On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Rental Family.
We speak to Japanese director Hikari about her film Rental Family, which follows the story of Phillip, an American actor living in Tokyo (Brendan Fraser) who is recruited by an agency to play stand-in roles for strangers. When the lines of real life begin to blur on assignments as a young girl’s father and as a journalist profiling a retired actor on the brink of dementia, Phillip finds himself at a moral crossroads. Hikari tells us what it was like filming in Japan’s bustling capital, how location impacts identity and belonging, and how her own move to the US helped shape the film’s protagonist.
Much of Rental Family makes Tokyo look like an intimate corner of the world instead of one of its busiest cities—but I imagine that’s not the case behind the scenes. What were the challenges of shooting in Japan’s capital?
You’re right—it was absolutely not peaceful! Filming in Tokyo is always more challenging because the locations are much more condensed compared to where you’d shoot in London or America. You can’t stop or block people in Japan while filming, unless you’re paying for the whole area, and even then, 99 percent of the time you have to let people walk through. If someone says they’re coming through in the middle of production, they’re coming through. So the production side of things requires a lot of patience. Peaceful as Tokyo is, many people have a “don’t fuck with my life” mindset—excuse my language, I’m Japanese! [Laughs] Also, when you scout apartments, you have to knock on every single door in the building and ask to shoot there tomorrow, or next week. And if one person says no, that’s a no. So we often had to visit five to six different locations knowing that someone would refuse. That’s one of the challenges as a director—I’ll love a location, and then one man or lady will say no.
We see many ‘little lives’ in this film: the camera zooms out from Phillip’s Tokyo flat, showing hundreds of homes in the building, then hundreds of buildings. It feels lonely at first, but then all of these little lives become entwined. Is this inspired by your experiences of Tokyo?
