Turning someone else’s work of fiction into a movie script is one of the least glamorous and most demanding jobs in filmmaking. Think late nights, too much coffee and writer’s block.
But if you ask Hawaii producer Jason Lau about the process, he’ll add translation to the list of things that give screenwriters angst — and for good reason, too.
Lau, president of TalkStory Productions, has spent the past year working with Japanese director Motoki Ishida to turn a 20-page short story into a feature film. They’ve written nine drafts, which sounds straightforward until Lau explains what it took to get to 110 pages.
The story, "Hanalei Bay," was written by author Haruki Murakami. It’s written in Japanese.
The film will be mostly in English.
What Lau knows about Japanese he learned more than 30 years ago at Punahou. (Now he wishes he had studied more.)
And — in case you can’t see what’s coming next — Ishida doesn’t speak English.
"He writes everything in Japanese," Lau said. "It gets translated to me into English. I rewrite it in English. It gets translated back to Japanese so he can read it and make notes. It took forever."
Not only did Lau worry about whether his writing was being understood, but also whether the original story was getting lost in translation.
"The process was really tough," Lau said. "Once in a while Ishida will write something and it will get translated into English, and it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever."
The two collaborators have had a few face-to-face sessions, but most of the work has been through emailed files. "It’s a very complicated, long process," Lau said.
Most of Murakami’s "Hanalei Bay" takes place on Kauai. It’s the story of a Japanese woman who must retrieve the body of her estranged son, who was killed in a shark attack.
"She meets all these people who knew her son," Lau said. "They’re surfers, and she doesn’t know anything about surfing. She learns through the people she meets who her son really was."
Like other Murakami stories, "Hanalei Bay" deals with alienation, loneliness and loss, Lau said. The author writes about that in a way that Lau found easy to relate to, he said.
"His character sketches touch people," Lau said. "He does these characters and when I read his stuff, he touches something in me. I feel that character is true. I see a bit of me in that."
TalkStory Productions, which helped produce Julie Taymor’s "The Tempest" in 2010, is negotiating a finance and distribution deal that Lau believes will be settled in January. Filming would begin in Hawaii later next year with a budget between $3 million and $4 million.
Lau will produce, and his wife, Deborah Lau, TalkStory Productions business manager, and John Ching, the company’s vice president and director of development, will executive-produce the project.
Lau was deep into writing the screenplay when he traveled to the Tokyo International Film Festival in October to pitch the movie to possible financial backers. There were several interested groups, largely because Murakami has a wide audience not just in Japan, but in Korea, China, the United Kingdom and France.
Murakami has often written in Hawaii. Two years ago he was a visiting writer-in-residence at the University of Hawaii’s East Asian Languages and Literatures Department. He isn’t involved in the movie, though, and Lau hasn’t met him.
"He has taken the approach that, ‘I have given you the rights, and I am going to let you run with it,’" Lau said. "He is letting us go."
Lau sent Murakami a draft of the script, and the author liked what he saw but acknowledged that a movie is different from a short story.
So the revisions keep coming, back and forth through language barriers.
"We are still evolving," Lau said.
"We want to grind out and squeeze out every essence of Murakami’s characters and make it all work. We want to remain true to Murakami’s work."
AND that’s a wrap …
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Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his Outtakes Online blog at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
