Zeze Takahisa used a Tokyo International Film Festival masterclass to make a forceful argument for original filmmaking, warning that the industry has become overly dependent on adapting already successful material.
The director, whose “Sukiyaki” opened the festival, addressed a full-house audience at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya as part of the Tokyo Talk program. While the session traced his path from early “pink” films to mainstream projects, Zeze’s reflections ultimately returned to the creative value of stories developed directly for the screen.
“The industry is too focused on the ‘source material market,’” Zeze said. “They think that if the source material is selling well, they should adapt it.”
Zeze has worked within that system himself. His commercial films include the hit 2016 two-part mystery and suspense project “64,” adapted from a bestselling novel. Even so, he said many of the movies that captured his interest were not adaptations.
“But the movies we actually found interesting or the ones I personally found entertaining were all originals,” he said. “So I feel that pursuing original concepts and making original films is incredibly important right now. They have a unique, compelling strength.”
From Pink Films to the Mainstream
Born in Oita Prefecture in 1960, Zeze entered a pink film production company as an assistant director in 1986. Three years later, he made his directing debut with “Extracurricular Activity: Rape,” winning the Pink Grand Prix Award for Best New Director.
That film, which Zeze also scripted, followed delinquent high school girls who spend time at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and fight the yakuza. He privately called it “Go to Haneda and You Will See Kids Dressed Like Pirates Ready to Attack.”
Zeze said he was interested at the time in stories about female criminals. “It’s just different from the male perspective,” he explained. “The motives behind the crimes and so on. I found it fascinating.”
Pink films were shown in specialized theaters to exclusively male audiences, with directors required to include a bed scene approximately every 10 minutes. Within those restrictions, however, Zeze recalled finding room to develop his own ideas, particularly as the culture changed in the early 1990s.
“I’ve always been pretty firm in my convictions,” he said. “Starting from the early 1990s the culture shifted and I had more freedom to say what I wanted. That kind of thing was important to me.”
Discussing his 1994 film “Genuine Lesbians: Embarrassing Positions,” which he titled “Fallen Angels in September,” Zeze said its story about female soulmates grew out of young people’s interest in mysticism at the time. He recalled a trend of searching for past lives and looking for connections to another world, an idea he believed could anchor a film.
The “Four Heavenly Kings” Era
Alongside Sano Kazuhiro, Sato Toshiki and Sato Hisayasu, Zeze became known as one of the “Four Heavenly Kings of Pink.” He said the name originated with a pink theater in Toyama—or possibly Ishikawa, a detail he could not remember with certainty.
The label reminded the four directors of “Nouvelle Vague,” a name associated with both critical and commercial standing. Rather than continue solely as individuals, they decided to use the group identity to their advantage.
Their films later appeared in retrospectives at the Rotterdam festival and elsewhere outside Japan. According to Zeze, recognition abroad arrived first before being effectively “re-imported” into Japan.
Although pink filmmakers were still required to include erotic content, Zeze said they were not being instructed to abandon politically sensitive subjects. He described the period as one of considerable freedom and said filmmakers from different backgrounds could collaborate without standardized career boundaries.
Among the directors from his generation with whom he worked were Aoyama Shinji and Suzuki Takuji. Zeze said such filmmakers came together through chance encounters or a shared desire to create something interesting.
His mainstream debut arrived in 1997 with the teen horror film “Kokkuri-san.” For the following decade, he continued moving between pink productions and mainstream cinema.
A Creative Turning Point
In 2010, Zeze released what was then his most ambitious project, “Heaven’s Story.” The 278-minute revenge drama screened in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section and received the FIPRESCI Prize.
Zeze said the project emerged from a feeling that he needed to move beyond the commercial films he had been making. “Personally, I felt a sense of urgency—or maybe a sense of crisis—that things weren’t going well, and that’s what pushed me to take on this challenge,” he said.
ShowBiz Take
Zeze’s case for original films carries particular weight because his own career has crossed several distinct production models: tightly structured pink filmmaking, independent work, mainstream releases and adaptations of established material.
His Tokyo appearance showed that the restrictions surrounding his earliest projects did not prevent experimentation. Instead, he described filmmakers using the available freedom to explore political themes, female-centered crime stories, mysticism and unconventional collaborations.
That history sharpens his message about the present. Zeze is not dismissing adaptations from the outside; “64” demonstrates his direct participation in commercially successful filmmaking based on existing intellectual property. His argument is that original concepts retain a creative power the industry should not overlook—and that the films artists find most compelling do not always begin with a bestselling source.