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| "Women's Life and Health" is the interview series that features active professional women about their health, lifestyle and career. |
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| Interview
vol.2 |
Sachiko Watanabe, Film Critique -Part2 |
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| Finally, I’d like to ask a bit about you yourself. What got you into this business? |
| Me, I just love film. When I was in my first grade in elementary school, my parents took me to see “Snow White.” It was such a beautiful world and I thought to myself that I always wanted to be near films. The more films I watched, the more I realized that I loved the thrills, the suspense, and the excitement of it all. And that’s how it’s stayed right up into adulthood. I thought that if I wanted to do something related to movies, I had better study film. I majored in film at university but after I graduated, I realized that it’s not easy finding a job as a film major. I wanted to be near films but what exactly does that mean? I thought over this question but I couldn’t find an answer. So after I graduated, I took up a part-time job. One day, however, I saw a listing in the classifieds section of the newspaper: “Staff sought for editorial department of film magazine”. I replied to it straight away. |
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| You didn’t think about producing films? Did you want to make your own? |
| I didn’t have the desire to make any; I liked watching them. I’ll tell you, though, because I like films, I wanted to see what it was like on a movie set. When I was a child I appeared in two films. One of them was a film directed by the great Keisuke Kinoshita. At the time, though, I went without having any idea of who he was. I didn’t want to be an actress, though, so I never pursued anything after that. |
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| So then you joined the editorial department of a film magazine. |
| On my first day at the magazine company, I was given five pictures. They were a group of pictures of an actress wearing hats, and I was told to write captions for each of them. But I had no idea that I was going to have to write copy, so I had no idea of what to write. I carried the things around all day, and my boss was really furious at me! He said, “I don’t care what you write but just write something!” So I did, and that was my very first copy. Even now the memory is fresh in my mind. It was a Sophia Loren nightmare! |
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| Ha, ha, ha, ha! All five pictures were of Sophia Loren? |
| Yeah, but all the hats were different. Nevertheless, I studiously looked through the dictionary...‘crochet’, ‘casket’...but I just couldn’t get the copy written (laughs). It was an absolute nightmare of a first day. |
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| And your career took off from there? |
| Yes. Because it was a film magazine, it had a mountain of stock photos. When some were going to be used for the magazine they went off to the printers, and when they were finished they’d come back. My main job was putting the pictures back in their original pouches based on the work they came from. Thanks to this job, though, I was able to remember film scenes and performers. I was still young and they called me the “memory whiz.” |
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| No kidding? |
| One year and eight months later I got married and went on my honeymoon. When I came back, however, I was told that the magazine had closed down (laughs). The main publication dealt with handicrafts-about which I had no interest-so it was back to the classifieds for me (laughs). I found an ad for a company in Ginza “seeking a chief editor for a PR magazine.” I went down there and sold myself well enough that they hired me. I went from the bottom of the ladder to being chief editor. |
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| That’s amazing, to go suddenly all the way up to being chief editor. |
| It wasn’t too big a deal. I’d been doing this sort of stuff for a year and eight months, i.e. I had experienced with what happens each month close to two times each, and I knew what was going on during each season. Plus, because this was a PR magazine, they’d want to do a lot of films and plays, which was no problem for me. Over time I got buried more and more by movie articles! But after two years I got tired of it. My friend had gotten set up in the movie industry, and I thought, if I could get two or three jobs, I could go independent, so I ended up going freelance. I was about 28 or 29 at the time. |
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| What’s the most interesting part of your work? |
| That would be being able to encounter interesting and exciting films. Definitely. But, you know, I get betrayed about two-thirds of the time! I probably watch about 200 films a year. No matter how much I love watching movies, though, it’s hard not being able to say that my hobby is to ‘appreciate movies’, because I’ve made my hobby into my job. I love reading and theater, especially musicals. I look forward to the last three weeks or so of each year when I go to New York to watch musicals. But, because these get adapted into films, these other hobbies are-in fact-part of my job. After I first read the major bestseller The Da Vinci Code, I waited until it was made into a movie. When it came out, and I went to see it I wrote it up for the newspaper that very day. It was the first written review of the movie in Japan. |
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