Born in Osaka in 1969, Toshiaki Toyoda must surely be the only film-maker in the world whose entrée to the industry was through being a junior chess champion. From the age of nine until he was 17, Toyoda was a member of of the highly prestigious Shogi Promotion Association (shogi is a Japanese form of chess).
“I was even called a genius,” he later recalled. “I could leave school early anytime if I just told my teacher, ‘I am playing chess today.’ But around the time when I was 17, the serious chess matches started to be quite hard for me. I was beginning to feel that I wanted a normal life. I think I would have turned professional if I had kept on playing chess, but I wouldn’t have become a grand master.”
By the age of 21, Toyoda had become something of a juvenile delinquent but his life changed when he saw and was impressed by Juni Sakamoto’s first film Dotsuitarunen/Knockout. With nothing to his name except two guitars and 20,000 yen borrowed from his parents, he travelled to Tokyo where he contacted Sakamoto: “I thought, ‘Films are great. Oh, I want to make such films.’ Then I came to Tokyo and wrote a letter to Mr Sakamoto: ‘I saw Knockout in Osaka and I was terribly moved. I will do anything. Please let me work for you.” So I started to work for the Arato Genijiiro Production, the company that was producing Mr. Sakamoto’s films at that time.”
In his ambition to become a director, Toyoda was advised by a producer at Arato Genijiro to write about what he knew - hence his first produced screenplay, the chess drama Ote/Checkmate, co-written with and directed by Sakamoto. keen to learn as much as possible Toyoda helped on the production as assistant director and even worked as manager of the Tokyo cinema where the film was shown.
After writing another screenplay for Sakamoto, Toyoda made his directorial debut with Pornostar which was a smash hit at festivals in both Japan and Europe and which earned him the ‘Best Newcomer’ award from the Japanese Film Director’s Association. “From the beginning I knew that the theme of Pornostar was something I had to film in order to go to the next step,” he explained. “I had already decided by myself that I would do this when making my first film. I was not going to change my mind even if anyone else had told me that it was nonsense. I wanted to retrieve the feeling of a serious match, sitting down in front of the chessboard face to face again.”
The success of Pornostar allowed Toyoda to fashion a feature-length boxing documentary, Unchain, out of footage which he had been shooting beforehand. He followed this with Blue Spring, adapted from a collection of autobiographical short stories written by manga artist Matsumoto Taiyo, and seen by some critics as a sort of follow-up to Pornostar, since both films deal with violent unrest among young people.
His most recent film is Nine Souls, of which he said, “I’ve wanted to make a prison-break movie ever since I became involved in the film business. It’s a way of escaping my own blocked feelings, society and myself.”
