film remind me of a simpler time in Japanese filmmaking when you just go out and start filming without thinking about the consequences. There’s an arrogance in the framing mistakes, the focusing problems, and the extreme close-ups which I like – when a film lies between a home video and a low-budget independent nothing can be more real than it.
Maborosi , dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda (1995)
Light is nothing without darkness. Hirokazu’s debut taught me that. It is the most excellent example of how to efficiently use natural light as not only satisfies budgetary conditions but also emphasizes an environment in its most natural state.
Chungking Express, dir. Wong kar-wai (1994)
This one goes without saying and so do the rest of his films in this trilogy:
Fallen Angels (1995)
I always liked the way he used green for scenes that needed a sense of dinginess or stuffiness. That’s the color scheme inspiration for the Hotel scenes and its interior.
Days of Being Wild (1990)
On the Beach at Night Alone (2017), dir. Hong so song
This one’s less about cinematography and more about the dialogue. But of course, the dialogue dictates the frame. Hong’s dialogues wouldn’t seem that important if someone said them to you and that’s the magic of it. See, the way he holds two people in a frame without giving them any emergency exits makes these seemingly mundane dialogues about ordinary life choices somehow more important and exciting than a Shakespeare play. At least I think so. I believe he uses the language of cinema in the right in this manner.
Also, No OTS shots. And I strongly advocate that.
Tale of Cinema (2005), dir. Hong soo song
All about Lily Chou-Chou (2001), dir. Shunji Iwai
And now comes Iwai. See, this is a shot that makes me want to keep making films. It gives me hope that anything is possible as long as I don’t betray the audience’s trust. This is a location that is repeated throughout the film but this is the first we have seen it at night. Notice how there are no streetlights because it’s a rural area. So he went with this. It’s 5 seconds in the film – it doesn’t take you out of it neither is it invisible. It is just a night scene. Plain and simple.
I have always been under the impression or you can say it’s my manifesto that I would go to great lengths to make a film, a scene, or a shot, spend years or in it, decades even – if it meant that it looked like it was made yesterday. And that is what I see in his movies.
There’s a sense of urgency in his films that is deeply ingrained in the camerawork. And not in the editing per se. It doesn’t affect the pacing. It is there in the production – a component of creativity that we sometimes tend to forget in filmmaking.
Still the Water (2014), dir. Naomi Kawase
She is a documentarian at heart just like her colleague Hirokazu. What makes her different from him is that she for my money made one of cinema’s greatest storm scenes in this film.
A storm keeps people tucked away in their homes. And I’d like to believe that there’s a storm throughout Love Hotel – everybody’s home but Ahmed and April are walking through a tornado. How will I come to show that through cinematography? I do not know.
5 centimeters per second (2007), dir. Makoto Shinkai
I would be crazy if I didn’t add this one to the list. Just the feeling of the film is enough for it to be part of it.