I thought he'd really said that he liked the documentary style of contempory Japanese film-makers and as this was his first film he was looking to try and pick up that vibe.

He also stated that Japan's modern architecture provided the perfect backdrop, but said that getting security-passes for nuclear power-stations was proving difficult.

Must watch this again, I've avoided watching the documentary again as Lucas comes across as a real dick in all of his interviews.

Back to your orginal question, he ultimately found a better location with the Bay Area, in that case.

isn't the film shot entirely within a white interior if i remember well?

nice entry sensei.

By unique mixture of authoritarian social order and rampant consumerism didn't he just mean breakdancing robots on fire?

Stop confusing your American Zoetrope productions, Rory.

If we look at the genre of dystopian films, where are they shot?

Truffault's "Fahrenheit 451" looks like it's shot in Holland. In fact it's Chateauneuf, a suburb south of Paris which had an experimental monorail.

"1984" is filmed in London using famous 1930s landmarks like Battersea Power Station and Senate House, part of the University of London, to represent authoritarianism.

"Sleeper" (Woody Allen) is filmed on location in California and Colorado, some scenes at Rutgers’ University Busch campus, and the scene in which Woody plays the robot servant to a gay couple (and enters a Wilhelm Reich-like orgone accumulator) is shot in a futuristic Charles A. Haertling house.

I guess this goes back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but it's always struck me as odd that film-makers tend to set their "dystopian" epics in some of the most excitingly futuristic environments, places with the most advanced transport, architecture and technology. (And a worryingly high number of university campuses.) It may be that these directors are somewhat conservative and anti-intellectual, and harbor a populist mistrust of designers and architects whose ideas seem too freaky. Or it may be that their script-writers (or the novelists whose ideas these films are based on) are intent on making a moral point about conformity, but their set-designers get carried away with the futurism and make it all look just too damned attractive.

One of the most critical articles I ever wrote about Japan was for Metropolis magazine in New York. It's called Hell's Furnishings and it's about another of these dystopian epics, "A Clockwork Orange". In the piece I professes to be staggered and outraged that Tsutaya put this film in a section of their store labelled "Good Furniture". How could anyone watch such an ethically critical film for the furniture? But, you know, if we see these films' mistrust of Modernism as something retrograde, a kind of sentimental humanism in the script that the set designers don't share (and the dystopia in "Clockwork Orange" looks great, pure Verner Panton), then this reaction on the part of the Japanese is actually a very liberal and right one. I compare it in the article to Andy Warhol's stance: he watched films for the shoe styles. This stance is not without politics, but it's a very different politics from the reactionary humanism of the scriptwriters and novelists who craft the film's moral core, and who always associate Modernism with totalitarianism. The Warhol line (which I think is also the Japanese line) is more like: "Gee, everything's great" and "Everybody should have money" and "I love shopping" and "The peripheral is just as important as the central, and the boring is an interesting as the exciting".

Nevertheless, it doesn't explain why Billy Corgan's photo was attached to this entry...

How could anyone watch such an ethically critical film for the furniture?

Have you not seen the beautiful dresses in Schindler's List?

On a funny, real side note, Tsutaya's enormous display for Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ last year included other Jesus-related titles at the bottom - including Monty Python's Life of Brian. I have a feeling this was not a satirical selection...

Thank you Momus. I was cracking up while reading that, and agreeing with every bit of it. And it really continues and develops the points made down below in the last long discussion.

I don't really know much about Goerge Lucas, except -- as has already been mentioned -- many people think he's a d$%^. Also the cinematography and effects in his movies are sometimes interesting. One last thing I know is that he based the settings for a some scenes in Starwars on settings from films by Kurosawa, namely Seven Samurai and Roshomon.

Oh, and Chris, please pardon my English, it's my third language, and I've only been speaking it for half my life. I know how to spell and write correctly, but it doesn't come naturally as it might for you. I don't always remember or want to correct myself, but if I can continue practicing my wrting like this, then it will come naturally in a few years.

marxy

Films.

Hint: try for example as a starting point, looking at kichikudaienkai as a film primarily dealing wit the japanese inability to question and confront power - minutely exploring the dynamics and possible consequences of that.
Though, not un-poignantly extreme in subject matter and manner of exposition, the film deals with very common patterns and dynamics in japanese society. Try looking at other japanese texts in non-reflex manner. (sorry if i come accross as patronising)

i suspect you (would) like the films of masato harada. (90s) they have plenty dialectic, political expose and so forth , yet they strangely always seem to end at the airport. hardly a rewarding closure. suicide seems less of a copout.

_____kurosawa -> star wars.

it's actually a more obscure and probably his lightest, most fairy-taley kurosawa film, 'hidden forest' that was the prototype for star wars. there's a princess and all

kichikudaienkai as a film primarily dealing wit the japanese inability to question and confront power

I thought of it as a film primarily dealing with how totally awesome it looks when you show a massive open head wound squirting blood and dripping parts for ten minutes (with appropriate gooshy sound effects).

(You may be right about what the underlying themes are but the director's overobsession with making the work a gore/slasher flick undermines any kind of ideological statement.)

i think it's "the hidden fortress", not forest.