Audition

Omega Project, the company behind Ring, wanted something without the supernatural this time. It bought Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel and hired a screenwriter and a director not known for horror: Daisuke Tengan and Takashi Miike. Tengan is Shohei Imamura’s eldest son and worked on his father’s The Eel, which took the Palme d’Or in 1997. The widower Aoyama is not a producer. His friend Yoshikawa is the film producer who stages the fake casting call, and Aoyama only poses as a casting director. Eihi Shiina, who plays Asami, was a model making her first film; Miike gave her the part at their second meeting. Asami’s repeated line in the closing sequence was not scripted; Miike and Shiina worked it in on set. Shooting ran about three weeks, roughly a week longer than Miike’s usual pace then. At the 29th Rotterdam festival it took the KNF award from the Dutch film journalists’ circle, and mass walkouts were reported there. In Japan it played briefly in small cinemas and Miike says no reaction came back. A good fit if you take the quiet marriage plot of the first half as groundwork rather than delay and want the register to turn over at once. Not for viewers who cannot sit through detailed torture scenes; that stretch is what made the film known.