Hikari‘s delicately calibrated and sweetly moving comedy “Rental Family” (co-written with Stephen Blahut) stars Brendan Fraser as an American expat in Japan. Working as an actor, he stumbles into a job playing roles not on a stage or screen but in people’s lives. If a single mother needs a husband to show up for a daughter’s school interview, Fraser’s character Phillip “plays” him; he does the same for a woman who hires Phillip to play a journalist to keep her father from feeling like he’s been forgotten, or for a family as a mourner at a funeral for someone he’s never met.
In Hikari‘s hands, this premise serves as the basis for both a fish-out-of-water story about Phillip finding his way through a culture he doesn’t really understand and a meditation on emotional connection in an increasingly fragmented, post-pandemic world. The director found a lot to relate to in Phillip, whose story represents a cultural reversal of her own experience as someone born in Japan who spent her teenage years in Utah.
“When I first came to America, I felt like I was the only Asian girl,” Hikari told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I landed in Utah, and I couldn’t speak the language. There was a loneliness. I was really just taking it in as the days went by. I learned what it was to feel like the only person in a room, but there was also the love I received. I made dear friends that I’m still very close to, including my host family and my best friend from high school.”
Hikari wanted to convey that experience from a different perspective, so she told the story from Phillip’s point of view. “I wanted to flip the idea, to put Phillip in a room surrounded by Japanese folks and see what that looked like,” she said. Ultimately, however, the movie’s greatness lies not just in its exploration of Phillip’s story but in the multiplicity of points of view. Hikari skillfully extrapolates from his perspective to encompass the experiences of the colleagues and clients he meets.
“For me, each character had to tell a story that resonated,” Hikari said. “Every single character represents a part of us. The writing process took a long time because we really looked into all the possibilities. We don’t want to write anything just to write it. Are we being authentic enough? Everything we wrote was similar to something that happened in reality, that we learned through interviews or reading articles. I think we were able to find the truth in individual characters and what they were really going through.”
The director was intent on sharing everything she learned about the characters with the actors who played them, whether it would make it to the screen or not. “I tell them a lot of backstory,” Hikari said. “Where they come from, what happened before — literally from the moment they’re born to now. So when they come to the set, they’re prepared, and I just let them play.”
The rich, naturalistic performances are integrated with an expressive visual style in which every camera move and composition moves the story forward or tells us about the characters’ internal tensions. Hikari’s precise choices are even more impressive given some of the restrictions she faced while shooting in Japan. “Shooting time in Japan is very limited, and the small locations limit where you can put the cameras,” Hikari said. “It’s very challenging.”
Hikari maximized her resources with careful planning, predesigning shots with Phillip in contexts alongside architecture and nature that would chart his emotional journey. Yet she would often have to reimagine these images on the fly or execute them in less time than she expected due to the vagaries of shooting in Japan. “Sometimes I would show up thinking I’m going to have a sweeping crane shot, and my location scout would say no, the neighbor said we can’t lay the track. So in that moment, I have to figure out, OK, no more dolly tracks, no more crane shots. I think about what happened in the scene before and what’s going to happen soon after, and try to find a balance.”
The film‘s balance of color is especially effective, and one of the areas where Hikari’s background as a painter is most evident. “Color is such a powerful tool in the cinema,” she said. “For this film, we started with blue, but then as Phillip moves forward and starts getting involved in other people’s lives, we put more color into his apartment. Toward the end, we start pushing toward more orange and natural colors, going into yellow and green. And at the end, he’s wearing a pink shirt, so he’s a little more open, and there’s a warmth to who he’s become.”
That warmth and sense of human connection that Phillip feels is something Hikari hopes “Rental Family” will inspire in the audience. “When I first found out about the rental family business, it seemed so bizarre,” Hikari said. “I found that something beautiful and phenomenal was happening, which was people finding a true connection by playing roles in people’s lives. Right now, we are in an epidemic of loneliness. People are so isolated.”
Writing “Rental Family” was Hikari’s way of trying to figure out if there was a way out of the loneliness she saw pervading in the age of COVID. “I just felt like maybe there’s a story here. Let’s figure this out because all of us are feeling this way now. When we started writing the script, it was in the middle of the pandemic. Everybody was so scared of what was happening. If you could write a story to take away that anxiety, what does that look like?”
In the video at the top of this page, watch Hikari discuss how our current loneliness epidemic inspired her to tell this story.
“Rental Family” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Hikari and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.