By George & Josh Bate
The Duplass brothers coined a genre of cinema called “sci-feeling,” also referred to as “lo-fi sci-fi.” The term refers to movies that position science fiction elements in the periphery in favor of explorations into more intimate matters, such as human relationships and emotional vulnerability. Anima, a new film making its world premiere at this year’s SXSW, can be best characterized as “sci-feeling” due to its strong emotional resonance taking precedence over the novel technology at the center of its story.
The narrative feature debut of writer/director Brian Tetsuro Ivie, Anima stars Sydney Chandler (Alien: Earth) as Beck, a reserved and solemn young woman looking for a new job. Her pursuit takes her to Anima, a company that preserves dying people’s consciousness inside a cloud system. Beck’s first assignment after being hired is to drive the company’s client Paul (Rental Family’s Takehiro Hira) to the Anima facility, but, while embarking on the road trip together, Paul takes a number of detours as he attempts to come to terms with his regrets in life.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with writer/director Brian Tetsuro Ivie and star Takehiro Hira about their new film, its status as “sci-feeling” movie, how Ivie drew on his experience as a producer to direct his first film, the theme of found family, and more.
Having produced the Ethan Hawke-directed drama Wildcat, amongst other projects, Japanese-American filmmaker Brian Tetsuro Ivie is no stranger to the inner-workings of a film production. But, with Anima, Ivie takes on a decidedly different creative challenge in helming his first narrative feature. Ivie discussed how his experience as a producer informed his work as a first-time director. “You get to watch other directors work – there’s no better film school,” Ivie said. “I went to film school, spent a lot of money, but the best film school for sure was just standing behind Ethan Hawke, watching him direct actors and see what he did do and what he didn’t do. He moved very fast. Obviously, I did not, because I had no experience.”
Ivie continued regarding the way in which experience being a producer helped him direct Anima, “As a producer, a lot of producers, I found the best ones are very creative people. They definitely have good taste. They understand what works and what doesn’t. And they tell you that at the right moments. So I think I learned a lot from watching other directors and also just getting the chance to watch other directors navigate the process of getting a movie made at all.”
For his first movie, Ivie wanted to explore a burgeoning interest in a technology that provided a way through cryo-stablization to do away with the business of death entirely that he first read about in an MIT Review.” I think in some ways it’s just what I was grappling with in real life,” Ivie remarked. “The diminishing of my own humanity through technology. The beautiful aspects of new technology and what it can bring to our lives and just trying to understand how to maintain my humanity in the face of a future that is hurtling past and through us.”
Consistent with other “sci-feeling” movies like Safety Not Guaranteed and After Yang, however, Anima’s science fiction element is secondary to its more intimate themes. “The science fiction element….could almost be cut out and you would still have the best parts of [the movie] in many ways,” Ivie stated.
The best parts of the movie that Ivie speaks about involve Takehiro Hira’s Paul, a wealthy button manufacturer on the precipice of death. With Sydney Chandler’s Beck as his driver, Paul embarks on a journey to make amends with certain people from his past before he succumbs to his terminal illness and his consciousness is uploaded to the cloud.
The film’s most emotionally impactful throughline comes as Paul attempts to reconcile with his ex (Lili Taylor) and son (Maximilian Lee Piazza), who he has not seen for years. This aspect of Paul’s character particularly resonated with Takehiro Hira. “I guess I had a little difficult relationship with my father,” the Japanese actor candidly reflected. “So it was, in a way, therapeutic for me to play someone who sort of had abandoned his family and try to come to some sort of redemption at the end of his life.”
Takehiro Hira noted that, in order to play Paul, he lost 10 pounds and learned to play piano. The actor known for his work in Shōgun and Rental Family further embodied the role of Paul by wearing a very distinctive long black leather trenchcoat for the duration of the film. Crediting his “favorite costume designer in the world” Emily Costantino for the jacket, Ivie spoke about why Paul wears such a distinguishing jacket after initially (half) joking that it was homage to Neo in The Matrix. “There’s something very serious about the film at some level, but also not serious about Paul in the tradition of Takeshi Kitano or the Mr. Bean movies,” Ivie acknowledged. “There’s this sense in which he can go either way – either very ridiculously funny or very serious and sensitive. So the trench coat was his attempt to sort of rekindle a romantic relationship by dressing up the way he did when they first met.”
Paul’s counterpart in the movie is played by Alien: Earth breakout star Sydney Chandler. Ivie compared his characterization of Chandler’s character Beck to Paul. “ I think what I wanted to do is create a character who is a modern person, who is a little dissociated, a little living at what I would call ‘hyper-living,’ which is living along the surface of everything.”
“There’s a poet named David White, who talks about how you can only see people moving at the same velocity as you,” Ivie continued regarding Beck. “And so I think the fact that Paul’s life is so much like Ozu, slow, kind of contemplative, and Beck’s life is so rapid – they have to meet at a certain velocity [otherwise] they could never connect. And the movie has to observe that. And then, when they do it, the movie really slows down to let them just be together a lot more.”
Finding a compatible velocity allows Beck and Paul to develop a touching pseudo-father-daughter relationship throughout Anima. Having previously explored found family in last year’s Rental Family, Takehiro Hira reflected on how this theme plays out in Anima. “We first start out as someone really opposite [to one another],” Takehiro Hira remarked. “I’m an old guy dying and she’s a young person who doesn’t know what to do with her life but could have lots of time. We don’t see eye-to-eye. But, at the end, we became a family.”
Through the burgeoning family dynamics between Paul and Beck, Anima steadily evolves into a deeply moving cinematic experience. Touching on death, fatherhood, found family, and groundbreaking technology, Brian Tetsuro Ivie’s narrative feature debut will certainly strike an emotional chord for even the most hardened of audiences.