10/21 (Sun) Q&A Session of Yellow – Competition film was held with Nick Cassavetes (Director) and Heather Wahlquist (Actress and Screenplay-writer).
It is a great honor for me to welcome you to the Tokyo International Film Festival I am truly grateful to have you participate at the Competition section of this film festival. Could you give a word of welcome for our audience please?
Nick Cassavetes: It’s a great pleasure for Heather and me to be here. Gosh, there are so many people in the audience and thank you all for coming to see the film. We are in the land of great film makers and Japan has rich tradition for making great films and we are proud to have our film here. For those of you saw the film, thank you for watching it.
Heather Wahlquist: I just want to say that I am so happy to be here and it was such an honor to be invited. To show my film that we’ve worked on for three years: not knowing whether it was going to be made or not: getting stopped along the way; and to be here, you know, showing it and people seeing it. I have no words, thank you, guys.
I understand that you jointly wrote the screenplay together and I thought that it was a very unique story. It has a lot of originality but could you tell us and share us how you wrote the screenplay together?
Heather: Do you want the truth. We were just lying in bed one night and we just thought wouldn’t it be funny; we normally think in characters and something leads to another and then we thought we wanted to write a story about the girl who basically feels a lot of pain but makes no excuses for it. It was just fine. And the rest of it kind of just came along as we were writing it. And then it just took the turn into the head of Mr. Cassavetes.
Nick: We were speaking in back stage and I don’t know what it is like here in Japan but where I live in America, a lot of films just seem to be same. They have same type of cloth and same type of story. Heather and I have a way of speaking to each other that is rather truthful and blunt and part of the genesis for the story was that people on film didn’t reflect the people that we saw on everyday life, especially women. Once again, I have to say that I don’t know what life is like here in Japan because I don’t live here but in America, things are getting different, especially for women. I noticed a little in last ten-fifteen years that women are much tougher. They are much more honest and much less willing to pretend that we live in the old days. When I was growing up, if the women dated a guy for money, she was found upon as being a gold digger. If a woman spoke up she was too aggressive. And in the way the film is portrayed in America today, they are still kind of nice little girls who wait their husband to come back from work and tell them not to do anything that is too dangerous and we wanted to write something which is more reflective of women we so today. The women you see in this film is not that different than the American women we see today. There’s a big problem with pain killers in our society but even more than that women do what they want. They sleep with who they want to, if something doesn’t work out, it is easy to change directions and have another type of life, and maybe some people think that it is wrong or sad or it’s depressing, but women are tough. We want to write a movie about that kind of women.
