‘Look Back’ Breakouts Furi Nanase and Rokka Okada on Growing Up on a Hirokazu Koreeda Set

Like the characters they would ultimately play, child actors Furi Nanase and Rokka Okada could easily have become rivals when they first arrived on the set of Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda‘s latest acclaimed drama, Look Back. Both 11-year-old fifth graders when filming began, the two actresses came to the film with opposite levels of experience and very different dispositions.

Okada had been appearing in Japanese film and TV projects since she was an infant. “I’ve been working in this business since before I could even understand things, so it’s like everyday life to me now,” she says. The young veteran was chosen for her role for her layered poise and Koreeda’s confidence that she was up to the task of mastering the dialect of Japan’s remote Akita prefecture, the place her character would call home. Nanase, meanwhile, was a total newcomer to the screen who had been scouted and picked purely on the basis of her natural, bubbly charisma and seemingly boundless confidence.

“I remember looking at her on the first day and thinking, Hmm, is she really so good?” says Nanase. “But then we were introduced and started talking, and I was like, wow, this girl is really interesting!”

The pair, who later shared their 12th birthdays on set just one day apart, became instant best buds. By the time of Look Back‘s well-received world premiere in Venice last week, they had grown inseparable. As a duo, they landed on various fashion outlets’ best-dressed-of-the-festival lists, thanks to their stylishly retro outfits and adorable antics on the red carpet, where they struck coordinated poses and jumped in the air in unison.

The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Nanase and Okada on the Lido the following day for what amounted to their very first interview with the international press. 

“I can’t imagine how I could have gotten through this whole experience without her by my side,” says Okada. “I think I would have been really scared, but instead it has been so fun together.”

Among Japan’s most decorated contemporary directors, Koreeda’s great hallmark, aside from the gentle humanism of his storytelling, is the unforgettable work he consistently gets from child actors. His 2004 breakthrough, the child-abandonment drama Nobody Knows, would see its 12-year-old star Yuya Yagira take home the Cannes Film Festival’s best actor award, making him the youngest winner in the festival’s history. Much of the director’s most feted work that has followed has hinged upon delicately naturalistic performances from kids, from the switched-at-birth saga Like Father, Like Son (Cannes’ jury prize winner in 2013) to his Palme d’Or triumph, Shoplifters (2018), and recent best screenplay winner, Monster (2023).

Nanase says she wasn’t sure what to expect for her audition with Koreeda and his producers, because they hadn’t sent her any scenes to prepare. Instead, they said she should just come to the meeting and be herself.

“The moment he entered the room, he had this aura of someone who takes his time and has everything under control, which was very comforting,” Nanase remembers. “He spoke to me like I was a grown-up person, but he was very kind and gentle.”

Later, on set, Koreeda would explain each scene to his inexperienced star and then give her the dialog shortly before rolling cameras.

“He would share the main idea behind the scene and tell me what he would like me to do,” she says. “But then he would say, ‘What do you think about this? Do you think it’s a good idea? Is there anything else you want to try?'”

Nanase adds: “Before we started, I was a little worried about how everything would feel on set, but it never once made me nervous.”

Before preproduction, Koreeda’s only request to his actors was that they not read the manga (Japanese comic) on which Look Back is based, nor watch the popular anime of the same name that was previously adapted from it. Instead, Koreeda’s team suggested they watch Shoplifters and Monster with their parents, to give them a sense of the endeavor they were joining.

“Both films had something in them that sticks in your heart, something that you don’t find in normal movies,” says Okada. “I thought they were beautiful.”

Look Back is a feature adaptation of Japanese artist Tatsuki Fujimoto’s wildly popular manga of the same name. A coming-of-age drama of delicate simplicity, the story follows Fujino (played by newcomer Nanase), a vivacious grade-schooler whose gift at drawing comic strips has made her a minor celebrity at her small-town elementary school in remote northern Japan. Fujino’s budding drive to become a great artist is further inflamed when she sees the drawings of Kyomoto (Okada), a reclusive classmate who rarely leaves home but whose work has a surprisingly adult-like sophistication. What begins as a fierce rivalry between the two eventually blossoms into an adoring friendship and manga-making partnership — Fujino draws the characters, Kyomoto does backgrounds — as the story follows the two girls over 13 years as they come of age, get a first taste of professional publishing success, and eventually experience a heartbreaking falling out that sends them down separate paths.

Shot on location in Japan’s northern Tohoku region over the course of a full year, the film is positively Studio Ghibli-esque in its reverent portrayal of childhood innocence in the Japanese countryside — amid the shifting beauty of the seasons and the halting wonders and dramas of growing up. Midway through the film, adult actresses Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita, who bear an uncanny resemblance to the kids, step in to play the more mature Fujino and Kyomoto.

The only in-depth preparation the project required of its younger stars, aside from dialect coaching for Okada, was intensive drawing practice. As in the film, Nanase was trained to draw figures, while Okada learned to sketch backgrounds and panoramas. Koreeda brought the two on a shopping outing to a bookshop in Tokyo where they bought loads of drawing books and materials, and later they took online drawing classes and met regularly with a professional manga artist.

“All of the directors I’ve worked with so far have always been very nice to me, but director Koreeda is on another level,” says Okada. “He is so good at giving advice. I remember when we were shooting one of the first drawing scenes together, he told us to focus all our attention on the sound of our pens scratching the paper, like it’s music, and that was somehow very helpful.”

Above all, Look Back is a story about the making of artists, and the film’s two young leads say they intend to carry some of that spirit into the next stage of their careers.

“My character, Fujino, has so much determination once she decides she wants to become a manga artist, and that’s how I want to be too,” says Nanase. “I’ll be carrying her with me when I go to my next audition — absolute confidence!”

Okada, despite her lifelong acting background, says Look Back has similarly changed how she thinks about her path.

“Kyomoto is able to look inside herself and think deeply about what kind of artist she wants to become,” says the 12-year-old. “I want to try to do that too — so I can try to reach higher and higher with my acting.”