The Contestant tells the story of Tomoaki Hamatsu (aka Nasubi), who spent 15 months trapped naked, starving and alone as a contestant on the Japanese entertainment show Denpa Shonen – completely unaware that his ordeal was being broadcast to an audience of millions.
We spoke to director Clair Titley about her mission to help Nasubi reclaim his story, the work that went into recreating the feeling of 1990s Japanese television, and the ups of downs of directing through the pandemic. Read our interview below.
How did you first come across Nasubi’s story, and how did you get involved as director of the film?
I was in development on other projects, and then I got lost down an internet rabbit hole and came across the story and it really jumped out – and every time I came back to it, it seemed to me it hadn’t really been covered in western media that much, and when it had, the coverage always seemed to be quite reductive. My burning questions were all about Nasubi: what had happened to him, the man at the centre of it? There didn’t seem to be anything looking into him specifically.
So, I got in touch with Nasubi and said “I want to tell the story about you”. Rather than about the show and how shocking it was. It was only after that that I learned out what had happened to him afterwards, and that really hadn’t been publicised. He was really on board. I think for him the timing was right, he’d got to a point in his life where he felt ready to tell the story. I think also it actually helped being a foreigner telling the story, and having that slightly removed perspective.
We built up a level of trust over a long period of time, and I made sure he was on board with my version of the story. I was never making a documentary about reality TV in which he featured, I wasn’t doing a shock and awe story about this crazy show in which he featured – it was about him, and his journey.
Given Nasubi’s experiences, you’d think he has every reason to be distrustful of how he appears on TV. How did you go about earning his trust?
I approached the whole project – and I approach every project – with the idea that consent is ongoing. I told him that I wanted him to have a lot of involvement with the project, though I was very clear that he wouldn’t have any editorial control of it. I believe that when you’re directing, and particularly on this project, there is no point where your responsibility ends to your contributors.
For example, we’d finished the project, it had had a fantastic run at TIFF, and it got bought by Hulu who really supported it and were great. I remember they’d made a beautiful poster for the film. Nasubi was naked on it, which we’d discussed with him and he was fine with, but the plan was to put it up several feet tall in Times Square. That triggered that question of consent again, and I knew I had to check in about it with Nasubi – as it happens he was fine with it, excited by it actually, and he loved seeing it New York and felt it was a reclaiming of his own narrative.
What other responsibilities do you have to your contributors as a documentary director?
I think, particularly with this kind of project, you have a responsibility to try not to re-traumatize people. The intention is to give them agency over their story in some way and make sure they feel comfortable and confident.
You also have a responsibility to make sure they feel heard, and that their story is told fairly, even if it’s not strictly from their POV. I’m a believer in the truth being subjective – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it.
And how did you secure the involvement of your other key contributor, the TV producer Toshio Tsuchiya, and encourage him to speak candidly?
It was actually via Nasubi that we approached him. Nasubi asked Tsuchiya to do it and he agreed – and he made it very clear from the start that he wasn’t doing it for us, he was doing it for Nasubi. I can’t speak for Tsuchiya, but I personally believe he did it because he felt like he owed it to Nasubi.
And what I have complete respect for, regardless of what he did in the past, is the fact that he didn’t just say yes and get involved reluctantly. He really threw himself behind it – he got involved with archive and smoothed the way for us a lot, put us in touch with the right people and let them know he was supporting the film, and helped us find other contributors.
He’s a ridiculously experienced documentary-maker and producer, he’s not naïve, so when it came to the interview he knew what we were going to ask him and was prepared for the most difficult questions – and he didn’t shy away from anything. He gave honest answers to everything, and I have a lot of respect for the way he approached the project.
A large part of production was during Covid – what obstacles did that throw up, and also were there any unforeseen positives?
One of the positives was how working remotely allowed us to have a truly international production. I’m not London-based, which can be tricky, but strangely my editor lived about 100 metres away so I ended up in a COVID bubble with her. But her edit assistant was working from Toronto, and our researcher was in Belgium, and we had people in London and other places.
