THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 30, 1995 TAG: 9505270070
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
``YOU MAY THINK I have this glamorous life, but the reality is that I can't pay the rent next month,'' Kayo Hatta was saying. ``There is a strange duality about that. Ha!''
Hatta's new film, ``Picture Bride,'' about a mail-order bride who gives up her Japanese homeland to live with a sugar cane worker in Hawaii, has become a surprise hit with both critics and the public. It is the first feature for the University of California graduate.
``The movie had all the things a first-time director should not try,'' she said with a laugh. ``It had babies, animals and the weather. The wind was a whole character. We even had a wrangler to handle the centipedes. I needed the cooperation of Buddha to get it made.''
She also needed cash.
``We went into production, although I needed $1 million to finish it,'' she said. ``I had only $300,000.''
That all changed when Miramax Films, the champion of independent movies that made a hit out of ``The Crying Game,'' saw ``Picture Bride'' at the Cannes film festival and picked it up for distribution.
``There I was, coming out of the trenches and getting all dressed up at Cannes,'' Hatta said. ``Miramax had this huge yacht in the harbor. It was all very glamorous, and everyone was wearing diamonds. They were talking about my film. It seemed like another world.''
``Picture Bride'' is partly based on family memories and was co-written with her sister, Mari.
``She and I have always collaborated on the documentaries we made, even though she was in in New York and I was in Los Angeles,'' Hatta said. ``We looked toward Japanese and Chinese filmmakers for inspiration, because you never see Asian people on film here.''
Both their grandmothers were Japanese immigrant women. ``Mail-order brides, as in the film, exist even today in southeast Asia. Arranged marriages are still very present in Japan,'' she said.
The film is set in 1918. The sugar cane industry pictured no longer exists. ``Some of the cane workers hired to be in the film were laid off from their jobs, even while we were filming,'' she said.
``The cane industry is largely gone. It's very ironic that the fields, as depicted in the movie, have largely been turned into golf courses for the Japanese. Times have greatly changed.''
She was worried about her star, the pert Youki Kudoh, who has the role of the steel-magnolia city girl who resents the fact that her proposed Hawaiian husband is 20 years older than she expected.
``Youki is only 22 and very Westernized,'' the director said. ``She is a pop singer in Japan - very Generation X. I was worried about her doing a serious role. She's like a teeny-bopper. She could do a New Jersey accent. She could do an Italian accent. But I kept wondering if she could do a Japanese accent - an accent of this period. I needed a bilingual actress because my own Japanese accent is not that good.''
The release of ``The Joy Luck Club'' in the United States helped Hatta's film. ``It showed,'' the director said, ``that a mainstream audience can connect, universally, to an ethnic story. My first idea, in making it, was to reach an Asian audience. Miramax wanted to reach a mainstream audience and thinks we can.''
The biggest break came when the legendary Japanese star Toshiro Mifune agreed to make a cameo appearance in the film.
``When he agreed to be in it, my thought was that we barely had enough money to get the film made. My thoughts were: `He will have to fly first class; he will have to stay in a big hotel.' Happily, none of that became a bother. He has a home in Hawaii. He contributed, like everyone else, to getting this film made.'' ILLUSTRATION: MIRAMAX photo
Kayo Hatta's ``Picture Bride'' has been far more successful than she
ever dreamed.
by CNB