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skeletonpunching · 2 years

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Buddy Daddies producer interview

Interview with Tsuji Mitsuhito (P.A. Works producer) and Toba Yosuke (Aniplex producer)

Interviewer: "Buddy Daddies" is an original work, but how did the initial concept for the project come about?

Tsuji: I'd just started parenting children of my own, and I had a discussion with Toba-san about how it might be nice to do something with that theme - that was the start of it. To be honest, I'd brought this up to various producers before, but I was told that stories about "parenting" were a hard sell…

Toba: Personally, I didn't say it was "impossible" from the start. I said first off, I'd go home and think it over. Building a new piece of entertainment around "parenting"... I thought about it, and in the past, there were foreign TV shows like the sitcom "Full House". Going with that general vibe, I thought it might be fun to have a story about people who have no affinity for parenting getting jerked around by children, and having to struggle through it. And also, I thought about including anime-typical action… For example, wouldn't it be fun if someone who usually murders people gets saddled with parenting? It might feel like "Léon" [1994 movie by Luc Besson] or "A Perfect World" [1993 movie by Clint Eastwood], wouldn't it? Something like that. And then Tsuji-san brought up the topic of the Netflix-distributed movie "Polar" [2019 movie, known for starring Mads Mikkelsen], and this became the story of a hard-boiled man raising a child.

Tsuji: The protagonist of that story was an old assassin guy, so I tried to picture him raising a child.

Toba: But characters who are "old guys" are a tough sell, so I wondered, what comes next? (laughs) And there's the common trope of an assassin taking in the child of a target they killed, but it seemed rather hard to set up a natural way for a killer to take in a child of their own accord. Like in the case of "Léon", the young girl Mathilda voluntarily seeks out the assassin herself - that's a good fit. But Tsuji-san said he didn't want the child to be old enough to make up their own mind and act on it themselves. He preferred a younger child.

Tsuji: After all, it's incredibly difficult parenting kids in early childhood, when they're getting wilful and assertive. I wanted to create a character at that age.

Toba: If so, I thought it'd be tough to develop things further… And then I met Shimokura-san [Shimokura Vio, writer for Nitroplus] on another project, and we got to chatting, and I asked for his opinion. And he said, "In that case, having a duo would work well." One of them is a guy who wants to ditch the child and leave them be, but the other's personality is the opposite, and the interactions and dialogue between these two inevitably create a back-and-forth. If you set up a scenario like this, it's bound to go somewhere, he said. I think Shimokura-san helped me immensely by coming up with this excellent idea. So I decided, let's go straight down the route of odd-couple assassins raising a child.

Tsuji: And I think that's how the idea of this as a "buddy story" really got started. The protagonists were a bit younger than the original concept, but we got them up to around their late twenties to thirties.

Toba: And I thought it'd be nice if these two men took on the roles of father and mother. The two men are bringing up a child without any blood ties to them - that's quite a modern story, reflecting how values are diversifying, and I figured this would work well. "Family with no blood ties" and "two people of the same gender raising a child" - I think both of those are really great themes.

Interviewer: In a so-called "buddy story", the way the main characters' dynamic is written is really essential - what did you focus on in the creation process?

Toba: The two of them essentially get along well, but their personalities being direct opposites is easier to work with, so we used that as a base.

Tsuji: One of the characters is in the mother's role, shouldering the main burden of parenting; the other character is a deadbeat dad who takes up the father's role anyway… Starting from this, we came up with their dialogue and personalities.

Toba: A caring mother, and a father who takes his regular job seriously but does absolutely nothing once he gets home. We basically took that setup and changed them into assassins.

Interviewer: Since this is an original work that was created from scratch, was there anything you got especially hung up on?

Toba: The question of how to depict "parenting". If I had to put it into words now, I'd say that "becoming a family" ended up being a major theme.

Tsuji: (Kurusu) Kazuki has experienced lost love, and (Suwa) Rei is a character with no idea what love is, and all this changes through living with the child (Unasaka) Miri. So portraying the changes the two of them undergo is a big part of it.