For the shoot itself, I always knew I wanted to work with a Japanese producer, because there was a language barrier – and also because I really believe that you need to be able to look someone in the eye to get the best interview. But when Covid hit Japan went into a very strict lockdown and no one without a Japanese passport was allowed in. I’d met Nasubi in person before, he’d met my family, we’d even been on holiday together, but suddenly, I wasn’t going to be with him for the interviews. I’d already been working very closely with Megumi Inman, a Japanese-British producer, who was incredible, and we’d already intended to do the interviews in a way where we’d be working very closely together – she’d be the one in front of him with the questions, and I’d be behind the camera. As it turns out, I ended up being several thousand miles behind the camera, having to do everything remotely while Meg went to Japan.
Meg had to do two weeks of quarantine and she was (in a slightly “meta” way given our subject) stuck in a small room with trays of food coming in. I decided to do the entire quarantine period with her, at the same time. So, I’d go to bed at 3pm in the UK and wake up at midnight and work through that way. Of course that was difficult, but it was also brilliant, because suddenly we had all this time to prepare for any eventuality, prepare our questions, discuss our philosophies of interview and everything in between. So, by the time we came to the interviews we felt as if we were almost the same person! It was obviously difficult much harder for Meg (I got to do the whole shoot in my slippers!) but it worked incredibly well.
It was a challenge at that time to find a DoP who spoke fluent English and lived in Japan, but we managed to find the brilliant Mikul Erikkson who really took it all on board. We knew weren’t going to have those creative conversations that you might usually have in the car on the way to a shoot, so we deliberately made time to schedules those things. It wasn’t always organic, but it was so important to have that blue sky thinking time on Zoom – we made sure those moments, which are so valuable, were planned in.
You had to make some decisions on language in the film. What drove your thinking behind how much to dub, how much to subtitle and how much to leave in Japanese? It must have taken really careful consideration.
It seems ridiculous, but sometimes when you’re pitching a project there’s still a resistance to making something in another language. There is always that slight niggle, but I wasn’t going to compromise on the language my interviewees spoke. The main difficulty was the archive, in particular the archive footage of Denpa Shonen, which at the time had a lot of words flashing up on the screen in Japanese, narration over the top, canned laughter, presenters... you have all that and then I’m inter-cutting with interview as well.
So, we needed to make it easy for the audience to know where to look, but at the same time I wanted them to get a sense of what it was like for a Japanese audience to watch the show. Denpa Shonen was an onslaught for the senses – if I stripped it back too much I wouldn’t be representing it properly. One of the reasons audiences at the time reacted in the way they did, was because the show was played for comedy, with all sorts of noises and effects, and the starving and naked man in the middle was almost obscured.
What we decided to do was translate as much of the original Denpa Shonen graphics as we possibly could into English, working with a brilliant effects artist called Jason Martine. Sometimes what he came up with would even look too good, and we’d go back to ask him to make it look more ropey and 90s. That was painstaking work, because it’s not like he had different layers to work with, he basically just had VHS quality footage to mess around with and mask, and that was it.
A huge amount of work also went into the sound. We had to replace a lot of the music from Denpa Shonen with soundalikes – so the music was painstakingly re-recorded to be put back in just the right spot.
It was a case of stripping the music out and re-building it to make space for the narration. In the narration, there are two voices we hear speaking in English in the film. One is the narrator of Denpa Shonen, which we translated as accurately as possible and which Fred Armisen did a fantastic job of voicing. The second is Takehiro Hira, who did a fantastic job as the voice of Nasubi’s diary. The diaries had been published, so we were able to explore more of Nasubi’s diary than was broadcast by Denpa Shonen.
There is no contextualizing “voice of god” narration in The Contestant. What was the thinking behind that?
Probably the closest we have to that is Juliet Hindell. We were cautious about her inclusion, because though she was integral to the story, I was very conscious of our role as Westerners telling this Japanese story. Juliet was on the same page too, so it worked really well. I didn’t want the film to have a voice of god, I didn’t want anyone telling the viewer what to think. That’s not what the film is about. It’s a film about Nasubi, and other themes evolve out of it, but it’s not a history . What Juliet does beautifully it put it in context for us to understand, but very much from her perspective – which was also what she did as a journalist working for the BBC at the time.
There’s a lot of terrific archive footage – was it a challenge to research and clear? Was there anything where you thought “If we can’t clear this, we’re in trouble”?
The majority of the archive is from Denpa Shonen. That was the most critical thing to acquire, and also the hardest. The negotiations went on a long time, and that’s where the producers Andee Ryder and Megumi were amazing, hats off to them.
