Thread by @JoshuaDysart, Here is a thread about the making of Nobuhiko Obayashi's movie, HOUSE. [...]

Here is a thread about the making of Nobuhiko Obayashi's movie, HOUSE. Nobuhiko passed from this world yesterday-ish & I want to pay tribute to him. But don't let this thread fool you. HOUSE is not Obayashi's only great movie. Also: Hanagatami, Emotion, Sada, etc.

K, let's go:

To me the story of the making of “House” is a story about vision, creativity, and what’s truly important in life. And it starts like this...

Legendary film studio and distributor, Toho, needed its own “Jaws”. Actually, all of Japan needed a “Jaws”.

In 1975 the Japanese film industry was slumped something fierce. Young people weren’t going to movies. They were watching TV. But “Jaws” had been a global mega-hit, huge even in Japan.

The entire Japanese film industry knew they needed a crowd-pleasing hit that had the tooth of “Jaws” but was lensed through a domestic sensibility (since they simply couldn’t compete with Hollywood budgets and go for the global gold).

So Toho approached Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, a then 37 year-old experimental short filmmaker who had turned into a successful commercial director. Commercials were a field of filmmaking that both his experimental peers and the great masters of Japan’s film industry deemed beneath them.

When Toho approached him to write a screenplay for the Japanese “Jaws” they had dreams of making a wild bear attack film, but Ôbayashi-Sama found their concepts too derivative and began searching for a new idea in “pure entertainment with scares in it”.

In an excellent Criterion feature that has probably the definitive Ôbayashi interview regarding “House” available with an English translation, he says, “When faced with any important decision I always consult children.”
So he turned to his ten year-old daughter, Chigumi Ôbayashi.

She had just returned home from a visit to her grandparents’ house in the country & had found the old house filled with dark, dusty ramps for her imagination.

The grandparents kept their food cool in a well, and Chigumi imagined the melons down in the depths were human heads. One of the large, heavy futons that made up her bedding fell on top of her & her little body became trapped underneath it for a brief time.

There was an old, imposing clock in the house, & its constant, lazy ticking & the audible creaking of its internal gears felt otherworldly & nightmarish to her. Chigumi was learning to play the piano too, & she was always worried about getting her fingers smashed in the key guard

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi understood. The shark, for his child, was the distant woods, the old house filled with dark memories, & lives lived that were utterly beyond the understanding of a 10 year old.

To him the long wrought shadows that hid some child’s “Alice in Wonderland” idea was the same as the surface of the ocean hiding a prehistoric evolutionary horror.

And so he made a leap that he claims only a 10 year-old mind could make. The House is would be his shark.

But any other director would have taken that idea & scaled it up for the adult mind. & in fact, when held up to the light of maturity, it’s really just another haunted house story, not all that fresh at all. Ôbayashi understood that too. These ideas alone were not that unique.

The only way to make the audience understand what his daughter was feeling was to make them see the house exactly as his 10 year old girl had seen it. The governing principle, we should, through this film, experience the world completely from a child’s point of view during play.

A child's shifting attention span, overdramatic turns, & ultimate quest for pure fun - would shape ever single creative choice that Nobuhiko Ôbayashi would make regarding “House”.

If Lewis Carroll had been a Japanese commercial director in the 1970’s, obsessed with the atomic bomb and pop-surrealism, “House” would’ve come very close to being the kind of project he would’ve pursued.

With his daughter’s ideas, worldview, & attitudinal perceptions deeply baked in to the project, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi worked with his friend Chiho Katsura on the screenplay, finished it, then sold it to Toho & went back to making commercials.

But Toho didn’t want to make it.

They told Ôbayashi that no director would touch it. That it was too trite, too meaningless, that it would end any director’s career that tried to wrestle it into an actual movie.

Ôbayashi understood that no one was thinking of directing it straight from the mind of a child.

They were all mired in their adultness. He asked if he could direct it himself, though he’d never done a feature film before, but it was obvious that Toho was turning their back on the project. They owned the script, but would not make the film.

And so, using the money he made directing over 100 commercials per year, Ôbayashi created the first multi-media plat-formed property in entertainment history.

Over the next 2 years Ôbayashi built a brand for a non-existent film.

First he made an announcement in the ad trades that Toho had bought his screenplay, “House”, but didn’t mention they wouldn’t be making it. He kept the title in English, as American culture was popular with young people, & the New York pop-art movement was gaining huge traction.

He created the now famous original poster image and put this image on his business cards. He approached the Japanese rock band Godiego, young handsome men that alt-culture Japanese girls swooned over. They cut a soundtrack album that became a hit getting endless radio play.

He hired seven young female commercial models that he had worked with in the past, girls who were stylish and attractive, & announced them as his cast, forcing the Japanese fashion magazines of the time to cover the non-existent film.

Japanese boys began hanging posters of the seven young women on their walls with just the one word of text printed across the image in English… HOUSE.

Ôbayashi turned the screenplay into a commercially-successful manga and then a radio drama using the cast he had already put together.

Single-handedly Ôbayashi, understanding exactly how to market to youth culture, made “House” a household name.

After two years of watching Ôbayashi make money on an idea that they owned the screenplay to Toho had run out of excuses and a production date & a budget was announced.

But the now 40 year-old Ôbayashi had done much more than just market his film over these two years.

He'd been doing pre-production. Meticulously designing every frame of the film. Once they started building sets, Ôbayashi’s vision was crystal clear. A horror film told from the POV of a young modern Japanese girl, using the language of pop-surrealism & the Japanese ad landscape.

He played the soundtrack while filming so the girls would dance through their acting beats, giving a sense of rhythm to everything. He played hide & seek with them when the cameras weren’t rolling to keep them childish, but also to remind himself to stay childishness and play.

Studio executives were nervous, but the crew were elated, with many saying they had worked in film so long they had lost their joy for it, but that everyday on the set of “House” was a reminder of what was important in life. That work be play, that we be bold in our creative acts

And most of all, that we reveal ourselves through art without fear, that we rely more on spirit than on craft.

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