How Genki Kawamura turned a video game into a feature-length film

Here, the game’s player character is represented as the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), who witnesses a man berating a woman and her crying infant on the subway at the start of the film and does nothing about it. He departs his train, and just like the game, finds himself caught in an endless tunnel, where his only company is a smiling man (Yamato Kochi) and a boy (Naru Asanuma), and his only clue to his circumstances is a sign that reads, “Do not overlook any anomalies. If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back. Go out from Exit 8.” Counted among those anomalies: a literalized Mona Lisa effect, rains and floods of blood, doors that lead to an abyss, and vermin shaped like sensory organs—ears, mouths, and you get the idea.

The Lost Man’s ordeal is horrifying, no doubt, especially for those of us who know what it’s like to squeeze through a crowded train station at rush hour. But Kawamura means to achieve an emotional effect with Exit 8 in tandem with its horror element. I talked to him, through his interpreter, Mikey, about personalizing the “stuff” of the game in order to create his protagonist and a narrative throughline, and his hope for what his audience will take away from the film in an era of worldwide selfishness.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Andy Crump: What led you to the material you used to fill in the gaps around the game? The game is very straightforward. You don't know anything about the character you're playing; it's just you. So I'm curious about the Lost Man's backstory and what brought you to that character as the protagonist.
Genki Kawamura: I commute every day on the Tokyo subway during rush hour myself, and I know there are a lot of people taking the train together. But despite being together, we're all very isolated. Everyone's on their cell phones looking at different timelines, and even if there was a baby crying on the train, some people might not even notice it happening. Even within their smartphones, there's some terrifying stuff on their timelines, wars happening around the world, which you also see, but pretend not to see. 

None of us are responsible for directly killing anyone, but I think we are guilty of pretending not to notice certain anomalies happening throughout the world. So I thought, “What if we take those, place them in this context of a white corridor that keeps looping through itself and make people come face to face with some of these sins that are happening around the world? What might that look like?” That was the origin of the story for our main character.

AC: I keyed into that at the start of the movie. A lot of characters walking through the frame are on their phones. Our phones are portals to nothing but bad news, yet the event that catches our protagonist's attention is a man verbally abusing this woman because her baby won't stop crying. The film feels to me more focused on the things we can confront versus the things that we can't. Can you speak to that?
GK: The design of the game itself is quite simple: if you notice an anomaly, you turn back; if you don't say anything, you keep going forward. When trying to apply those same rules to our surroundings in our daily life, at first I felt it needed to be much more subtle, and then the more subtle the anomaly, perhaps, you might not even notice you're ignoring everything, and you get stuck in this loop where you're going through exit zero indefinitely. But as you are able to notice each anomaly, I think our protagonist, in a way, is working his way up to exit number eight, and then the types of anomalies, the types of decisions, the choices he has to make, carry more and more weight, ultimately leading up to this idea of “do I become a father or not?” So I think having anomalies that you're able to actually act upon is quite important. But it starts very small, and then the responsibility and the type of decisions and choices become bigger.

AC: Because that moment at the start is the kind of thing where somebody should intervene. It’s satisfying that the thing (the Lost Man) has control over is mundane, and with the potentiality of fatherhood at hand for him, it's meaningful that the event he neglects is between a parent and a stranger. Was it intentional that his journey, wrestling with fatherhood, is reflected by the mother, her baby, and the abusive passenger?
GK: Looking at the current state of the world, I think in general on macro and micro levels, everyone's become a lot more selfish, even the geopolitical landscape, and on a country level, I think all the nations are very focused on their country first. The same applies on an individual level as well. So within that context, I think it's become very, very hard to be a parent in this world, and I think that's a reflection of all of our own lives as well. So I wanted to take that idea and link it to this video game so we can see, in a way, on both the macro and micro scale, what type of context we live in as individuals as well as on a much larger level.

AC: I agree with the assessment about the world being a more selfish place. I think that's something that's reflected in actually a great deal of contemporary horror cinema, too. Is that something you've noticed with the genre, too, or is that something personal to you as an artist that you wanted to tackle?
GK: So, in addition to being a filmmaker, I'm also a writer. I've written six novels, my first one, If Cats Disappeared from the World, being a bestseller. One of the common denominators (in my work) is this exploration of what happens within the human and not what's happening externally—so, what's happening within the mind? How are these fragmented memories affecting us? What kind of regret do we carry? That, to me, is much scarier than monsters or ghosts, and I think it's what's happening within humans that ultimately leads to all the killing and wars that we see around the world. 

When designing (Exit 8’s) story, I really wanted the anomalies to be a representation of that very subtle guilt and the sins we carry with us, and I hope that it's an exploration of the human mind in a way that helps all of us realize that, “Hey, well, maybe this is a little off or not.” That is what I also kept in mind when taking this video game underlying source material to Cannes. I think that helped a great deal. It's the first game adaptation that made it into that type of film festival circuit, which I think helped serve the overall narrative, as well.