The Belle Game – River Music Video (w/ Band & Director Interviews in 日本語 & English)

The narrative came to form from discussions with the band about what the song meant to them. I tend to ask a lot of questions in the beginning stages, to understand what the band wants and how they want their music to be visually portrayed. So it was a matter of understanding the song and its themes, and finding an avenue to express all those ideas in a narrative form.

The band sent me this statement about the song: “River describes a relationship where one person’s purpose is to take the burden of the other’s insecurities. It’s about craving the attention of the other and the willingness to take whatever they give, simply because it makes you feel as if they need you. In spite of this, it was important to us that the song didn’t have a victim… There’s something powerful about being in this position and we wanted this to come across, especially as the narrator reaches their breaking point.”

There were a lot of keywords and phrases that popped out at me and pushed me in certain directions. I can’t pinpoint when in the process I tried changing the setting to Japan, but something there seemed really intriguing to me. I really liked the idea of taking these universal themes and injecting it into a very specific niche culture and character. At that point I started researching Japanese subcultures, and that’s when I first learned about rent boys or “hosts”. There I found the basis for a character to express all these ideas we wanted to come through in the video. I think it was the third sketched out idea I sent them, was really happy they went for it.

The process took so long because we couldn’t find a reliable producer in Tokyo that was willing to work with our tiny production budget. I think there was three false-starts with a number of Tokyo producers, that took weeks with every one. Eventually, Kyle Hollett (executive producer) ended up finding Darryl Rigby (our future Tokyo producer) just before we flew over. Darryl was great, and managed to pull a lot of things together through his connections that we would have otherwise never been able to get. Darryl brought in another American producer, Patrick Cunningham, (who produced “Martha Marcy May Marlene”) who was also a tremendous help as well. It was a huge group effort in putting this video together. I can’t even tell you how many people along the way told us, “This concept simply cannot be done for this budget in Japan.” It was always a matter of putting together the right team, and we were luckily able to do that.

There was almost no storyboarding done, save for a few images I had in mind for certain scenes. I developed a shot list the day before each shoot day (3 in total), based on what I knew of the locations, and what story beats we had to hit. But it was more about consciously not getting married to any one way of how I wanted to shoot things – and more about quickly coming up with a way to best take advantage of the space we had to work with. It was mostly shot guerrilla-style, so the luxury of time and multiple takes was not an option. We had to embrace that mentality; to be present and on our toes the whole – I think it bred a lot of great moments.

The narrative surprisingly remained almost completely unchanged from the written treatment. The mantra throughout the production was always that “the story needs remain intact”. Luckily, Jason Aita (our Canadian producer who was with us), was really on top of making sure we didn’t miss story beats – as well as getting all the pieces we needed to communicate the Rent Boy profession. Other variables in the story did change though, like for example, hitching a ride with a Bōsōzoku biker gang vs. a Dekotora truck driver.

I feel bad talking about the actual process behind this video. For us, it was one of those beautiful experiences where we spoke to Kheaven about it, daydreamed about it for a few months, then received a copy that was better than what we had hoped for. We were talking to Kheaven while we were in Montreal last week and he was telling us about what the process actually entailed… I think it was a little less cozy for him and the crew…

My experience with Japanese culture was quite limited before this project. I knew about as much as anyone from pop culture and movies. But from doing research, and watching a few documentaries (namely “The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief”), my understanding got to the point where I felt I could take a crack at it. One of my biggest fears was for the video to come off as made by a Westerner with a surface level understanding of Japan and this subculture.

There was a few key things that I felt would contribute immensely to the authenticity of the video, and one of them was to shoot at a real host club. It was an incredible feat that our production manager, Chiaki Saito, managed to get us a real host club location – with real rent boys no less! I was pushing for it the whole time, but was warned it would be nearly impossible because all these clubs reside in the biggest Yakuza-controlled neighborhoods in Japan, called Kabukichō, and it would have been out of our budget range to pay them off. But Chiaki somehow arranged for us to meet a club owner, who liked the idea, and agreed to let us shoot there for a few hours with her actual hosts.

We shot the “champagne call” scenes in a faux documentary approach, by simply getting the hosts to go through the process as they would normally would, except with our actor in place as the main guy. Ben Loeb, my cinematographer and I, would do a bit of a dance in covering the action, but we did two takes in two setups, and that was that. It was quite surreal talking to 30 Japanese people with a translator behind me; luckily, the language barrier didn’t slow us down too much.

I also wanted our lead actor, Hiraku Kawakami, to solicit girls outside the club, which we learned was illegal, so our hosts weren’t able to do it. But as we were shooting some exteriors around Kabukichō, I noticed a group of rent boys from a different club trying to wrangle girls passing by. I asked Hiraku to walk up to them in-character, and to just go along with it and do what they do. It made for some really authentic footage that made it into the intro of the video. Soon after, we were told by a suited Yakuza member to stop filming and to leave – we got off easy, according to our local crew.

Any other sort of authenticity that comes through I think was just a result of asking Hiraku a thousand questions about everything. He was very much our cultural compass in keeping things authentic.

It was really important to everyone that the video didn’t turn the country or the characters into a “spectacle”. We didn’t want the video to shout, “Look, it’s Japan! It’s so different from Canada.” To avoid that, it had to be a pretty accurate depiction of that lifestyle. The little scenes that depict how the whole rent boy process were really important to achieving this. All that said, the specific culture of rent boys is unique to Japan, so it became a really exciting way to explore the themes of the song and touch on the idea that people’s behaviours and personalities are the result of their surroundings.

From what I can tell on Twitter, they seem to be intrigued by the rent boy/host culture as well. I think it’s unknown to a lot of Japanese people as well.

A lot of the sentiment behind “River” is the result of my obsession with the [Alain Resnais] movie Hiroshima Mon Amour. It was co-produced by governments of France and Japan. A Japanese man and French woman have an affair with each other and throughout the story the movie reveals their own past with the other person’s country as they’re walking through the city. There’s this interesting conflict between their identity and the cultural identity of each country. The fact that this video was made in Japan is coincidence, but it definitely got me on board right away.

It was fascinating to see relationships commodified into that form; it’s almost a nuisance to endure a real relationship for a lot of young people. There’s an epidemic happening there because they have one of the lowest birthrates in the world. I think it might have something to do with the fact that women are becoming more and more independent and don’t want to have leave behind all they’ve accomplished to start a family. From what I was told, women are expected to quit their jobs after getting married to start a family. It’s a old world model of thinking that is obviously shifting quite rapidly. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe that a pretty young girl would pay to be entertained, but I guess the allure of small bite-sized relationship portions has its benefits for a girl with a career aspirations and limited time.