Toba: Another detail of the story is the inclusion of "relatable parenting moments". For example, how two men go about "hokatsu" (the hunt to enrol their children in daycare), or what reaction two men have the first time they visit a "specialty children's store"... that's fun to see, isn't it? A guy pedalling around with a child on his bicycle, and he's actually an assassin - stuff like that. I think that sort of minor detail brings out the comedic elements and makes the story more engaging.

Interviewer: So basically, making the details of parenting more realistic.

Toba: Of course. Since many of our staff on this project are veteran parents.

Tsuji: There are also veterans among the writers, so they incorporate plenty of "relatable parenting moments".

Toba: We have a scene along the lines of getting a call from the daycare while you're at work, and being told that your child has a fever, and thinking, "Seriously? I'm on the job (assassination) right now."

Tsuji: The protagonists are basically newbies to parenting, so how will they cope with this… I thought it'd be interesting to show that.

Toba: After all, given their positions, they live in the shadows. There's no one they can discuss this with.

Interviewer: What is the appeal of Kazuki and Rei as characters?

Tsuji: At the outset, Rei doesn't have much emotion, and has no idea about love - but over the course of all 12 episodes, he displays really subtle changes, and I hope the viewers will sense that evolution. I would be very happy if you get emotionally invested in his progression towards understanding love; it's charming and worth watching.

Kazuki's buddy dynamic with Rei, and his parent-child dynamic with Miri, are a lot of fun. Toyonaga-san (Toshiyuki) plays Kazuki, and you get to enjoy his incredible range as an actor. He puts in flourishes that we never imagined, and it's delightful; I feel like he's enhanced Kazuki's charm.

Interviewer: We've already mentioned the actors, but Toyonaga Toshiyuki-san, who plays Kazuki, and Uchiyama Koki-san, who plays Rei, are both perfectly cast.

Toba: I feel like Uchiyama-san is almost just playing himself (laughs), but Toyonaga-san suits the role so well it's like it was written for him. I was amazed just how well it fit. It's like Kazuki is Toyonaga-san and Rei is Uchiyama-san in disguise - it feels as if they themselves are on the screen. It's incredible. That's what I think, personally.

Interviewer: Was the casting this time determined by audition?

Toba: We held auditions. But before that, there was already some talk floating around about how Rei was "very Uchiyama-san".

Tsuji: There were lots of opinions like that, about the atmosphere and the voices. Previously, I'd worked on another P.A. Works project with Toba-san, and Uchiyama-san played the protagonist there. Generally, in the anime world, you don't often reuse a previous lead actor in your next project, but this time we couldn't shake that feeling of "Uchiyama-san really would be great for this". So who would be good as Uchiyama-san's buddy Kazuki… And we decided on Toyonaga-san. The two of them were a duo in "Zetsuen no Tempest" about 10 years ago, and since then, they've co-starred in various works. They already had a strong rapport, so it seemed like they'd make a good match.

Toba: When it came to this series, I really placed a lot of weight on that aspect as well. I requested that the performances feel a little raw, and as close to their actual selves as possible. So, rather than fitting themselves to the characters, the true goal was to fit the characters to the real people themselves. At that point, we could see Uchiyama-san doing that, and then we thought, "If Toyonaga-san is a good fit too…" And he turned out to be an even more perfect fit than we'd imagined. He's practically just being himself by now. (laughs)

Tsuji: Toyonaga-san comes to pretty much every audition for a P.A. Works project, so I knew that he'd tackled all sorts of challenges in his performances, and had a very wide range. Kazuki is a free-spirited character who isn't constrained by any mould, so I thought he'd be perfect for Toyonaga-san, who can throw himself so freely into his performances, and brings so much to every role. It also felt like P.A. Works had finally found a character that would let us work at full power with Toyonaga-san.

Toba: In that sense, it feels like Kazuki was truly finalised as a character after Toyonaga-san was cast.

Interviewer: Unasaka Miri holds the key to this story - how about Kino Hina-san, who plays her?

Toba: Miri's performance was also mostly left up to Kino-san herself.

Tsuji: Miri is a 4-year-old child, and personally, I wanted to depict a realistic child in anime. So, ever since the audition phase, I requested that everyone steer clear of the sort of stock phrases and mannerisms you find in so-called "kids' anime". If possible, I wanted a naturalistic portrayal of a child. And then I suddenly found myself very taken with Kino-san's performance. In that instant, Director Asai [Yoshiyuki] and I spontaneously glanced at each other, like, "It's her." After she graced us with such wonderful acting, it was a simple decision.

