This seems to be a season of swan songs. At the recent Cannes Film Festival, ace British auteur Ken Loach said The Old Oak, which played in competition and was heavily tipped to win the Palme d”Or but did not, would be his final movie. Loach is 86 and has made brilliant cinema for many decades. Now, Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live, produced by his Studio Ghibli, will also be his final film.
It will open on July 14 but will not be preceded by trailer or promotional activities. It is said the studio wants people to walk into the theatre with no preconceived notion. However, one poster has been released, and that is about it.
In a recent interview with Japanese magazine, Bungei Shunji, Ghibli’s longtime lead producer Toshio Suzuki, said nothing more will be revealed about the movie before it hits theatres. “As part of company operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the films we’ve made. So we’ve thought about that and done a lot of different things for that purpose — but this time we were like, Eh, we don’t need to do that…Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different,” he said. He added that they did not want to copy Hollywood’s style of promotions.
Suzuki averred: “There’s an American movie — ah, I almost said the title out loud! — coming out this summer around the same time [as How Do You Live?],“They’ve made three trailers for it, and released them one at a time. If you watch all three, you know everything that’s going to happen in that film. So how do moviegoers feel about that? There must be people, who, after watching all the trailers, don’t want to actually go see the film. So, I wanted to do the opposite of that.”
How Do You Live has been described as a “grand fantasy”, and is based on Japanese author Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel with the same title as the movie.
The plot focuses on a young boy and his experiences as he grows up after the death of his father. We know nothing more.
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