Blog — Luc-Yan Picker

When I first went freelance, my biggest concern was obviously money. Not being able to feed myself and pay rent was the biggest fear I had. My second fear was to stay stuck at the level I was. Up until that point, the only jobs entrusted to me were pretty fun and creative but never had any kind of real money behind them and I felt that it gave most of my work a feeling of “wow that’s nice for a small budget”, which is not where I want to peak. The only bigger budgets I got to play with were jobs that came through Cutters and without my name attached.

Here I am, wondering if I’ll ever pay rent again.

Luckily, that concern didn’t last very long. About a month before my last day, I got a call from a producer for what sounded like a fairly large tourism campaign for the Japan National Tourism Organization. I had done multiple jobs for that client before but this one seemed much bigger. The shoot itself was scheduled to be 25 days, spread out over a few months and including locations all over Japan. We’d be delivering seven main films with cutdowns, which would then come to 21 films total.

Although my fee was quite low for the amount of work involved, it was by far the largest amount of money I had ever been promised for a single project until that point.

The theme itself was luxury travel and the campaign was aimed at rich boomers from Europe and North America. The agency plan was simple; film boomers enjoying a certain number of luxury activities, food and hotels. The extent of their plan was to make a list of those activities but they stopped short of making any sort of creative plan. This suited me as it gave me a lot of freedom to come up with an approach myself.

I personally really dislike tourism films that are essentially white people smiling and pointing at stuff. It’s just very obviously a lack of inspiration on the part of the people involved and it’s just so boring. My first decision was to shift the focus from people enjoying things to actually showing what they are enjoying. To put it simply, an image of a temple is more inspiring than an image of tourists looking at a temple.

Not seen here is a tourist pointing and looking in awe.

I also questioned myself about Japanese luxury. It isn’t garish gold-plated toilet seats or other useless displays of decadent wealth. Even when it comes to food, rich people can eat whatever they want wherever they are, why would they go to Japan to eat sushi if they can fly a chef over in their private jet? What I tried to focus on instead was the culturally inspired meticulous attention to details that Japan is so proud of. I wanted to show all the people, skills and industries that come together to offer these experiences. I believed that this, with a strong voice-over giving meaning to the images would lead to a more compelling film.

For the VO, I managed to push through a Japanese VO. I wanted it to feel like a voice from the past reaching across the ages. Both the agency and the JNTO people were a little reluctant because they feared the approval process for the script would be too tedious.

For this shoot, I ended up working with Nobu Arakawa. I knew him from his time as a Cutters intern. His work as a DOP was starting to look pretty good and he seemed perfect for this kind of small and nimble shoot. Ultimately, the crew was just me and him. The rest would be 2 people from production, 3 from the agency, 2 clients and usually two models.

For the cast, I managed to convince them to widen the net a little bit. We ended up casting our two older models but also a younger family and ultimately 2 younger women.

The shoot had a difficult start. The first day was in a luxury train. I had laid down a series of requests to make sure we could make the most out of our limited time on location. From the moment we arrived, it was clear all of it was ignored. The agency had basically arranged the shoot so that we would not get in the way of anyone. We were not allowed tripods or light stands. We had limited time to shoot in each train car, which was sometimes mere minutes and strangest of all, the cast was not allowed to eat the food being served. They instead had to play pretend. It was overall very bizarre and clearly the result of things not being communicated properly.

Another thing that really irked me was the agency had made a shot list but had never actually discussed it with me. It really made me wonder why I was even there. Luckily, the producer came to my help and told them this wasn’t acceptable and to allow me to direct.

The models also noticed that the shoot was a little off and started commenting on everything. “Why aren’t we waiting to shoot this at sunset?” “This should have been done this way” etc. It added to the stress and basically made us kick off on the wrong foot. To be honest, I wanted to recast after the first shoot but after having a little heart to heart with the cast, things became a lot smoother.

As the shoot went on, we finally found our pace. Nobu and I had a good understanding of what we were doing, the agency gave us more trust and the cast became more eager to work with us. The overall vibe was usually very positive.

Of course it wasn’t without challenges. Some of the locations demanded long hikes to get to and the shooting days were quite long.

One of the more unique opportunities this shoot provided us was to spend time in a completely empty Ninnaji temple, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had a couple of monks showing us around and guiding us during our shoot. One of them was so photogenic and just cool that we ended up shooting him more than we shot the cast.

We got to eat food, visit locations, meet people and have experiences that I’ll never be able to afford on my own. Riding a helicopter around Mount Fuji and swimming in glaciers in particular are things I’ll remember.

I don’t actually have any pictures of us in the water, but I promise we went in.

The shoot schedule ended up being quite extended and Nobu was no longer able to free his schedule. For the last 2 or 3 shooting days, he was replaced by Chris and Andrzej Rudz who came to help out.

Eventually we had to change the cast because one of them became unable to join any further. They decided to add two young women, with the implication that they MIGHT be lesbians, but didn’t want it to be too explicit.

A potentially lesbian couple being guided on an adventure.

Editing the project wasn’t super hard at the beginning. I already had a structure in mind for the stories and the biggest challenge was just going through the mountain of footage. We shot over 55 hours of footage and going through it was absolutely tedious. Where things got complicated was on the client side.

