The streets of Tokyo have always been the ultimate place for writers to bring their mysterious stories of misunderstood men and women to life.
With the help of Japanese cultural aesthetics and the bright city lights of Shibuya, Netflix’s Earthquake Bird came to life as the mostly-Japanese mystery thriller we didn’t know we needed.
Now speaking about the production, Alicia Vikander, who stars as an enigmatic and disturbed ex-pat who gets accused of murdering American Lily Bridges, recalled her co-star Naoki Kaboyashi and the crew being ‘too nice’ to correct her on the mistakes she made when impressively learning Japanese from scratch.
When asked whether she got help from the cast, Alicia told Metro.co.uk: ‘No, actually, they didn’t because everyone is so nice and I’m there saying, “It’s okay you can tell me!” but they don’t.
‘They’re always so polite, but there were definitely some scenes I was like running it by [Naoki] like “Is this okay??” and he’d then tell me.’
Alicia embraces her character Lucy’s unfamiliar journey with love, which has her thrown into an exhilarating and fiery relationship with a secretive Japanese photographer while juggling a translating job in 1980s Tokyo.
Without the help of technology that we have today, it’s no surprise Lucy is forced to be fluent in Japanese after living in the metropole for years with no contact with her family.
And with most Asian languages, the correct sentences rely on emphasis and octaves that don’t exist in English.
A change in pitch can turn a very simple phrase into a completely unrelated word, which is what Alicia quickly realised.
Explaining her 10-week journey on getting the emphasis right, she said: ‘[My co-stars] were like (makes disapproving noise) and I would be like, “That sounds good” and they would answer, “NO!”.
‘It really helped too because finding emphasis of wanting to get your thoughts to come across the way you are thinking is faced differently.
‘Japanese is very different from both Swedish and English where I knew exactly what weird sounds I would need to make.
‘By the end, the emphasis became natural.’
With every scene that passed, it became very clear the extreme Japanese influences director Wash Westmoreland had.
From using an all-female rock band, Falsettos, to sing Yoko Ono’s songs in the film to listening to Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, there wasn’t a single moment in the Netflix creation that wasn’t carefully considered.
So much of it oozed Japanese exactitude that you wouldn’t think that the script was written on the 38 bus from Hackney to Soho.
Wash, who also directed Colette, said: ‘I was getting the bus into Soho every day. I was like this is boring, so I put on my headphones, listened to Ryuichi Sakamoto, cracked open my laptop and would write for an hour every morning and over four to five months it accumulated.’
Earthquake Bird launches on Netflix on Friday 15 November.
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