Interview with Hirokazu Kore-eda ‘Sheep in a Box’

Imagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball, and hanging out with his friends. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. And the worst thing that can happen happens: A terrible accident takes your child away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to be sad for a long time, because now there is an AI company that can bring your child in the form of two robots that look unrecognizable to a person.

This is the country where the famous director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 show. Shopliftershas made with his latest sci-fi drama, Sheep in a Box. It’s the kind of story that might have seemed outlandish a few years ago but will become less so as AI permeates every aspect of our lives. This is a challenge Kore-eda knows all too well – so much so that she sat down with a robotics expert while writing the script to find her answers. They told him that because of the heat of the robots, “soon we will have more human beings than we can have human robots,” Kore-eda said.

But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human film. Sad work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s great movie. Although it may be implemented soon, the peak of Sheep in a Box they are still family members learning how to cope with their loss. And if we give ourselves permission to stop disbelief and go on this journey, we can see ourselves in it.

Seaside sat down with Hirokazu Kore-eda at Neon’s offices a few days ago Sheep in a BoxThe beginning of the US. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda explains everything about writing and directing the film, including what happened when he fed the script through ChatGPT.

This interview has been edited and shortened.

You have made many films about grief. What have you learned about dealing with grief through all of this?

What have I learned about grief? I think everyone experiences it differently. It is very different. And when I made my first film, Brushesthat was exactly sad. And this was the time when I read the books of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, about the work of grief. And I learned about the process of grief work and used it as a framework for the film. However, it is not as if grief follows a certain pattern. So I can say that I have learned that it differs from person to person.

In Sheep in a Boxmemories become knowledge. There was something about it that was confusing or a little cold to me. How much did it cost? How did it go for you?

I’m not sure I managed to get to this point through the film, but while I was filming, one thing I was thinking about was that the memories that are implanted into the humanoid Kakeru are pre-selected by his parents. So it’s not exactly the same as remembering the way we do it. It is pre-selected data. I think that when memory is removed from our body, what we experience internally as a memory, is not the same. It is not the same as what is entered as data. It is not the same thing that we remember that evokes the emotions that make us human.

There is a lot of AI noise in the world right now. What made this topic so important for you to understand?

In Japan, there is a huge increase in various AI-related practices. When you get into a taxi, there is a screen that tells you all these trades to increase your productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI that is used as a sad work. A few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who died was recreated through AI and then he was singing a new song. I also heard about a Korean girl who died and was recreated through AI to relieve her parents’ grief.

And then in the film, what started as the seed of the film is the commercials being made in places like China where AI is being used to recreate people who have passed away. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as someone who has made many films around grief, one thing I thought about was how the image of grief can change using AI in both good and bad ways. This is what drew me to the idea of ​​how new technologies affect this family that is trying to rebuild or rebuild their family life using AI.

One of the biggest debates surrounding AI is its uses. I thought it was very interesting that humanoids do not drink water or eat food. Can you discuss that decision?

You thought it was confusing, didn’t you?

I actually talked to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the main obstacle to making humanoid robots is that they generate a lot of heat to move very well, by processing a lot, and that there will be no way to release or fix this heat.

In order to write this article, I had to remove the barrier because it produced so much heat that it probably wouldn’t have been possible. So I decided to leave that one story alone to tell the story. They don’t waste money. It’s more of a way for them to be independent, to not rely on these things to survive.

Because it would happen so soon, it was difficult to distinguish fiction from possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was real, I was a little scared. What is it to you?

It’s hard to say, and I don’t want to talk in circles, but I talked to a robotics expert and I showed them the process of this story and they said, “Well, this is not possible. There is no way that we will make humanoid robots because of the differences in the body and the construction of the bodies that people have inside the internal organs and bones that are built from the internal organs and bones that are built inside the external robots.

So that there may be no way that we can achieve human-like movements or that you can touch a humanoid robot and it feels like a human. But if we were to give up morals, they say that soon we will have the same people as human robots. And that sounded very scary to me.

A robot is a robot no matter how you think about it. But I think as long as we don’t live in a world full of exercisers, there is still hope. We are already in the age where we can adopt our pets. I think this is already happening. So when you think about it from a moral point of view, even countries are dealing with it in a moral way in different ways. So now that cloning is possible, the way we change life is getting more advanced and unusual. And that to me is a very scary prospect.

The film has a lot of blue, especially with the costumes. That sounded deliberate.

As for the clothes and the use of blue, this could be the choice of Sachiko Ito, who designed the clothes. One of the ideas I told him was that I wanted to use lower tones for the characters, the leads in the film. Also, one of his concerns was that 10 years from now, climate change will mean we are living in a much hotter place. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothes, that maybe there will be less buttons and patterns and zippers and fasteners and things like this.

I’m curious to hear you talk about how AI has become part of your daily life.

I don’t think I’ve intentionally integrated AI without using AI translation. I think it has become so sophisticated that I often use AI to translate my Japanese into English for messaging and communication.

This came up in a Q&A yesterday at the Japan Society. I explained how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way that I fed it a movie script and said, “Give me feedback.” And we had a little exchange between me and the AI ​​and every time I changed the notes, they said it was good. They said, “You will enter Cannes.” But ChatGPT first said, “I think you’re going to enter the Un Certain Regard category.” And I said, “Except for sure?” Then my producer said, “Yeah, the director of this movie is a guy named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, then, you’re entering the race.”

And I entered the competition, so the AI ​​wasn’t wrong, but I think any human can tell me more. So I don’t think I got the value out of that exchange. And the fact that there is no humanity behind this exchange is what makes it so uncomfortable for me.

I think that when you train an AI, for example, on a person who is known to give love advice, then the advice is also normal. So I guess I’m not sold here and I don’t see AI being very useful to me. What I find most challenging is that people are becoming more interested in having creative ideas that also affect the filmmaking process. I think safety is important, but for example, we are no longer photographing cars on the road. We are doing it in the studio by creating the background. I think the breathing function will come back maybe fall to the side and then be slowly controlled by AI or VFX.

It’s not about us except for the day-to-day AI. We are already using things that we would have thought of and downloaded onto computers. For example, with this film, I shot at the studio and we did the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I will stop writing cartoons that require this kind of VFX or production because I think that the more we are used to productivity, then it is against the art.

Sheep in a Box is in theaters Friday, July 24.