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Monster is finally being released in UK cinemas this week, and Express.co.uk had the chance to speak to celebrated Japanese actress Sakura Ando about her latest complex role.<\/p>\n
In director Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s latest drama, Sakura portrays single mother Saori, who becomes unraveled when her fifth-grade son starts exhibiting strange behaviour, leading to an uncomfortable confrontation with his teachers.<\/p>\n
Sakura recently picked up both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards at the Japanese Academy Film Prize for Monster and Godzilla Minus One, respectively, two starkly different roles compared to her performance in Kore-eda\u2019s most successful film so far, Shoplifters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first read the screenplay, I think I felt the same way viewers feel when they watch those scenes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThis rage towards the school and what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, as I read on my feelings change,\u201d she teased. \u201cBut I decided that I had to hang on to the initial rage I felt.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me that\u2019s all there was as Saori, there was just that rage from the initial part.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was reading the script, I tried not to focus, I was half closing my eyes as I was reading the rest of the parts!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Monster deftly handles hard-hitting topics such as single parenthood and child abuse at first before perspectives start to change in the second and third acts.<\/p>\n
Sakura\u2019s performance is consistent throughout, however, and she believes audiences worldwide will enjoy chewing on Kore-eda\u2019s difficult yet engaging subject matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt moved me to tears at the end,\u201d she told Express.co.uk.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people in Japan really took this movie to heart more than we imagined they would.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of people in Japan who love this film, and it feels like they\u2019re more invested in it than we expected.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I do Q&As with the director, for example, it feels like the audience knows Monster better than we do!\u201d<\/p>\n
Sakura was also incredibly impressed with the film\u2019s young actors S\u014dya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi, who portray the film\u2019s young friends Minato and Yori.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a scene in front of a hospital where my son starts running and then I follow,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t in the script that he should start running, in the script he actually squats down.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, it was coming to the end of the day, it was starting to get dark, we were running out of time and the scene wasn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d rehearsed it over and over. And in the end, he just broke out into a run. We knew if he was going to do this we wouldn\u2019t have been able to shoot it that day. We had lost the light because it was such a big change.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the performance was so good we decided to respect this new action that had come out of him spontaneously and film it another day.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result, I think it brought out an emotion in his performance that hadn\u2019t been there before. And that was very impressive to witness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sakura\u2019s work on Monster was a very different experience with Kore-eda, she says, but the award-winning star assured us she would leap at the chance to work with him again.<\/p>\n
Monster is available in UK cinemas from Friday, March 15.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] Monster is finally being released in UK cinemas this week, and Express.co.uk had the chance to speak to celebrated Japanese actress Sakura Ando about her latest complex role. In director Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s latest drama, Sakura portrays single mother Saori, who becomes unraveled when her fifth-grade son starts exhibiting strange behaviour, leading to an uncomfortable …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[765],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}