The Emotional Curve: A Key to Screenwriting for Hirokazu Koreeda

Hirokazu Koreeda (Photo: BAFTA)

Dealing notably with slice-of-life movies that wrap pseudo-family stories, the protagonist's emotional journey serves as the foremost thing for Hirokazu Koreeda in building story structures.

“How to draw the emotional curve is the most important thing for me when I am writing a screenplay,” Koreeda stated in his lecture session at the BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series. He outlined how he created the curve using his fingers, pointing at his imaginary curve: “Their feelings start up here and then down here (where) they are at their lowest, and they go up again from there.”

He used one of his movies, Like Father, Like Son (2013), as an example. The movie begins the curve with a well-to-do man who thinks he is the ideal father and husband to his five-year-old son and his wife. However, the day when he finds out that his son is switched comes, and he starts losing things. He blames his wife for the incident and explicitly expresses his dissimilarity to his son, driving a distance between him and his family. That is when he hits the bottom of the curve. His realization of his mess and his endeavors to fix himself and his family make the curve go back up.

Koreeda partially explained how he divided the time for each up and down curve in the same movie: “It is about 60 minutes in when he realizes he was the cause (of the mix-up) and by around 80 minutes his son is estranged, and then it is about how he recovers.” He emphasized that he tends to think about the duration of each emotion within the entire 120-minute movie.

Not finding a specific reason why the emotional curve is vital, Koreeda said: “I have never really read a book on how to write a screenplay, but one thing I keep in mind when I am coming up with the structure (of a screenplay) is the protagonist’s emotional journey.”

Prior to this, Koreeda talked about his favorite screenwriter since he studied at the university, Sô Kuramoto. Back then, he always bought and read one book out of 30 volumes of the Sô Kuramoto Collection every month, got ideas, and wrote his own stories. “For the most part, Sô Kuramoto wrote about ordinary people. That’s what I like most about him and what influenced me,” he said. His other favorite screenwriter is Kuniko Mukōda, who is in the older generation than Kuramoto.

Koreeda also talked about his turning point: he shifted his dream of becoming a novelist into a screenwriter and director at 19 or 20. During his literature course, he realized that the university classes were not really teaching him how to write novels. He then started going to cinemas and was interested in getting involved in movies by writing screenplays. “(I) realized maybe novels were not for me, but movies were,” he said.

He did not miss discussing his movies –which might be called a fun fact session. In Nobody Knows (2004), the first scene that came to his mind was of a brother stuffing the body of his dead sister into a suitcase and driving to the airport, where his biological father works, by monorail to bury her. Moreover, the first scene he wrote for Shoplifters (2018) was of a father and a son fishing with a stolen fishing rod. He then decided to make the father and son not related by blood. He revealed that the original title of Shoplifters was Call out Loud and showed the audience the notebook he used to write the movie's screenplay, which contains dialogues and the charts that break up the scenes.

Koreeda has been a mainstay of Japanese cinema for almost 30 years and is a milestone in its global presence. He attended the BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Series based in London, England, on 4 December late last year remotely, along with Lena Dunham (Catherine Called Birdy), Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness), and Tony Kushner (The Fablemans). A 25-minute recording of his lecture is available on BAFTA's YouTube channel.