The last time Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa was at the Venice Film Festival, he took home the event's prestigious Best Director award for his costume drama Wife of a Spy. This week he returns to the main competition of the Italian festival with Cloudthe first action film in his extensive and acclaimed filmography. The film received a boost Friday morning before its world premiere at the Lido, when news reached Venice that Japan had selected Cloud as an official nomination for the Oscar race for Best International Film.
The film tells the story of Ryōsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda in a star-making performance), a worker at a small factory who earns extra money as an online reseller of random goods (medical devices, handbags, collectible figurines), whatever he can resell for a quick profit. Little by little, Yoshii begins to avoid those around him (an old friend who taught him the game of reselling, his caring boss at the factory, some of the people he does business with online and in person), focusing solely on increasing his bank balance. But when ominous and disturbing incidents begin to occur around Yoshii with increasing frequency, he flees the city with his girlfriend (Amane Okayama) to a large house by the lake, hiring a seemingly naive local (Daiken Okudaira) as his sales assistant. There, a spiral of escalating animosity eventually finds him.
Kurosawa, whose previous festival accolades include winning Best Director at Cannes and Rome, is in touch with The Hollywood Reporter via Zoom before arriving in Venice to discuss the making of his 29th feature film.
What inspired you about the premise of this film and the themes it allowed you to explore?
The inspiration for this project did not come from a thematic angle, but from my long-standing desire to create an action film. Action is a genre deeply rooted in the history of cinema, but creating one set in contemporary Japan presents unique challenges, both logistically and financially. But the ambition to tackle an action film has continued to persist in me.
A major challenge I set myself was to move away from the typical protagonists of Japanese action films, often Yakuza, cops or defense forces, and instead focus on ordinary people. These are individuals with no connection to violence in their daily lives, yet they find themselves thrust into a life-or-death situation where survival requires extreme measures. This required crafting a story that believably placed ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: kill or be killed. Getting them there was the biggest narrative challenge.
What attracted you to make the protagonist an online retailer? What did this profession represent for you?
It was a personal connection: I know someone who does this kind of work and I found it fascinating. This person operates in a gray area, where what he does is technically legal but often borders on the ethical line. He is incredibly diligent, constantly checking his computer, researching items, listing them, and selling them, all while living in the demanding urban environment of Tokyo. This occupation, to me, symbolizes contemporary capitalism, where if you don’t have exceptional talent or wealth, reselling is a way to navigate the system. It’s interesting because, if you think about it, this small-scale operation mirrors what big companies do on a larger scale: buy low, sell high, but with less awareness of any ethical lines they’ve crossed. The occupation felt like a powerful metaphor for the times we live in.
Yes, I read it as a very pure and corrosive form of laissez-faire capitalism, where the character cares less and less about the impact his activities have on the people he's dealing with, and eventually even his closest personal relationships. The pursuit of profit becomes more and more all-encompassing. I really appreciated that initially his activities don't necessarily seem that unreasonable, and that you use horror film tropes to create a sense of ambient evil that is coming for him for reasons we don't understand. But as the protagonist is forced to explore why this is happening to him, the audience is forced to question his behavior and culpability on a deeper level, until the critique that's embedded in the film gradually becomes more and more visible, even as it morphs into the tropes of a straight-up action film.
I really like this take. This kind of reading makes me feel validated in making this film.
'Cloud'
Venice Film Festival
I'm curious to know what you think of the assistant character. I found him a bit inscrutable. What were your intentions there?
When it came to creating the character of the assistant, it wasn't drawn from a belief that there is someone exactly like him in the world, but more from a need within the genre. I wanted a character who seemed ordinary on the surface but carried with him an unsettling, almost hidden, capacity for violence. Daiken Okudaira, who plays him, is a remarkable young Japanese actor who, while not yet well known, has a unique charm that made the character enigmatic and inscrutable. Initially, I wasn't sure if the character would work, but Okudaira brought his own mysterious energy to the role, which really elevated it.
I usually like to leave interpretations open to the audience, but since you asked, in my mind the assistant represents the devil. He is someone who has made a subtle, almost invisible contract with the protagonist, offering him both happiness and despair in equal measure. It's the simplest way I see his role in the story.
In line with the anti-capitalist critique above, I began to see this as a logical conclusion: the pursuit of profit at all costs turns someone into an empty and insensitive gangster.
Oh, I totally agree. It's all there, in the final scene in the car between the two of them. How you interpret the film depends on how you read this interaction. You could see it as a monster of capitalism, or more like an abstract devil. Of course, how the film is seen is now in the hands of the viewers.
Considering these themes and the way you handled them, I found myself wondering if the film was meant as a response to the social changes taking place in Japan, the emergence of a more American-style corporate culture and a widening income gap that is eroding some of the much-vaunted social cohesion of the country’s middle class. Or did you mean your critique to be more universal than that?
Well, the story is set in contemporary Japan, focusing on the lives of ordinary people, so it naturally reflects the realities of modern Japanese society. I’m not very familiar with the nuances of American society, but it’s clear that many countries are struggling with widening gaps between rich and poor. Japan hasn’t gotten to that point yet. Historically, Japan has had a postwar economic boom that fostered a strong middle-class identity, and that sense of shared identity still persists and is dear to us.
But as we move forward, there is a growing sense of uncertainty. Even among those who still identify as middle class, there is a strain of anxiety: people feel cornered as if the stability they once took for granted is slipping away. This sense of individual desperation, this fear that “I have to do something or I might lose everything,” is becoming more palpable. It's this feeling that I wanted to explore in the film, to capture that unease that is slowly permeating society.
You’ve said that your main priority with this project was simply to fulfill a long-held desire to make an action film. Now that you’ve done it, are there any other latent desires to make films that you still harbor? You’ve worked in so many styles and registers over the course of your long career. How do you see your career ambitions at this stage?
In terms of my career, I have never set a specific trajectory or had a fixed idea of what I wanted it to be. Of course, journalists and other people around me might help shape this narrative, but for me it is the depth and richness of cinematic expression that naturally guides me. No matter how many films I make, I never feel like any of them are truly perfect or complete. In fact, the more films I make, the more elusive the very concept of cinema becomes, as if it were always one step ahead of me. This simple, almost primitive desire to understand what cinema really is keeps me going, and I imagine it will continue to do so until my death.