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HBO: How did you come to make WHITE
LIGHT/BLACK RAIN?
Steven Okazaki: This is a project I've wanted to do for twenty-
five years. When I was starting out as a
filmmaker in 1980, I met a group of
Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors who were
getting together once a month in San
Francisco to talk about common social and
medical problems. I went to their meeting and
there were about twenty-five, thirty people,
mostly women, in their fifties and sixties
there. That was my first experience meeting
survivors.
Like most American, public-school educated
kids, I had no background on the subject at
all. I knew that bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima-Nagasaki and then the war ended.
But that really was about it.
I think the concept of their being survivors
hadn't occurred to me. But here in this
room were housewives and shopkeepers, and
I just thought, well, this would be a less
threatening way to tell the story.
People have a lot of trepidation and fear about
this subject, about looking at the images, and
hearing the stories. I thought this would be a
good way to reach people.
I tried to make this film around 1994 and
realized that it was a subject that was still
very charged politically. So I gave up and
made a small, personal film instead, The
Mushroom Club in 2005. And when I was in
post-production on that film I got a call from
HBO, from consulting producer Sara
Bernstein, who said they wanted to make an
ambitious, comprehensive documentary on
Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and as she described
the project, I realized it was the film I had
been wanting to make for twenty-five years.
And so I jumped in, working closely with HBO
to stick to that initial idea of just telling the
story through the people that were there
instead of the scientists, or a narrator, or
historians, leading us along.
HBO: It's fascinating the differences culturally
between the Japanese and the Americans,
and how that's revealed in the film.
Steven Okazaki: Some people are surprised by the reserve of
the survivors. But you have to remember that
culturally, for Japanese to just talk about
themselves in any way that might elicit
sympathy or pity is something that
Japanese just don't do. When the survivors speak out publicly, they often face
criticism and prejudice from their neighbors
and the public. People tell them to be quiet,
to forget the past, not to stir up old emotions,
not to remind people of the war. So it's a
difficult thing to do
They are in the film because they feel they
have something important to share. But as
soon as they do that, they're
separating themselves from Japanese society. And so it really is an act of
courage and defiance for them to speak out
and tell their stories. Some of them might
even smile or giggle at a time when they're
talking about something really painful just as
a way of telling the listener, you know, I'm
okay, don't worry about me.
At the same time, a lot of people were really
eager to tell their stories. We had situations
where we were sitting with twelve survivors
having coffee, talking, and it was kind of
amazing, I mean, people really wanted to talk,
you sensed the urgency, the realization that
they weren't going to be around perhaps in
ten years to tell these stories, and this was
their last chance.
One thing I try to remind people of with the
film is that most of the people in the film were
teenagers at the time. This is not the full
story. The people that were parents, who
were in their twenties, or thirties, are already
gone, or their memories have faded. The thing
we wanted with this film is go with the
clearest, sharpest memories that weren't
mixed in with other people's memories, which
can happen with something like this.
HBO: What did you learn about human beings and
their capacity to survive a traumatic
experience like a nuclear bomb?
Steven Okazaki: I realized that surviving is not just about
physically surviving. It's more about
spiritually surviving. I've met people who
were not physically hurt by the bomb, but
who were really destroyed by what they went
through.
When you do a film like this, you're getting
the story of the people who've survived in all
ways, not just physically. I mean, there are
people in the film who live in constant pain.
One of the survivors in the film had to take
breaks every couple of hours so she could rest
and take her morphine.
Many people in the film are still dealing with
survivor guilt but somehow have found
reasons to live. One of the survivors talks
about looking for her mother, and seeing what
she thinks is her mother because she finds a
burned corpse with a gold tooth that looks
like her mother, and she reaches out to touch
the body and it turns to ashes before her
finger reaches it. And then her sister gets
radiation sickness, her hair starts falling out,
and the kids at school are taunting her sister
because she's bald, and the sister steps in
front of a train and kills herself. This woman
says that there are two kinds of courage--the
courage to die, and the courage to live. And
she says she decided she wanted to live,
despite her having lost everybody.
HBO: You also interview four men who were part of
the American bombing missions. Their
experiences and memories are quite different.
Steven Okazaki: All of the Americans I interviewed are old-
school World War Two gentlemen. All of them
feel a sense of duty to share their stories. But
when they were talking, I realized that they
were closed off to certain aspects of the story.
In their recollections they stayed in that
airplane in their minds and tried not to think
about what was happening down on the
ground for self-preservation reasons. They
certainly could not take the burden of killing
so many.
Most of them talk about the success of the
mission. But for one of them you could tell, it
was difficult for him even to say those words.
All of them were in their early twenties; they
were good soldiers, and they were doing their
duty. They had no idea about nuclear
weapons and radioactivity. So, it's
understandable that they weren't willing to
consider all the ramifications of their
involvement in the Hiroshima bombing. It
made more sense for their mental health to
stay kind of ignorant.
All the men were adamant about the necessity
of dropping the bomb, and all of them said
they had no regrets about being part of it.
But they all made powerful anti-war, anti-
nuclear weapons statements at the end of the
film. And this was not prodded by the film
crew at all; the one thing they seemed to
clearly have thought about was the future use
of nuclear weapons, and about the state of
the world we're in.
Right now we have the capability of four
hundred thousand Hiroshima's in the world's
nuclear arsenal. I wanted to make the film
ten years earlier, but I think making it now
has a particular relevance, and the film is
timelier than ever. Certainly since 9-11 there
really is a different sense of how nuclear
weapons could possibly be used. Every week
there's a story in the news that reminds you
of this very real, frightening situation we're in.
I think what we want to do with the film is not
make particular political points, but just the
point that the bombs affected the lives of real
people, and so let's hear what they have to
say. No matter how important your message
is, if the film is boring, no one will hear it.
And my feeling is, this is an incredibly
dramatic, amazing story, and if we just let the
people tell their stories, that in itself is a
political act, of sorts, and that people can find
their own messages.
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