Yasuaki Nakajima
Director/writer/producer/actor
After the Apocalypse

It took Yasuaki Nakajima almost five years to complete his debut feature After the Apocalypse but even a brief encounter with the Japanese-born, Manhattan-based filmmaker suggests resolve more than obsession in his working methods. He said notions of survival and communication (the apocalypse has rendered the last people on Earth mute) formed the basis of the film but adds the fact that there's a limited number of things one can say about the end of the world.

Nonetheless his stark, black and white saga made for nickels and dimes has a visual elegance that far exceeds the meager resources at his disposal.

Nakajima's personal story also has lots of fanciful and compelling drama. Born in the North of Japan in Hokkaido, he grew up in a pastoral and remote area. He'd watch movies on television and when the family set broke, he would make a weekly trip to visit his grandmother and stay overnight to catch a weekly movie program.

"I think I hurt her feelings because I wasn't very good at hiding my real reasons for visiting," he says in his heavily accented English. "I loved Jackie Chan movies but on Saturday Night there was Golden Foreign Theater and that's where I saw things like Stalker. I loved really esoteric films even though they were dubbed in Japanese."

While he didn't know how he would wind up getting to make movies, Nakajima realized the first step was getting out of Hokkaido and going to Tokyo. He wound up taking a job cleaning windows on skyscrapers.

"The money was very good because of the personal risk but I can't recall many times when it seemed at all dangerous. What it allowed me to do was buy a Super-8 camera and that's how I got started," he recalls.

His first film was a Claymation fantasy. He worked a year in his apartment with models and lights and eventually completed a 12-minute short. The experience proved to be his film school as he learned the basics of every aspect of production by means of trial and error. But after four years in Tokyo, Nakajima decided he had to have a broader perspective and went to Australia despite his most glancing ability to speak English. Camera in hand he went into the country's most remote regions to make a highly stylized travelogue.

Again, it was a learning experience as he shot sequences to figure out what one could do with a camera. From Australia he went to Britain and a short time later crossed the Atlantic for New York City. He took acting classes and began to meet people while eking out a living working for post-production houses. The idea for After the Apocalypse began to take shape and as he became acquainted with the city he began to take note of possible locations where the story could be filmed.

"I started with a 10-page script," says Nakajima. "Eventually I had something that was 40 pages that was mostly description because there's no dialogue in it. The cast were all people I'd met in the acting class."

Filming began in 1999 on location in Queens and Long Island and he shot for 10 days. He would later film two more days of pickups and reshoots but with the budget coming out of his own pocket, the completion of the film would stretch out over years and numerous visits to the IFP market in TriBeCa. After it was completed last March he premiered the film at the South x Southwest festival in Austin.

He's been amazed and heartened by the public response to the film and taken note of people's comparisons to other movies. He recently caught up to one of them - Luc Besson's debut feature Le Dernier Combat - and was surprised by the similarities between the two films. However, he says he's sorry he hadn't seen the Besson film prior to filming because it made him realize ways he could have improved his own film.

"Everything informs everything," observes Nakajima. "What I've made and what I've seen will allow me to make a better film next time. I also think I'll be able to make it faster."

- by Leonard Klady