Interviewer: So you wanted the tone and vocal quality to be realistically childlike.

Tsuji: That's right. I was aiming for a performance close to a realistic 4-year-old, but Kino-san is really smart, and gave a take that was uniquely hers. I'm grateful that I could watch the recording process with no worries as well. When all three of the main actors were present, it felt like witnessing a parent-child conversation for real.

Interviewer: You brought up foreign TV shows at the start - so did you consciously draw inspiration from foreign works when writing characters who were involved in the assassin trade?

Toba: It was quite a conscious decision. As mentioned before, the cast's performances were fairly raw, and we were sticklers for realism. We wanted it to feel more like a work which had been dubbed [into Japanese]. We were envisioning something like those really straightforward foreign dramas, which are so-called crime/suspense stories containing comedic elements. I was thinking along the lines of, "This is something J. J. Abrams (American movie and TV producer) would make!" (laughs)

Tsuji: Or rather, let's get J. J. to make a live-action version. (laughs)

Toba: A live-action foreign drama about an assassin raising a child has plenty of possibilities.

Interviewer: Now, please say what you think are the selling points of this series "Buddy Daddies".

Toba: The ups and downs of the buddies' interactions. The comedic contrast of usually-cool assassins being jerked around by a 4-year-old. I think those are the most enjoyable parts to watch. Of course, like I said just now, the main theme is something like "murder and parenting, work and family, which to choose?!", and what conclusion they'll reach in the end… Those dramatic parts are another highlight.

Tsuji: When Miri is riding roughshod over those two adults, she's animated in a really adorable way - I hope you pay attention to all her fun movements. Also, as mentioned before, I'd like you to carefully follow Rei's emotional development.

Toba: By the way, Tsuji-san's child is also part of the production staff.

Tsuji: I got them to draw Miri's drawings which appear onscreen.

Toba: I said I wanted a real child to do Miri's drawings, and he was like, "Isn't there one right there?" (laughs)

Tsuji: My kid is 6 years old, but it's quite tough to get them to draw. Of course, doing all of it was out of the question, so I mostly asked them to draw the key pictures.

Toba: That sort of realism can't be achieved by an adult, even a professional animator. Getting a child to draw it is significantly more convincing. We made sure to properly include them in the staff credits; I truly hope you look forward to seeing where this art is used.

Interviewer: Finally, please give a message to everyone who is anticipating this series.

Toba: It's a really fun comedy, so I think it's just right to watch without getting too worked up. Just relax and enjoy yourself for 30 minutes.

Tsuji: Personally, I hope that people who are tired out from parenting will watch this and feel that empathy of, "Oh, I'm not alone after all!" I'd like this series to bring them some relief. Of course, not just those people - I want people with no experience of parenting to also watch this and think, "Children are pretty nice."

#buddy daddies #crawls out of the shadows for this #i don't know i just blinked and this happened #crawls back into the shadows #i guess i have to start organising now lol #buddy daddies interview

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justforbooks · 4 months

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Morgan Spurlock

American film-maker best known for his acclaimed 2004 documentary Super Size Me

Few film-makers can say that their work has made a change to the real world, but Morgan Spurlock had a stronger claim than most. His 2004 documentary Super Size Me, an exposé of how the fast food industry was fuelling America’s obesity epidemic, appeared to have direct repercussions for the world’s largest fast food chain, McDonald’s.

Shortly before the film came out in May that year, the company introduced its Go Active! menu, which included salad items; six weeks after its release, the company abolished its supersize portions entirely.

McDonald’s claimed these menu changes were a coincidence. But the director, who has died aged 53 of complications from cancer, struck a timely blow at the business when awareness about fast food’s corrosive role in public health was on the rise.

Super Size Me’s high-concept premise – eating three McDonald’s meals for 30 days straight – was key to conveying Spurlock’s message. With the director gaining 11kg, plumping out his body fat from 11% to 18% and inflicting heart palpitations, impotence and depression on himself, his gonzo approach put him at the forefront of the early noughties boom in cinematic documentaries instigated by Michael Moore. “There’s real power in a documentary,”Spurlock later said.