One of the best, and most poignant, things that happened when researching was finding out that even though Nasubi’s Mum said that she didn’t want him to be on TV and she wasn’t proud of him going into that line of work… she had actually devotedly recorded absolutely everything he did. So, we went round and collected all the VHS that she had, and we then knew what was out there to find. So, I’d say that Nasubi’s Mum was actually the second most important person in terms of archive at that point! We’d have just been trying to find needles in haystacks otherwise.
Let’s talk about the edit. How did the film take shape there? What were your non-negotiables and what did you have to be brutal with?
The non-negotiable for me was showing the whole of Nasubi’s story. It would have been easy to cut it off after Denpa Shonen ended, but I really felt as if he needed to reclaim his story. The hardest part was the number of amazing twists and turns in the story we couldn’t include, because he was on that programme for so long and they did so much – for example, they even transported him alone to a desert island and had him forage for food. There were so many plot twists, and wrangling that narrative was difficult.
Getting under Nasubi’s skin was a priority, he’s very stoic and understated as an interviewee, so to get maximum emotional impact, we had to take a lot of care over where we placed certain elements of the story.
The other thing that was really hard in the edit was getting the tone right – that merging of comedy and tragedy. I worked with two editors on this, Rachel Meyrick and then Katie Bryer (we had a break in the middle of production). Both of them were geniuses at that. It was quite important that the comic element was there. I wanted the audience to laugh, and then feel bad for laughing – that was an important journey to take them on, and a really tricky balance to strike in the edit.
Tell us a bit about your choice of music. What were your ideas for score, and commercial music?
Nainita Desai composed the music for us. She’s a genius, and she was integral to establishing the tone, and for characterisation too – we talked a lot about how I saw Tsuchiya as a kind of Logan Roy figure, and she did a wonderful Succession-style piece for his introduction. Her score also really helped bring out the emotion in the Everest scenes.
Our producer Amit Dey was on board with us having commercial tracks from the very start, and it was great to have that support from an early stage – that’s definitely not a given! He and I were both very into Japanese music, and I’ve always been into J-Pop particularly around the 90s and early 00s. I also went round to a friend’s and we dug out all our old J-Pop CDs and we were playing through them and bouncing ideas around.
They’re incredibly hard to clear, songs from the 1990s, because they use so many samples. The Eels track that comes in was from that era, Rachel, our editor, put that together and it was incredibly poignant, ditto the beautiful acoustic cover of Big in Japan – which really encompassed that bittersweet tone we were looking for, when he’s emerged from the show and he’s the most famous person in the country, but is also completely overwhelmed by it.
I really wanted a track at the beginning of the film by Cibo Matto – a band I loved and a song I knew would have exactly the feel I was looking for from the beginning – but it was extremely difficult to clear. Eventually I reached out to Miho Hatori, who was in the band, explaining how much I loved the track but not really expecting a response. She did get back to me though, and suggested that if we couldn’t clear anything, we could write a song together! Of course, the teenage version of me was absolutely beside herself. And that’s how the opening track came about, it was something Miho wrote specifically for the film and for Nasubi, who she’d been inspired by.
Music is an extremely important part of the film and I’m quite proud of how as a team we’ve been able to take Nainita’s score and the commercial songs and make sure there’s a balance throughout.
How have you found the audience response to The Contestant?
It’s been a lovely journey, and it’s been a long journey. It was at TIFF in the second half of 2023. The response has been really positive, and what I love about the film is that everybody takes something different from it – some people see a cautionary tale about the future of social media, others say that it’s all about consent and our responsibilities in the media. People have said that it’s a useful film for thinking about domestic violence, and coercive and controlling behaviour.
The most important thing is that the whole way through this journey, we were telling Nasubi not to worry, and that everyone was going to love him. He’d been taken advantage of by the media before, and he was worried people would judge him or think he was stupid. When we got to DOC NYC, he came out with his Mum and his sister and he got a standing ovation. He was overcome with emotion, and I noticed a marked shift in him from that point on. He understood then that people liked him and respected him. I’ve done a lot of festivals with him since, and even the way he stands is different. He’s so much more confident in himself. He’s totally reclaimed his story.
What are you working on next?
I can’t say too much, but I’m working on a documentary project about the fragility and intensity of teenage friendships. It’s quite a harrowing story, that in some ways feels very different but in other ways has a lot of similarities to The Contestant.
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