Genki Kawamura’s “Exit 8” is a thriller unlike any other. Based on the 2023 video game, an unnamed protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) gets trapped in an endlessly repeating patch of a subway station hallway, only able to get closer to an exit by identifying bizarre and incongruent aberrations in his environment.
With twists, clues and plenty of creative camerawork, as well as a surprisingly heartfelt story about fatherhood, it’s not suprising it was selected to premiere in Cannes’ midnight screenings earlier this year before a high-profile acquisition by Neon. Kawamura, who directed and co-wrote the movie with Kentaro Hirase, spoke to Variety through a translator before the film’s TIFF bow about making a confined space feel cinematic, the Stanley Kubrick movies that inspired him and the video game icon that gave him advice.
What made you want to adapt to this video game into a feature film?
I directed my first feature, “A Hundred Flowers,” and it went to San Sebastian and won an award. What people responded to really well, I felt, was the visualization of a perspective of a person with Alzheimer’s. We got high praise for a visual tool that connects different times and physical space. I was looking for another chance to use those kinds of interesting visual tools. When I was thinking about that, I encountered this video game, “Exit 8,” and my first thought was the design was amazing.
Were you at all nervous going into a property where you’re filming the same environment over and over again, with sometimes only slight modifications? What were the discussions you had with your cinematographer about making the film feel cinematic, even though you’re in a confined space?
When I played the video game, I thought it was amazing, and the design itself was amazing. It happens in this really unique space and has a very simple rule of either going forward or back. I thought the design and the simple rule were the two biggest strengths. But of course the video game didn’t have any narrative. But I thought that if I can utilize this design and a simple rule and make something creative out of it, it was going to be a very unique film.
What I was discussing with our DP [Keisuke Imamura] was, “Can we make something that has a blurred line between a video game and a movie?” I think that is a very unique cinematic experience for the audience.
I had sat down with Shigeru Miyamoto, a famous video game producer at Nintendo — he’s, of course, the producer of Mario — and what he said was, “A good video game is fun to play, but it’s also fun to watch somebody play.” As I was trying to adopt this into a film, I thought we could create cinema that has both elements, meaning that the audience will become a player of the film,]o but also watch The Protagonist playing this game. It’s sort of how YouTube has a lot of video game explanation videos. That experience is unique to a video game, and I wanted to make a film that has that element.
The film opens in first person. How did you determine how much you wanted to be in first person, and why was that an important choice?
The moment where it changes from first-person POV to objective outside POV is when The Protagonist, or the audience, looks at the yellow Exit 8 sign. It is very symbolic to me because it’s sort of like Hell, and Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s not anything organic, but it could be a symbolized object of a God, or a demon or something that is outside of an organic object. At that moment in the film, it changes to an outside perspective, third-person perspective. That’s the moment where, up to that point, the audience is watching the film as a player, but that changes to a person watching a player play the game.
Fatherhood is such an important theme in this movie for The Protagonist. Do you look at fatherhood differently now after examining it so fully in the film?
When I made this film, I thought about how to face the tradition and history of horror films. It’s modern, but I wanted to carry that narrative of horror films. I’m going to mention two: One is “Ugetsu” by Kenji Mizoguchi, and the second is Kubrick’s “The Shining.” The first one takes place in a sort of magical realism. Both films simply depict protagonists or characters who slowly lose fatherhood, and I wanted to depict those characters. I wanted to carry that narrative and I wanted to carry that history of film, traditional films in my modern film, especially in modern Japan. It is a very difficult time to become a parent who’s very responsible. I think there are lots of elements to it, but it is a time where responsible parenthood is hard to achieve. It’s symbolized in the opening scene of the film, where everybody is watching smartphones and when the mother is carrying the baby who’s crying, people around her are not interested in supporting that sort of parenthood. I wanted to have that scene to connect that bigger narrative of a protagonist or characters losing fatherhood.
Are there any other elements in the film that international audiences might not understand that speak specifically to modern Japanese culture?
It’s a very simple space, but I wanted to depict a space that symbolizes the society we live in. The Protagonist in this film is, in the video game, a so-called NPC player. The Protagonist has no name. It symbolizes and represents modern society. He’s a part-time employee. He’s not officially hired. He’s the victim of capitalism, so that element is in the film as well. Also, the posters in the space feature issues that we face in modern society, so I wanted to depict those elements in the space. The space symbolizes modern society itself.
I also thought that the unlimited looping in this space is our lives, as we also face choices in our everyday lives. Whenever we face an anomaly, we make a choice, and that’s our lives. I imagine this as a stage of a Japanese traditional play, and because of the simplicity, it could be interpreted in various ways by the audience.
Many video game movies have a reputation of being pretty bad. Were you ever worried “Exit 8” might be looked at differently because it was adapted from a video game?
When I adapted this video game into a film, I didn’t set out thinking, “Let’s make this video game into a film.” What I wanted to create is a unique cinematic experience that blurs the lines between video game and film. In recent years, the video game quality is getting better and better, and it’s getting closer to reality itself.
When I went to Cannes, some people said it might be the first film based on a video game that played at the festival. But I wanted to go a little bit deeper and ask ourselves, “What does it mean to play video games? What is the experience of playing video games?” That concept was underneath. I believe that’s why this film became a little bit different from the so-called video game adaptation films.
