"If I remember correctly, for a movie to be shown in February, shooting started in December or January." "As opening day drew near, shooting and editing were still underway." "That's the kind of circumstances Mr. Fukasaku worked under for Toei." "Toei staged a walkout." "It happened frequently those days." "I mean, Nikkatsu went under, and Daiei was closed down, so Toho decided not to make movies anymore." "But Toei continued making movies." "Since various types of work were discontinued because of the strikes, people had to take on all sorts of jobs." "But we took on what we could." "The director at the time was Mr. Fukasaku." "I wanted to work with Mr. Fukasaku, though I didn't know him." "So I offered to do it, and, luckily, we were able to join the Fukasaku team." "It meant I received the script and started work as assistant director that day." "Shooting had already been underway, but it had been stopped on about the third or fourth day of the shoot." "The work had been stopped." "The opening date was set, so the job had to be done." "We were asked to work and came on to the job as assistant directors." "We took the jobs the day we got the script." "We hadn't read the script yet, and didn't know the story." "All the assistant directors were in the same situation." "We had to learn everything from Mr. Fukasaku." ""We've shot up to this point, so today we'd do this scene."" "We'd be flipping the pages, wondering who the actors were." "We saw names like Tetsuya Watari and Yumi Takigawa, and so on." "We didn't even know what sort of scenes were to be filmed." "The first day was long and stressful, but Mr. Fukasaku explained everything to us." "We joined the team without knowing what Mr. Kinji Fukasaku looked like." "We looked for him, but the set was huge." "There were about a hundred people on the set altogether, and this one guy was shouting." "At first we wondered who he was." "We figured he was a prop guy or a lighting techie." "Then we found out he was the director." "I think realism is the true essence of Fukasaku movies." "Realism is quite evident in his films, especially in the violent scenes." "For example, you actually get hit, or you actually fall." "You really fall down the stairs." "Such truly realistic scenes." "For instance, if someone falls down the stairs and strikes something," "Mr. Fukasaku wanted the sound of bone hitting hard." "That's how much he demanded." "So you need people who'll go the distance." "And people who became stars on the Fukasaku team were just those people." "That kind of acting made them stand out, and they'd be cast again the next time." "That's how it seemed to go." "Going back to that scene at the end, a man commits suicide by jumping from a prison rooftop." "In that scene too, he'd have a stuntman actually jump." "It was a four-story building." "We had a gymnastic mat on the ground, and on it were cardboard boxes placed like this." "Before the shoot, he had a test object dropped onto the mat to check how high it rebounded." "After this very primitive test, we were going to have a live person jump." "You only get one chance to film that." "We set two or three cameras on the ground to shoot the jump scene." "We accompanied the stuntman to the roof." "We asked him if he'd be all right." "The place where he'd jump from was quite a distance from where we were, and looking down from the roof, the mat below seemed quite a ways off." "So we were concerned he might fall between the mat and the building, or on the other side of the mat." "We watched from above, concerned." "We had a rough idea from the first test where he'd land." "He was to jump just like that." "But being a member of the Fukasaku team, he was confident he could pull it off." "So he'd do the stunt with no fear." "When a guy's determined to do something, he's gonna do whatever he has to for the director's sake." "Or he's gonna do it for the production." "He'd do whatever it took to get the job done." "And it always gives Mr. Fukasaku great pleasure to watch it."