For the past few years, or at least since I was first involved in JNTO projects, they have relied on a foreign consultant whose name I won’t reveal here, just to show you how much growth I’ve been doing. This man is an ex Goldman-Sachs investment banker who fell in love with Japan, made friends with some very powerful people, including Shinzo Abe. Every project has to be approved by him. About once a month, he goes to the JNTO office where he holds court. Every projects get presented to him on that day and he gives feedback, approval of tears apart the project, based on whatever mood he is that day. Now, this man is not a marketing professional and knows nothing of filmmaking. He is just a foreigner who really likes Japan, has made friends in high places and hasn’t been told he was wrong about anything in over a decade. He is also the brilliant mind behind the “Enjoy my Japan” slogan. Dear reader, I’m sure you can imagine that getting someone like that to approve anything good can be a nightmare.

His impact on the work is actually much worse than that. Because he is so obtuse, the entire organization is focused on how to get him to approve their projects rather than trying to actually make good, impactful ads. Another hilarious example in retrospect is that he has an aversion to too many close ups in a film because showing context is more important. No, don’t worry about the pacing, emotionality and intimacy that you can create with close-ups. After all, and I quote: “we’re not trying to win awards here.” This led to the JNTO as well as agency people repeating again and again that no close-ups were necessary. In the edit, they would even go and count how many close-ups were in the film and request to reduce them in number.

Another fun thing to know about him is that he doesn’t review and approve creative plans, only finished films. Remember this part kids, it’s going to matter down the line.

In the 10+ meetings I’ve had with the man, I have found him to be a:

Difficult,

Arrogant,

Vitriolic,

Incompetent

Dunning Kruger exemplifying

Art averse

Tasteless

Keen to promote his friends

Intolerant to discussion

Norm fearing

Sabotaging

Overconfident

Nincompoop

and all with the confidence of a man surrounded by sycophants.

Among his great comments were: “Why are we showing sushi? Show other food” In a video that featured prominently a sushi chef, and “The tea ceremony master must not be very good, she is using a cheap cup. Go reshoot with a better cup.”

He also critiqued the script for the voice-over as not English and to make sure a British person write it. Make of that what you will.

Two monkeys having more intelligent thoughts than the aforementioned.

When we went to reshoot, (because yes, that happened because of a cup) I found out that he had insisted on having a meeting with the new tea master to discuss what she would do. Keep in mind, we had a shot list and basically needed 4 or 5 shots but this new list now consisted of over 15 shots, with two different kind of tea that essentially look the same on screen. At this point I realized the agency and client folks had basically given up on making anything good. They just wanted to get the project done, which is fair since by this point we had been working on it for nearly 8 months. This however meant that they had no intention to push for anything or push back when clients say something dumb. The client said what they wanted so just shoot that, no matter how it’s going to look in the project.

This attitude unfortunately ended up having a cost. Once we got to the voice-over, the agency could not imagine the voice-over be anything else but the typical Japanese commercial voice-over.

At the beginning of the project, I sold them on the idea of making the voiceover in Japanese, with a voice that sounds old and distant, like through a radio that would be kind of a “voice of Japan” rather than just a straight: “Come to Japan, there’s food”.

They had agreed to this direction but changed their mind once they heard it. They feared it was too dark, too unusual and the voice wasn’t clear enough. The Japanese voice in a commercial that would air in Europe was not clear enough. Dear reader, yes you read that right.

Sadly, this project ended up leaving me very bitter. My final call with the agency folks wasn’t a pleasant one. I ended up walking away for my screen and pacing back and forth in the room. I was incapable to reply to their emails after either. I just couldn’t go through with this kind of false pleasantries after the project ended that way. Luckily I managed to get my VO for the director’s cut.

This doesn’t have anything to do with my director’s cut, but I really like this photo.

As of the time of writing this, the film series has been out for over a year and I’m finally able to look back with a bit more perspective, though you may have noticed that somehow those emotions are never too far under the surface. I’m actually pretty proud of what we accomplished. There were a lot of obstacles but I learned a lot along the way and the experiences were really unique.

What went well

I really enjoyed working with Nobu. I hadn’t worked with him since he had left Cutters and it was a chance to get to know him more and I think he’s a really good guy. He’s pursuing a career as a director now so my guess is I won’t have too many chances to work with him again. I think I learned to connect better with cast during the project and as it went along, I think I managed to really get what I wanted out of them. The locations really blew my mind. I was also really happy about the music. The good folks at Primary Colors really delivered a great track and I loved the sound design from Mike Regan.

What went wrong

Well obviously we ended up having a reshoot and that’s not great. I still wonder what steps I could have taken to avoid that. Like any way to speak up in the meeting or manipulating or even lying. Ultimately, the reshoot didn’t make the film better but cost production a lot of money. I also wish I’d managed to keep my cool when it became apparent the agency was unwilling to fight for the creative. After all, it’s just a commercial.

What I learned

Well, I learned that I could take on projects of this scale. I’ve worked on much bigger productions since but this was the first one that really gave me a chance to prove to myself that I could take on this kind of project. More than anything, I was really unsure that I was ready to shoulder such a big project, especially one with no actual creative brief. What I took from this job more than any other was that yes, I can do this, even without Cutters as a safety net.