In the spring of 1998, Imatoshi received a commission from the animation production company Madhouse to make an animation with screenwriter Sadayuki Murai.
Party A came up and directly gave the benchmark work, that is, "The Unnumbed Ministry House", and when the two listened, eh, isn't this what I did? I benchmark myself, and this kind of work sounds too neat.
But Jin Min still cautiously asked Party A, how to benchmark the law and benchmark the girl group? Or psychosis? Or eighteen forbidden? Party A thought for a long time and found that bit of blackness in the colorful colors, calling it "illusion painting".
This word, which sounds like I don't know what it is, but just feels very awesome, suddenly made Jimin burn. The Agency for Cultural Affairs also invested a whopping 13 million yen to support the anime.
Of course, more than half of the money was used as publicity money, and the money left for the production changed from "huge money" to "in-house capital", but despite this, Imatoshi began the preliminary work.
He opened his creative book, and after rejecting many solutions, he found an idea called "Ghost Memory", with only a few sentences:
The old woman who was once called a "female movie star" was supposed to tell her life, but her memory was confused, and the various roles she had played in the past were mixed in, becoming a magnificent story.
Seeing this synopsis, I really want to travel through the past and say "done" to him, of course, this idea is very unrealistic, after all, he can't understand Chinese.
How did these sentences come about? In fact, when Jin Min and his friends sent an email, they found the phrase "overhead female movie star" in the dense words.
What the email itself said, it is estimated that he has forgotten, but this sentence makes him feel very comfortable and stimulates the desire to create.
As a director, you definitely have to use pictures to conceive a story, and the picture in my mind when Imatoshi thinks about this story is a MV for Jun Togawa. The title of the song is "遅咲きガール" (Late Opening Girl).
In the MV, Aunt Chun plays multiple roles, singing and dancing, and the "overhead female movie star" in Jin Min's impression is like this.
At present, the story is still relatively conceptual, in order to further visualize, Jimin went to the creator's happy house, which is commonly known as the tavern.
While drinking "wheat special drink", he chatted with several young people, chatting and chatting, and two more key words hit his brain, one is "various eras" and the other is "chasing girls",
So on the basis of Pure Aunt MV, another step forward. After crushing young people, where do you go for inspiration? Imatoshi thought of a souvenir of the second country, manga.
He was inspired by Hoshino Yunobuki's short manga "Moondream", which is framed by a modern magazine reporter listening to an old lady tell about the past, and seeing this setting, Imatoshi says "bring it to you".
However, he was embarrassed to take it again, so he made a slight modification to expand the role of the listener of the story, so that he himself appeared in the stories of the old woman in various eras, and always played the same role.
So these two people maintain the same personality in different eras, and there is a feeling of reincarnation, but this reincarnation is not reincarnation, but a more essential "karma", a relationship that is constantly repeated in the passage of time.
It sounds like it can be summed up in one word: matryoshka dolls. However, Jimin says that this is not a simple repetition, but a repetition of the same melody like Ravel's "Bolero" and gradually extended.
Soon Toshi sorted out the second draft of the version, which already contained the plot of Chiyoko's constant pursuit of "him", and the name of this edition was also discussed with that wave of young people, called "Millennium Actress".
I don't know if those young people knew what kind of thing they did at that time. Then Imatoshi turned his attention to stage plays, and he liked a troupe called Pistachio Asteroid.
This troupe is not as fortunate as China's "happy" troupe, which was disbanded in 2000, and used to perform on a wide range of subjects, covering all eras, and often playing multiple roles by one person.
This artistic component is at least three or four stories high, and the motivation for creation comes from real life, and simply put, there are not enough people. Among the many stage plays, two had a great stimulus to Imatoshi's conception of "Millennium Actress".
One is called "Important Vacation". The special thing about this play is not the story, but the way of interpretation, called "All Members".
This means that in the process of performance, depending on the scene, the actor will play another role to play, and for each role in the play, all actors will play it once.
