HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK Interview: Director Morihito Inoue Talks Jaws, Bureaucracy, and Omnipotent Screen Sharks

You've gotta love it when a film does what it says on the tin, and the title Hot Spring Shark Attack (and its original Japanese title, Onsen Shark) tells you exactly what to expect.

Take Jaws, add some customary communal bathing, put the sharks where they shouldn't be, add a coterie of opportunistic, bumbling, and generally incompetent bureaucrats, and stir - it's a refreshing broth.

Hot Spring Shark Attack is the debut feature of Morihito Inoue, a young director with a penchant for deploying kaiju and a deep knowledge of the humble shark's history on our cinema screens. As Utopia prepare to unleash Inoue's festival favourite on the unsuspecting American public, we sit down with this fresh director to discuss the origins of his delightfully biting caper - which is far more than Just Another B-movie.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of JAWS, which makes this a very good time for your film to surface. Was JAWS a formative film for you as a cinephile?

Morihito Inoue: Jaws is the progenitor of all shark films. As we were shooting this film in Atami, a seaside town here in Japan, we thought, well, okay, if we're using a seaside resort town, we have to do a Jaws homage, right? When I was writing this film, everything stemmed from Jaws.

Usually killer shark films have some kind of buildup to the first attack, but you just get right to it - to hilarious effect. How consciously are you trying to break those structural expectations and conventions? Is that the core of your humor, do you feel?

Shark films are obviously very popular, but the opening parts of shark films are often about waiting for the sharks to come. There's always this moment where you're expecting the sharks to pop up, but they don't. And that's kind of the fun of it.

This was the first time that I had the opportunity to write my own longform film. And so I thought - well - the sharks are in many respects the real protagonists, so what if I just went straight to it and got to the action? I thought it would be really fun to break from the mold in that sense.

What would you do if you were given a larger budget? Is that something you want, or do you want to stick to lower-budget films? If someone turned around tomorrow and said to you "okay, here's millions and millions of yen - go make a film", what would you say?

Obviously, having more money is very helpful in enabling you to do a lot of interesting things. If I had more money I would use it to full effect. I'm not really tied to the idea of low-budget films, I just work with what I have.

What made you want to become a filmmaker?

I didn't necessarily want to be a filmmaker - that wasn't my initial goal. I went to an art college here in Japan. I did a whole bunch of different things for my thesis projects before graduating, and one of the things that I ended up doing was making a kaiju movie - and that kaiju movie was really popular. So it was a strange twist of fate that brought me into this world. Then I got the chance to make Hot Spring Shark Attack. Now I think it's destiny.

This marriage of monster movie and bureaucratic satire is reminiscent of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's films SHIN GODZILLA and SHIN ULTRAMAN. What do you feel differentiates you and your work?

The idea of incompetent bureaucrats is a core part of Jaws, so the mayor's incompetence in the beginning of the movie was very much intended as a Jaws parody. But I love Hideaki Anno's work, Shin Godzilla especially - which was a large influence on me. I thought - okay, what if an idiot came up with Shin Godzilla? And then what if they made that film?

I'm going to be watching your career with great interest. What do you want to do next in your filmmaking?

Giant shark movies are definitely a love of mine, so I really enjoy working on them. I'd love to have a big budget to work on more shark stuff. At the same time, I'm a huge fan of mystery and detective novels. I'd love to shoot a movie where it's just one person monologuing and having a deep inner world where he's pondering a crime or something. Of course, saying that, right now we're making Hot Spring Shark Attack 2. I've been in this shark world for so long... I would like to escape the sharks at some point.

I hope you get to escape the sharks at some point. But I would like to ask, as a final question, what is it about sharks that you like so much? What do you find compelling about them?

I think it's the fact that they can do anything - they'll work with any idea that you have. The history of shark movies has created a culture where pretty much anything that you have a shark do is accepted. It's basically "Okay, as long as it's the shark doing it" - and that's maybe a bit rude to sharks. They're not quite as omnipotent as the movies make them seem.

I thought about this aspect of shark movies when writing Hotspring Shark Attack. Even though I could have thrown everything at the wall and said "Okay, they can do whatever they want, no worries", I did try to think of reasons why the sharks would be doing all these things when placed within this setting. I tried to ground it a little bit in reality.

Hot Spring Shark Attack is in theaters and on VoD now from Utopia. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes. With thanks to Gavin Greene for interpreting.