Shy foreigner finds her voice amid culture clash
S.F. filmmaker bases feature on her experience learning to speak English
When San Francisco filmmaker Atsuko Hirayanagi was a graduate student at New York University and was asked to write “an idea for a movie about someone you know,” the memory of a shy classmate from her childhood in Japan came flooding back.
“I remembered a girl in my elementary school who never spoke in class, and that when I first came to the U.S., I basically became just like her, the girl with no voice,” Hirayanagi said during a recent interview about the inspiration for her debut feature film, “Oh Lucy!” It opens Friday, March 16.
“I’ve always been intrigued by people who are very quiet.
Read The Chronicle’s review in Datebook Friday, March 16.
They say little in life, but maybe they have more secrets. It’s their silence that makes me wonder, what would it be like if they had permission to let it all out, and say everything they’ve been hiding on the inside?”
Hirayanagi grew up in Chiba, Japan, moved to Los Angeles for high school and studied acting at San Francisco State University before deciding to get behind the camera. She has lived in Noe Valley since 2014 with her husband, daughter, 10, and son, 5.
During a conversation at the San Francisco Public Library branch on Jersey Street, just blocks from Hirayanagi’s home, where she wrote drafts of her script, she recalled how, in Japan, she “answered the questions in class,” was a “tomboy who played soccer with the boys” and even had a rebellious streak. Yet cultural dislocation as a teenager intensified her natural shyness — an experience she has wanted to explore as a storyteller ever since.
Hirayanagi first probed the idea in her master’s thesis film, a 22-minute character sketch (also titled “Oh Lucy!”) about a midlife Tokyo loner, Setsuko, whose days are spent shuffling between her monotonous office job and tiny, cluttered apartment, and whose only close bond is with her free-spirited niece. Only when Setsuko enrolls in an English-language class with a charismatic American instructor, who insists she wear a blond wig and take on an American alter-ego, Lucy, does she begins to emerge from her shell.
That 2014 short film won awards at film festivals all over the world (including prizes at Cannes and Sundance) and drew the attention of Will Ferrell and director-producer Adam McKay (“The Big Short”), who signed on to produce a featurelength version of the same story.
“The short was just the beginning of Lucy’s journey,” said Hirayanagi. “She’s so stuck in the beginning, and I wanted to see how far she would go toward coming into her own personality.”
The culture clash of ancient, tradition-bound Japan and youth-absorbed America fuels much of the film’s humor, but Hirayanagi also uses the contrasts between the two countries to pose deeper questions about the roles of place, culture and language in determining how we become, and express, our truer selves.
“How we can be the same person in two places, but more ourselves in one than the other?” Hirayanagi said. “I was the same person in both (the U.S. and Japan), but when my circumstances changed, I changed.”
When Setsuko (played by Shinobu Terajima, an acclaimed Japanese actress from a long line of Kabuki performers), meets her new English teacher, John (Josh Hartnett), she is caught offguard — yet captivated — by his direct American charm.
John gives Setsuko an unwelcome embrace (“I’m a hugger,” he says) and tells her she has to be “lazy and relaxed” to speak English like an American.
“This is the magic part,” he says, giving her a blond wig and an English name tag: Lucy.
Hirayanagi was struck during her Englishlanguage immersion as an adolescent that “American English is so expressive. You have to use your hands, open your mouth, even open your eyes wide and move your eyebrows” to sound convincingly American.
“Now I’m comfortable with it, but at first it was very uncomfortable. Japanese is smaller, quieter. You can almost keep your mouth closed and still speak.”
Personal transformation is by its nature unpredictable, and Hirayangi convincingly shows Lucy in a kind of delayed adolescence, following a crooked path toward reinvention. She “thinks she has found herself,” said Hirayanagi, when she follows John, who has taken up with her niece, Mika (Shioli Kutsuna), to San Diego on a wildly out-ofcharacter whim.
“But then she has to question if she is just playing another role,” said Hirayanagi. “We are all playing roles, different identities, all the time. It’s not always easy to know which one feels most honest.
“I often say that being confused is a great thing,” Hiryanagi said, about what she hopes audiences are left pondering after “Oh Lucy!” “Being uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing. It’s OK. Sometimes you have to try something, break something, do some damage to find a new part of yourself.”