San Francisco Frontiers - Stay far from battlefield, warns Japanese director in Vietnam War film

"Mr. Nelson, Did you Kill People?", which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, tells the true story of Allen Nelson, a black US Marine sent to Vietnam in 1966 and plagued the rest of his life by what he saw -- and did -- there.

Director Tsukamoto, last at Venice in 2018 with his pacifist Samurai film "Killing", said that when he learned about the story of Nelson, who battled PTSD and dedicated his life to speaking out about the horrors of war, he felt compelled to portray his experience on film.

"I wanted to depict the fact that, beyond eras and beyond borders, if people go to war, no matter what country they come from, they will experience horrifying things and commit horrifying acts," Tsukamoto told a press conference Friday.

Tsukamoto's work, which ranges from postmodern horror movies like 1995's "Tokyo Fist" to "Fires on the Plain" from 2014 about the WWII-era Japanese occupation of the Philippines, has increasingly examined the legacy of war.

In war, he said, "even if the side doing the killing changes, the victims do not".

"Whether it’s an old-fashioned war or a drone war, in the end, people’s innards are blown out, their eyes are torn from their sockets, and the families around them are plunged into grief. In that sense, the horror experienced by the victims is ultimately the same," he said.

"Mr. Nelson, Did you Kill People?" takes its title from a question asked by a schoolchild during a talk Nelson gave following his tour in Vietnam. The query sent the Vietnam vet into a tailspin that led to family problems, medication, therapy, and ultimately redemption.

- 'Fire at anything' -

Through unflinchingly graphic flashbacks, the viewer is plunged into the hot Vietnam jungle where the young Nelson, played by Mark Merphy, and his platoon seek out Viet Cong, massacring innocent civilians and burning villages as a matter of course.

"We fired at anything that moved," remembers the older Nelson (Rodney Hicks) during therapy sessions with his psychiatrist, played by Geoffrey Rush.

Tsukamoto said in an interview Saturday he tried to find a balance in the war scenes between shocking the viewer and numbing him.

"By showing something that has a shocking impact in the viewer, then I also show how gruesome, how brutal a reality can be," he said.

With repeated violence, however, the viewer might stop reacting, defeating the point, he said.

Tsukamoto touched on how the use of drones in modern warfare is changing perpetrators' awareness of their killing.

"As the technology becomes more advanced, I worry that the perpetrator’s sense of actually inflicting harm will become more and more dulled," he said.

But he noted that drone operators sometimes monitor their targets for days, firing their drone "after having watched and understood that person’s home environment and family situation."

"So in many cases, they launch an attack by drone after having developed a certain empathy for the target’s family. And it appears that precisely because of that, they do indeed suffer from severe PTSD," he said.

"So no matter how much the times change, those who are killed are in the same position as ever, and I don’t think the inner experience of those doing the killing will fundamentally change either."

The director said his goal was to make viewers "feel war with their skin, with their bodies, and to come away with a slight trauma."

"If people can feel that through this film, then I personally believe that someday, when young people see it, they will viscerally reject the idea of going to a real battlefield."

Nelson, who gave more than 1,200 talks throughout Japan about his war experiences, died in 2009 and is buried in Japan.

J.Peterson--SFF