You might remember the movie Kenny and its longhaired, bearded Quebecborn director, but the name Claude Gagnon will be much more familiar to the Japanese. He scored his first major success with Keiko in 1979, which he shot in Japan, and was the movie that brought him international fame and established his enduring links with this country. Among his many later works, one need only cite Kamataki, as well as his latest movie, Karakara, filmed entirely on Okinawa, which tells the interlinked stories of a retired intellectual from Quebec on a spiritual quest to the island and of a Japanese girl with a complex family history. The film has been a huge hit since its release here in January and has already won plaudits and prizes.
While he was in Tokyo, Claude Gagnon accepted JQR’s invitation to explain his love affair with Japan.

Time was, if you were a 20-yearold Quebécois intellectual, you went to France. But I never wanted to do the same as everyone else. I wanted to find the country that was the most removed from my own experience, be it culturally, religiously, philosophically, or geographically.

In the sixties, I left the séminaire (Catholic high school in Quebec) where I was studying the cours classique (classical humanities curriculum) to make movies.
Then in 1968, wanting to discover the world outside books, I hitchhiked to Mexico to visit the country during the Olympics. Strangely, it was during that trip that I realized that I knew next to nothing about the U.S.A. What I did know about it was what I’d read in books. At the age of 18 meeting a black guy who takes you to the other end of a bridge and gives you $5 out of charity after you’ve spent the night in a prison cell because you didn’t have anywhere else to sleep really didn’t match up to anything I’d ever read. You might have read Sartre and Camus, and you might think you know it all, and then you get out into the real world. Everything that I thought I knew about Americans was either wrong or only partially true. In the Deep South, a pickup truck stopped to give me a lift. The driver was a real man wearing a cowboy hat and packing a rifle.
He looked askance at my beard and the hair that I wore fashionably long. Still I was lucky because I was a sportsman and a big American football fan, and when he asked me about a Texan player in the Canadian League, I immediately replied, “Oh, he’s my favorite!” He was a little mollified. He dropped me off at a barber’s and gave me a few bucks so I could get a haircut! I went up onto the barber’s porch but I hid until my benefactor had driven off! I just wanted to explain how this experience completely changed my perception of how we see other people and of how other people see us.

A beautiful woman is well aware of how people see her: she knows that when she goes somewhere, people are going to stare at her. In my movies, I like to dwell on physical appearance. When I was younger, I played hockey but I was considered an intellectual because I went to the séminaire. But when I was at the séminaire, people thought of me as a “jock” because I was good at sports. I’ ve always been struck by how much the image we project shapes other people’s perceptions of us. I made one of my first films, Larose, Pierrot et la Luce, with Richard Niquette. I’d known “Ritchie” for years. He was a short fat kid, who wore suspenders, had rounded shoulders, and who at the age of 13 looked 50! while I was the college jock. I was a bit of a wild child, and I think that people were a bit scared of me. Later, while I was on a visit to Quebec from Japan, Richard surprised me by asking, “Would you get mad if I told you I was gay?” He’d always thought that because of the way I looked, I must be a homophobe. We classify people and measure their open-mindedness by the way they look. This realization has had a major impact on my movies. When I cast a part, I put a lot of weight on first impressions, and then I like to smash social expectations.