Japan’s Koji Yakusho received greatest actor at Cannes on Saturday for “Perfect Days” by German director Wim Wenders, a touching story a few Tokyo rest room cleaner.
Yakusho, 67, seems in most scenes of “Perfect Days” as a mysterious, bookish man with out associates, content material to spend his spare time studying, watering his vegetation, taking photographs and listening to songs on his automotive stereo.
“I want to specifically thank Wim Wenders… who truly created a magnificent character,” he mentioned as he obtained the award.
The versatile actor’s roles in over 4 a long time of movie-making have ranged from warlords and gangsters to killers and cops — and now an everyman who retains the general public washrooms of Tokyo pristine.
He has additionally crossed over to Hollywood for “Memoirs of a Geisha” in 2005 and “Babel” a yr later.
“Wim had given me very little information… There was a lot of mystery. Even today, it’s a character I know almost nothing about,” he mentioned of his function, which concerned virtually no dialogue.
“It was the first time I shot like that, over a very short period, without rehearsal,” he mentioned about working with one of many giants of European cinema.
Germany’s Wenders, 77, received the highest prize Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 for “Paris, Texas” and greatest director three years later for “Wings of Desire”.
Born in 1956 in Isahaya, Nagasaki prefecture, Yakusho first labored as a city corridor worker earlier than turning to performing in 1979, after following up an advert in a newspaper.
Out of 800 candidates he was considered one of 4 chosen, “and today I am the only one to be an actor”, he advised French media in 2003.
His first massive function that helped propel his profession was within the standard hit “Tampopo” (1985) concerning the hunt for a noodle soup recipe.
“Shall We Dance?” (1996) was a breakthrough and since then amongst his notable movies have been “The Eel”, winner of the Palme in 1997, and “The Third Murder” (2017).
In 2009 he made his first and solely characteristic “Toad’s Oil” during which he additionally performed the lead function.
Asked what retains him going within the commerce, he advised The Hollywood Reporter in 2019: “I all the time assume I have never obtained it fairly proper, however within the subsequent movie I’ll lastly nail it.
“I guess that’s the drug of this business for me, which has kept me going for 40 years.”
© 2023 AFP