NINO - December MORE 2008 interview (part 4/end)
Nino shares about his creative writing streak.
To those who've left comments, thanks for all the support so far. I'm currently looking for magazine scans which I can translate, so if you have good quality scans which clearly show the Japanese text, please let me know! I'm game for translating interviews for other Arashi members, should they be available.
In the meantime, enjoy the last bit!
You can live whatever life you want through your imagination and dreams.
With regards to acting, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to have gone through the same experiences or emotions as the person you’re portraying. I would think that for a girl who hasn’t given birth, she would be able to understand the feelings of a mother, right? Whilst in life, you could return to a path you’ve trodden on, in acting, it’s the actor’s job to walk in the path of someone he’s never known.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily easier to act out a certain role just because you’ve gone through the same experiences as that character. On the other hand, it would actually be more difficult for me. For a person who’s naturally smart from birth, it would be challenging for him to take on the role of a smart person. Well you see, they probably never thought about why they were so smart in the first place, right? I think a well-suited role would probably be diametrically opposite to the actor’s true essence. It’s precisely because I’m different from the person I’m portraying that I can let my imagination run wild and think of endless possibilities.
I’m a person who likes to daydream and fantasise. That’s why I find acting interesting. It’s the same case whenever I write [stories]. When I was 18 and wanted to become a director, I told this to the management and they told me to try writing a story…
So I wrote two stories, each with a motif fashioned after the Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid tells the story of a mermaid who fell in love, and in order to pursue her beloved prince, paid the price of losing her senses gradually. In a bid to get her beloved to reciprocate her love, to just turn his face to her, she loses her senses. Sight, sense of hearing and taste went away one by one. In the end, when she thought that her lover had died, she cut her own body. By that time, her sense of touch had already been lost, so she could feel no pain. So in other words, although she badly wanted to die, she couldn’t. Thus she lived on eternally in despair. Looking back, that was really surreal. I wonder why I wrote something like that. (laughs)