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HOLLYWOOD: A Japanese-American web programmer who
sonce dreamed of a Hollywood writing career is on the brink of
Oscars glory after emerging as one of the creative forces behind the
war film Letters from Iwo Jima.
The remarkable story of how Iris
Yamashita was hired to write the script for the Clint
Eastwood-directed film is one of the more unusual subplots at this
year’s Academy Awards, which take place here on February 25.
Yamashita had been toiling in IT
obscurity when she was approached by Oscar-winning writer-director
Paul Haggis to work on Iwo Jima, which tells the story of fighting
on the island during WWII from the Japanese perspective.
The 40-year-old, who has been
nominated in the best original screenplay category, had shared the
same Hollywood agent as Haggis after winning a screen-writing
contest in 2002.
So when Haggis began casting
around for a writer capable of understanding the cultural issues
raised by the movie, which is shot entirely in Japanese, Yamashita
soon appeared on the radar.
The two writers met, and soon
afterward, without ever having had a screenplay of her own produced
before, Yamashita was being asked to write a script for a Clint
Eastwood film.
“It was very surreal,” said
Yamashita. “One moment I had a full-time job as a web programmer,
and the next moment I had Paul Haggis saying ‘OK, you can quit
your day job now.’”
Yamashita, born in Missouri to
Japanese parents who moved to the United States after the war, was
already knowledgeable about war-time Japan: Her mother’s home had
been destroyed during the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and she had written
an earlier script set in Japan on the eve of the war.
The prospect of making a war film
from the perspective of the “enemy” was also attractive. “I
had seen Das Boot years ago, and I remember thinking before that,
‘You mean they’re going to show the German perspective on World
War II? What’s that going to be like?,’” she told reporters.
“But I walked out of that movie
and thought ‘Wow!’
“I’d grown up watching war
movies on television where you never really saw the enemy, or
considered them. So it was interesting to me to look at the story
from the other side.”
Though Yamashita speaks
conversational Japanese, English is her mother tongue. Her
screenplay needed to be translated into the Japanese language for
the benefit of the cast.
She revealed that the film’s
star, Japanese icon Ken Watanabe, helped fine-tune the script in
certain scenes. “Ken was always making sure the dialogue seemed
natural,” Yamashita said.
Haggis, the writer behind
Oscar-winning pictures such as Million Dollar Baby and Crash, said
initially he and Eastwood had sought a native Japanese screenwriter
to help with the script.
“We quickly discovered that
this [Iwo Jima] isn’t taught in Japan,” Haggis told reporters at
an Oscars luncheon.
“So we found Iris, and hoped
that she could help. And that in itself is a bit of a racist
statement, isn’t it? Because she is first and foremost an
American. And when we were working on the script we were both,
‘You see those bad guys coming over the hill? Well, that’s
us.’”
Haggis said the challenge was in
trying to present the Japanese soldiers as ordinary people.
“Awful things were done by both
sides,” he said. “We certainly didn’t want to make a film that
said ‘Oh, the Japanese, weren’t they lovely people?’
“Because no, there were awful
atrocities. But at the same time they were also ordinary humans.”
--AFP
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