‘Dreaming Awake’: how a 90-year-old became cinema’s oldest first-time director
To borrow a cliché, most people with aspirations of forging a career as a movie director likely think of it as “a young man’s game”.
Sure, there are plenty of elderly directors out there, with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola still stepping behind the camera in their 80s. However, both men did start directing in their 20s, and that may be why the perception persists that most directors need to start young.
In truth, though, there’s no age limit on directing, and if you don’t helm your first feature as a young whippersnapper, that’s not necessarily a barrier to success. Take French filmmaker Claire Denis, for example. She didn’t make her first feature until she was 42, and has since enjoyed a 30+ year career as one of the finest arthouse auteurs in modern cinema. Michael Haneke, another French director who has twice won the Palme d’Or, was 47 when he made The Seventh Continent.
In terms of more mainstream Hollywood talents, Ridley Scott and Clint Eastwood directed their first pictures at 40: The Duellists and Play Misty For Me, respectively. You could feasibly call each of these directors a late bloomer, yet this didn’t stop them from forging long-lasting careers.
However, these directors who began making headway in their 40s are mere babies compared to Takeo Kimura, who holds the Guinness World Record for ‘Oldest debut as a feature film director’. Astonishingly, despite working as an art director since 1949 and contributing to more than 200 films in his career, the Japanese filmmaker didn’t helm his first movie until he was the grand old age of 90. Even more incredibly, he wrote the film, too, which was based on a novel he self-published, and appeared in it as an actor.
Dreaming Awake, released in 2008, is a drama about an elderly university art professor who strikes up a friendship with a 26-year-old student obsessed with the senselessness of war. The two become entangled in each other’s lives, with the film highlighting the various differences and similarities between their generations.
Kimura depicts the professor ruminating over the paths not taken and struggling with memories of actually living through wartime. The student, on the other hand, has yet to truly live life and is so listless and depressed that he quits school, prompting the professor to write letters to convince him to return to his studies.
According to Seijun Suzuki, one of the most famous directors in Japanese cinema history, Kimura approached every project as if he had nothing to lose, long before he made Dreaming Awake. He served as the art director on a huge number of Suzuki’s films over a 37-year period, including classics like 1964’s Gate of Flesh, 1966’s Tokyo Drifter, 1980’s Zigeunerweisen, and 2001’s Pistol Opera.
“Kimura makes every movie as if it were his last,” Suzuki once said. “‘If this is my last, then I can do anything I want.’ That’s why I love working with Kimura as an art director.”
In the end, Kimura realised his dream of directing his own feature film only a year before passing away. At 91, he died of interstitial pneumonia, leaving behind an incredible body of work, not to mention an inspirational story for anyone who thinks they are too old to pursue their passion.
