Exit 8: “By playing video games, I immediately thought of the purgatory of Dante” (interview)
Meeting with director Genki Kawamura, who transposes the minimalist and creepy video game in the cinema.
Video games Exit 8 Responds to rules that could not be more simple: trapped in an empty corridor of tokyo metro repeating itself endlessly, the player must spot quirks that slip into the decor (a poster that changes, a door handful in the wrong place, a flashy light, two men in black suit that suddenly appear …). If an anomaly appears, immediate U-turn. If there is none, then you have to move forward to hope to find the exit, the slightest error having you resume zero in this infernal maze.
Big fan of the concept, the Japanese Genki Kawamura (the drama Do not forget the flowers In 2023) himself confided in the heavy task of transposing the game to the cinema. Met during the Cannes Film Festival, where Exit 8 was screened in midnight session, Kawamura details her staging choices and the essential additions that distance the film from the game.
Exit 8 is a game with gameplay could not be simpler, but its visual universe is extremely marked. What was your first intuition in terms of adaptation?
This is what I immediately wondered: what do the anomalies mean? And why are we in a loop that we cannot go out? These two questions led me to find answers to enrich the subject, because I could not make a film ofExit 8 Without widen the spectrum a little. When I thought about what this place was, this metro corridor, I immediately thought of Dante’s purgatory. It is therefore a space of judgment, and I wanted to put this on stage. I had already made a first film, Do not forget the flowerswhere I used a sequence to cross time and space. We went from a real universe to the dream universe of a woman with Alzheimer’s. I told myself that I wanted to do the same thing but in a modern Tokyo. And when I discovered Exit 8I told myself that he met all the conditions: today’s Tokyo, and the possibility of going from one world to another.
How important was it to add a narrative engine around hero parenting, rather than making a simple horrific operating film?
It was very important but above all quite natural. The minimalist mechanism of the game immediately reminded me of the scenography of the Noh theater. It’s simple, but there is a deep questioning. So I wanted to marry this very tokyo, modern and visual universe, with that of the Noh theater.
The fundamental question of an adaptation is the point of view. The game is entirely covered the first person and the film plays with that at the start, before going to the third person …
What interested me the most for the staging was to play on the borders. That we no longer really know where we are. In a game? In a film? In reality? The video game is always subjective: you are the character who acts. But in the cinema, one can be objective and subjective. Exciting subject to explore. Director Kenji Mizoguchi used the river as a border between life and death. For me, it was above all a border between reality and unreal.
And how was the staging of anomalies? In the game, we look at them very closely, we spend time on each detail. Cinema obliges you to make them more obvious.
That was really a technical and scriptwriting question. It was necessary to constantly adjust how far to show or not show, to place yourself between subjectivity and objectivity, to find the right time when the spectator can discover anomalies. It was a meticulous adjustment with the technical team. In my mind, when you see the yellow sign Exit 8 In this corridor, it is the point of view of God who watches men go around in circles. I wanted to stage human guilt and the fact that God can also be very funny and make jokes. But there are also anomalies that reveal the guilt of the main character, so I played on these two paintings, comical and tragic, to express this idea of purgatory that I told you about.
This question of guilt seems to say something quite deep on Japanese society.
Quite. I myself take the metro in Tokyo, and I constantly see small violence: a man who screams on a woman with a baby, another who shakes you up … These are not big physical violence, but they exist. And at the same time, there is the violence that we pretend not to see while having your eyes riveted on your mobile phone. We scroll on wars, illnesses, dramas, and we pretend that nothing had happened. It is this guilt to see without seeing that I wanted to express.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0bfk_doff0
What was your relationship with the creator of the game? Did you have to make him validate the scenario?
We asked to use the title and the decor, that’s all. The creator had some visuals that he absolutely wanted to place, and others that he categorically refused.
For example ?
He didn’t want sexual allusions (Laughter.)
And why?
No doubt that sexuality would have broken integrity this neutral space … But hey, speaking of life and death, we necessarily touch that.
Obviously, we wonder what the decor looked like and how did you concretely manage to give this impression of infinity?
I don’t really want to talk about it, because I prefer spectators to believe that this corridor really exists in Tokyo! All I can say is that we built two identical and massive sets, and that we turned in both to give this feeling of a loop.
Exit 8, From Genki Kawamura, with Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kôchi, Naru Asanuma… in theaters since September 3.
