Completion screening event of new movie "Sandome no Satsujin"

The completion screening event of new movie "Sandome no Satsujin" was held at TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills on 31 July which was attended by the director Koreeda Hirokazu and cast members Fukuyama Masaharu, Yakusho Koji, Hirose Suzu, Yoshida Kotaro, Saito Yuki and Mitsushima Shinnosuke. The movie will be shown in cinemas from 9 September.

The movie is based on Koreeda's original script about the psychological drama between an elite lawyer played by Fukuyama who values winning over everything and a murderer played by Yakusho. The story which is from Shigemori's (Fukuyama) perspective, talks about how he takes on the case of Misumi (Yakusho) who is on trial for murder despite the low odds of winning the case. As he interacts with Misumi, Shigemori starts to realise how unconvincing Misumi's motive for killing is and wonders if the latter is the true murderer. Hirose will be playing the murder victim's daughter Yamanaka Sakie while Saito will be playing the victim's wife Mitsue. Yoshida will be playing Settsu Daisuke who works on the case together with Shigemori and Mitsushima will be playing a young lawyer Kawashima Teru who belongs to the same law firm as Shigemori. Matsuoka Izumi will be Hattori Akiko, an admin staff in the law firm while Ichikawa Mikako will be the prosecutor Shinohara Kazuki and Hashizume Isao will be Shigemori's father Akihisa who was the judge for Misumi's case 30 years ago.

During the event, Yoshida joked that he actually had a bad first impression of Fukuyama when they first met during the script-reading session. As they had never worked together before, Yoshida thought that it was rude for Fukuyama to avoid eye contact and not speak to him at all. However, Fukuyama clarified that he's actually someone who's shy in front of strangers even though he's already nearing 50 (he is 48 years old now). He misunderstood that Yoshida is like him so that's why he didn't dare to approach the latter. As such, Fukuyama apologised for his rude behaviour to which Yoshida said that he found out during the filming that Fukuyama is a much nicer guy than he had assumed initially.

Fukuyama also recounted that when he acted in another Koreeda movie i.e. "Soshite Chichi ni naru", it was fun to be working with the child actors who managed to follow the script even though they were told the lines on the day of the filming instead of making them memorise the script. However, this time round, it was more difficult because the script was an original one by the director so there were a lot of things which needed to be figured out on a trial-and-error basis thus resulting in many surprises and discoveries along the way.

Sources: Oricon / Eiga.com