Doubts later emerged about Spurlock’s experiment in bodily attrition, after he refused to release his diet logs from the period; and then when it later emerged that he was an alcoholic who had also imbibed during the shoot.

An inveterate attention-seeker and twinkly-eyed showman, he was not going to let these details affect either the purity of Super Size Me’s marketing line, or his emerging career as a documentary star; a budding Moore for the Jackass generation. He would consistently target totems of modern capitalism and consumerism, though none of his subsequent works had the same kind of influence as his 2004 lightning-bottler.

Spurlock was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and grew up in Beckley in the Methodist household of his auto-repair shop-owning father Ben and mother Phyllis, an English teacher and high-school counsellor. Though his parents later divorced, he credited his mother in particular with instilling in him a sense of activism: “She was one of those people who speak up when she didn’t agree with things. She was a collector of people too: if you had the ability to help people, you should,” he told the International Documentary Association.

A childhood fan of British humour such as Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, he was already exercising his entertainer’s streak doing “funny walks” around the house aged six or seven.

Rejected five times by University of Southern California’s film school, he graduated from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 1993. “I wanted to be Spielberg. I wanted to write and direct scripted movies,” Spurlock told Interview magazine. He originally showed promise in this direction, winning an award for his stage play The Phoenix at the New York international fringe festival in 1999.

After stints as a personal assistant on Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway and Luc Besson’s Leon (both 1994), Spurlock first stepped in front of camera as a promotional spokesman for Sony Electronics. But his breakthrough came though hitching himself to the reality TV bandwagon with the self-created internet webcast, and, later (in 2002), MTV show, I Bet You Will. As one of the presenting team, Spurlock goaded members of the public into humiliating themselves for money – with stunts such as being “wedgied” or eating a worm burrito.

Super Size Me grossed $22m on a $65,000 budget, making it one of the most profitable documentaries of all time. Spurlock believed his body never fully recovered – though he lost the weight thanks to a special diet concocted by his then girlfriend, the vegan chef Alex Jamieson (the pair married and had a son, Laken, in 2006, before divorcing in 2011; Spurlock had been previously married to Priscilla Somer between 1996 and 2003).

He also later expressed doubts about the longer-term impact of Super Size Me on fast food corporations, later reflecting: “People say to me, ‘So has the food gotten healthier?’ And I say, ‘Well, the marketing sure has.’”

Spurlock could not skewer the zeitgeist again to create a second “doc-buster”, despite tilting at big-hitter topics such as terrorism (in 2008’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?) and product-placement and advertising (POM Wonderful Presents: the Greatest Movie Ever Sold in 2011). With his trademark handlebar moustache, he settled into a reliably affable front-of-camera presence nosing around socio-cultural issues and foibles – sometimes fatuously.

In total, he directed and produced nearly 70 films and series, including a One Direction hagiography in 2013 and a Super Size Me sequel in 2017. But he retained keen business sense and marketing nous throughout this prolific output. “He taught us that we have to be chief executive artists,” his fellow documentary-maker Ondi Timoner told Variety.

Towards the end of Spurlock’s life, his career was on hold after he confessed in a 2017 blogpost to sexually abusive behaviour, including an allegation of rape while at college and paying off a production assistant he had harassed. “I have been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had,” he also wrote, explaining he had been sexually abused in his youth. He divulged all this possibly pre-emptively in anticipation of future accusations in the up swell of the #MeToo movement.

Making himself the focus of the story was true to his modus operandi, and his professed desire for self-improvement could indeed have made a fascinating documentary.

But the mea culpa proved an effective self-cancellation, with him resigning from the production company, Warrior Poets, he had founded in 2004 and being sued by Turner Entertainment Networks for an aborted project.

He divorced his third wife, the producer Sara Bernstein – with whom he had a second son – in 2024. His final documentary credit was for a mockumentary creating a fake history around the classic 1992 Simpsons episode Homer at the Bat.

Spurlock is survived by his children, Laken and Kallen, by his parents and his brothers, Craig and Barry.

🔔 Morgan Spurlock, director and producer, born 7 November 1970; died 23 May 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Morgan Spurlock #in memoriam

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