Another stage play called "Knife" inspired Jimin in terms of story structure, which is composed of chapters that are repeated over and over again.
Not only at the story level, but also in terms of music, Imatoshi was also fascinated by one of Hirasawa's matryoshka albums, and the purpose of that album was also to repeat it in small units to form larger graphics.
Imamine does not believe in the traditional meaning of reincarnation, and hopes that the soul will grow with it in the repeated flow of life. This is an animation work that spirals upward like DNA, referred to as DNA moves.
Next, it's time to find inspiration for specific plots, and Jimin has been exposed to a large number of film and television works, such as Arthur Payne's "Little Giant" and Milos Foreman's "Mozart".
These are the stories of an old man telling his life's experience. Robin Williams' "The World Through Gap's Eyes" and "Forrest Gump" also inspired him.
After that, he found some works whose protagonists were once film actors, such as Yoji Yamada's "Movie World" and Kunichi Ikawa's "Film Actress".
Regarding time-warping movies, he thought of George Roy Hill's "The Fifth Slaughterhouse" and Terry Gilliam's "The Time Thief". When it comes to Terry Gilliam, "The Ultimate Skyfall" comes to mind.
The film is about the protagonist coming to a troupe, which is acting out its own story, and then the protagonist himself comes to tell it. Jin Min feels that "Millennium Actress" is a reproduction of this movie.
As for the inspiration of the Warring States Period, it will definitely not escape Akira Kurosawa, "Spider's Nest City", "Shadow Warrior" and "Chaos" are all must-have lists.
We can find that his film list is all live-action movies, which may be one of the reasons why his films can jump out of the animation circle and be loved by most movie fans.
Of course, in addition to live-action films, he also draws nourishment from literature, such as Ryoma Sakamoto's "Ryoma Sakamoto" and "Burn! The Sword provided inspiration for him to construct the end of the Curtain.
In the end, Imatoshi came to a conclusion: young people should read less manga and read more. My conclusion is that young people should go to taverns more, maybe they can catch a director, and the name of a future masterpiece is yours.
While looking at the works for inspiration, he began to write down his own ideas, and Imatoshi constantly imagined the picture in his mind. While thinking about the ending "pure white light gradually engulfing the rocket", he heard Hirasawaek's "Lotus".
After listening to Jimin set a goal, seeing the end of the film, it was like hearing "lotus", and even thought about adding this lyric to the script:
A call that never stops
Passed down from the distant sky
When you sing again
The lotus blossoms in the heart
By now we should be able to understand what this shot at the beginning of the film means and why lotus flowers always appear in the courtyard where Chiyoko lives in seclusion. And Tachibana Gen also blatantly printed the song title on the business card.
In the end, the soundtrack of "Millennium Actress" really found Pyeongtaek to come in and be responsible, which can be regarded as the star-chasing ceiling. After knowing this, when you listen to the ending song, it feels familiar, its name is "Lotus 2".
This is an ending that has been thought of for a long time, and as for the previous part of the script, it took Toshi and Sadayuki Murai more than half a year to complete.
Because the chapters change every time they are rewritten, we all who have seen the finished film know that the narrative of the film is intertwined by real time and fictional time.
And one of the aims of the work is that even if the times change, the story continues, so every revision will affect the whole body. Suddenly I found that this story, like Chiyoko, runs fast and is difficult to capture.
Fortunately, Party A does not access the creation, otherwise the most difficult thing to capture is the "fine-tuning" in Party A's mouth. In addition, there is another person in the story who is difficult for Chiyoko to catch up, that is, the key man, and this character is even more difficult to write.
Sadayuki Murai once suggested that Keyman is the director, so for Chiyoko, he is a person who is close but will never meet on the screen.
However, in the end, he gave up because he could not unite with the stories of various eras. As for why he was finally set up as a painter, even Imatoshi himself forgot.
He only remembered that the biggest difficulty was what form the key man would appear in after Chiyoko reached the moon with great difficulty, and the answer to this question, Imatoshi only left one sentence, please see the screen.