00:27Rental Family
00:30What is a rental family?
00:33It asks a lot of questions.
00:35I mean, it's possibly the setup for some kind of pejorative joke even.
00:41You know, go ahead if you have to.
00:43But as I quickly learned, it's a service that attends to the needs of people who are
00:55epidemically lonesome in a sect of society, in any major city.
01:01But this one happens to be in Tokyo, Japan.
01:07I know that she always intended to give us, to make a story about family.
01:19Her own personal attached, filmmakers like her always put so much of their own heart into
01:24the work.
01:26So I know it spoke volumes in her own life.
01:33And that it would be shooting in Japan.
01:37At first, it was kind of like pinch me.
01:39I didn't really believe it.
01:40But this film didn't belong anywhere else in the world.
01:47And what I read on the page was a pleasure and a privilege to see become a film that's
02:01a love letter to Tokyo.
02:19The premise of a rental family and being an employee of an agency definitely lends itself
02:29to the diversity of many different kinds of clients and customers.
02:33I mean, that's part of the fun of this movie is for how we get to meet so many different
02:38people.
02:41But meeting the ones who are most important to Philip are clearly this little girl who
02:51is in a big yellow hat, for instance.
02:54And this older man, who's in the twilight of his years, and seeing if or not he can fulfill
03:04this untapped need that he has to be a parent, even if it's make-believe, even if it's for
03:13only a little while.
03:31The notion of a rental family is a curious one, for real.
03:35But to my understanding, it's more as if people are asking for help rather than just fulfilling
03:50a service call to have the courage to be able to speak up and attend the vacuum that
04:03can be in our heart in a pandemic of loneliness, ironically, in one of the busiest cities in
04:14the world, is, well, it's poetry and it takes a filmmaker like Hikari.
04:36Is it in Buddhism that they say that you haven't made any wrong choices, just the ones that
04:42you made are the ones that bring you right to where you are right now, and where you are
04:47right now is exactly what you should be doing?
04:54I've learned from a little bit of something everywhere, everything I've done along the
04:58way, along the journey of my career.
05:03And where I guess I find myself now is at a place where I'll admit to feeling like I don't
05:09have anything to prove anymore.
05:11But that said, I'm not going to get lazy.
05:15I still have a great more of a need to achieve.
05:21So reaching for what that should be, I'm just going to go off whatever worked for me before,
05:28which was diversity.
05:29I'm interested in projects that are divergent from one another, and not just for any reason
05:35of not repeating myself or pigeonholing or whatever that is, but for the need I have
05:46to go in as many different directions as I can.
05:52I guess it's almost a selfish one, like I don't want to repeat myself, and sure, I'll
05:58admit there have been times in my career, in my life when you can't not do that, but with
06:06good fortune, they won't be ahead any longer.
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