guardian.co.uk
Rinko Kikuchi: the interview
Her smouldering looks and natural talent have made Oscar-nominated actor Rinko Kikuchi a star of the big screen. But she's also a favourite among fashion's elite. We catch up with Japan's most versatile leading lady
By Eva Wiseman
Rinko Kikuchi stands very still. It's the stillness of someone in perfect control, someone quietly absorbing a bright unfolding fame, the stillness of a turned-off fountain in a shopping centre after dark, pennies glistening at the bottom.
In 2006 Kikuchi became the first living Japanese actress to be nominated for an Oscar in 50 years for her role in Babel – a role where (then 25) she played a deaf-mute 16-year-old, completely silent throughout. Babel was a drama about communication, with her grieving, speechless schoolgirl the stand-out performance in a film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. In a scene set in a strobe-lit, noisy Tokyo nightclub, Kikuchi hears nothing, only feeling the music. Her delicate, expressive face registers every twitch of loss and acknowledgement of a parallel life. It's desperately sad, as is the character she plays in her new film, the highly anticipated Norwegian Wood.
It is based on Haruki Murakami's 23-year-old best-selling novel, a shadowy love story. The director, Tran Anh Hung, spent four years in correspondence with the author before Murakami gave his approval to begin shooting in 2008. Set in 1960s Tokyo, the script was written in French (Tran is from Vietnam), then translated into Japanese. It centres on the turbulent life of 19-year-old Toru Watanabe, played by Kenichi Matsuyama, and his relationships with two opposing women – the excitable, grinning Midori and the inward-looking, melancholic Naoko, played by Kikuchi. Naoko was Toru's best friend Kizuki's girlfriend until Kizuki committed suicide – a tragedy that explains Naoko's slow-burning insanity; her depression fills the screen like melting film. "It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself,'" Naoko tells Toru, her voice a whisper.
Today, in a photographer's studio under an east London railway bridge, Kikuchi's voice is similarly hushed. She's changed from her corduroy shorts and hoodie into her favourite look from the rail of high-fashion pieces selected for her – a long-sleeved Studio 54-style Gucci jumpsuit – and she stands still beside the wind machine, hair flying. Jetlagged from yesterday's flight from New York (her home of a month, where she lives with her boyfriend, Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze) she keeps her eyes on her fragile, ringed fingers, which flicker like flames.
"I love New York," she says, slowly, picking her way through the words, a translator on hand for difficult phrases. "I'm taking English lessons there for the first time. I used to live in Tokyo, but I needed something new. I'm really close to my family. I miss them all the time, but we Skype a lot. They are happy to see me on the screen, but my mother is so picky. When she saw my film she just said, 'OK, you're quite good.' She was happy for the Oscar nomination, I think, but it's quiet. Quiet happiness.
"We don't put our emotions out there in Japan," she continues. "I'm Japanese, but I love to be honest. I didn't anticipate this… this fame. I never expected to come out into the world, for everyone to see. It's kind of scary. I've learned so much. I've met more people this year than I've ever met before in my life, heard all their stories, listened to all their music, read their books – I've done a lot of listening."
Kikuchi was born in Hadano, 40 miles outside Tokyo. As well as the John Cassavetes films that she says influence her work, she grew up watching "chanbara" movies – samurai films that inspired her to learn sword fighting. "I loved the heroes in those films. And I still do sword play. There's something very… spiritual about fighting. It's physically very challenging. It's for killing people, after all, so it's taught me how to look at something head on. It's like living – confronting something. Everything for me came from films."
On her walls as a teenager she had a still from Bonnie and Clyde, and the image of Faye Dunaway in her beret is one she credits for her interest in fashion. A muse of Karl Lagerfeld, this month Kikuchi has also been picked by Marc Jacobs as one of 16 women chosen to model his new jewellery collection for Louis Vuitton. As a struggling model she would save her money, then buy a piece by Margiela – "I get excited when I see the one thing that will complete a look, that will make me look the way I feel," she says – now Lagerfeld dresses her in couture Chanel. "On the red carpet I need to be protected. When I wear a Chanel dress I feel like I've earned the right to be there. And Karl Lagerfeld is so poetic, such an intelligent man. I like the way he has the power to draw attention."
Kikuchi first read Norwegian Wood aged 17, the age her character Naoko is in the novel. She's gone on to read it five times – each time, she says, noticing every difference in their characters. Despite this, she was desperate to play her, fighting against the director's early dismissal of her name. "Naoko was so fragile and so dangerous," she says. "So powerful." Perhaps it's her uneasiness with the language, but the way she talks – slow, careful – adds a weight to her words. They echo glumly through the room. "I was a completely different person from Naoko. She, she is too much, she only thinks about herself, not about what is around her. I think she couldn't open her eyes. She doesn't see a future. She was trying to get away. She lives, only to die."
For previous roles, Kikuchi says, she was able to switch in and out of character, but for Naoko, she had to learn methods for "turning her off": the longer she spent inhabiting Murakami's creation, the more she felt herself deadening. "I looked for things that made me able to be myself. For every project I've done before this I've lived with the character in my private time as well, but I realised that this time it's unhealthy. So this time I needed to distract myself. I used music a lot – going into Naoko: classical music; coming out: Animal Collective."
She changes behind a screen, emerging in teetering tangerine heels that she has trouble standing in. Before finding success as an actress she modelled, and, posing for the photographer, she's the point of calm in the busy studio, reorganising her limbs at the stylist's request as though they're pencils on a messy desk. The music on the stereo slows to blues, and on her jetlagged stilettos I see her gently slump. She asks if there's any electro, and when it blasts through the speakers she tosses her hair and catches my eye. In a startling second, at the change of a beat, she's become someone else.
Norwegian Wood is out on 11 March
and love the shots from the telegraph, she looks so striking in those colors esp in the first Prada outfit
