JR Heffelfinger is one of those people who, upon entering the room, you know they’re doing something colorful with and for this life. A storyteller of the highest caliber, rarely seen without a camera in one hand and his trumpet in the other—although his newborn daughter might be currently demanding both—“Heff” as he’s known to his inner sanctum has been capturing and documenting since he was a teenager.
He not only was a brother from the minute we met—hazy frames of our galavanting around LA, New Orleans and his hometown of Williamsburg, Brooklyn immediately come to mind as I write this—but one who taught me the beauty of a story in its simplicity. And while I was supposed to be focusing on telling him my own story that one balmy Manhattan afternoon in his studio, I’ll admit to having absorbed everything he was able to do, this one-man show, obsessed with giving a voice to those without.
Heff cut his teeth under Spike Lee’s 40 Acres & A Mule production company, and his first project—a feature film, which happened to be in Japanese, Niji No Shita Ni—and has since gone on to produce for Facebook, Al-Jazeera and Amazon, as well as winning a Webby Award in 2013 with Howcast, and his most recent project, 8:15 Hiroshima, somehow finds a way to take a gut-wrenching story and turn it into something heartwarming.
And while he’s technically on maternity leave with his wife and their 2-month old, he somehow found time between dirty diapers and emotional breakdowns (his), to talk to an old friend about his new project.
Brother, I have to start asking about that incredible opening score—the voices when he talks about the explosion…
This is a composition by Hiroshima’s own Toshio Hosokawa, the piece is called “Ave Maria”
I had been invited to see the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra by Akiko’s cousin Bungo—he took us to that Okonomiyaki joint I told you about. I saw the premiere of a trumpet concerto (you know I had to go) by Toshio Hosokawa. I fell in love with his music and then explored his work more closely. Ave Maria made so much sense on so many levels. I wrote him a letter and with the right connections we got in touch with him and he was very generous with licensing us the music for this film.
That opening montage is stunning. Where was it filmed?
Thank you. I had this idea about radio frequencies taking us across time. The first shot is of Shiji’s granddaughter in the car with her family - we hear about the doomsday clock moving closer to midnight - we change the radio. The second is a shot at a middle school - it’s actually the middle school where Shiji ended up going to after he got separated from his father. They are listening to the news about 9/11. It was the morning we had just got the OK from the school to come for Akiko to give a little talk about her father.
Fun fact—and this happened a lot with this film—I said to Akiko, what if we could get a class of kids together in a room for this shot. We had so much support for the entire city, from the mayor and governors office, the Hiroshima film commission, for this we are truly thankful. The last shot is of a guy working at Shinji’s business, one he started shortly after the war - the news there is of the assassination of Kennedy. And that brings us to a radio broadcast young Shinji is listening to on a radio he is working on. The broadcast we hear is from a real transcript from a Tokyo Rose broadcast, which was US propaganda radio.
Filming was done in Hiroshima proper and in New York City. Hiroshima over the course of 7 days and all the re-enactments involving VFX were filmed at BeElectric Studios in Bushwick over the course of 2 days (not much time).
Another fun fact: Slow Motion shots of Shinji and Fukuichi’s feet walking over broken glass were shot in the back alley of the studio in Brooklyn.
And yet another fun fact: The black rain slow mo shot (often used on posters) was the final shot we took at the green screen studio. We had gone over on time and this was the final day of shooting, we had called wrap and everyone was saying their tearful goodbyes and heading out the door, our actor who plays young Shinji (Jonathan Tanigaki) had gotten his prosthetics removed and nearly cleaned up. “One last shot!” I cried, and we grabbed one of the most important shots of the film - the black rain scene.
And this is a true story.
Yes.
How is it being an American in Japan directing a film about the war?
My mission as an artist is to tell stories that unveil hidden truths about the human condition, give voice to the voiceless and make the invisible visible. Though I am American, I am also a New Yorker and of Puerto Rican Heritage, I think growing up in New York City and having had the opportunity to travel and film around the world I consider myself a global citizen, and I think that perspective is important when approaching a subject like this. In terms of the war and this specific event, I don’t think I ever grasped the gravity of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki until I had gone to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum and delved into the archives and of course read Akiko’s book and listened to her father’s story. This was nearly 80 years ago and it’s often understood from a perspective that is 30,000 feet in the sky looking down and certainly in black and white. What I wanted to do was to bring you there.
It views like a play - how did your vision for how to shoot this come about?
Figuring out how to tell this story wasn’t easy but I came up with the idea to have the film center around a re-enactment of an interview with Shinj (portrayed by the brilliant Sotaro Tanaka), based on passages from Akiko’s wonderful book, 8:15 A True Story of Survival and Forgiveness from Hiroshima, of which the film is based - the book covers so much more - we worked on distilling it into something we could shoot with the time/money constraints we had. This was a budget friendly way to tell the story and carefully choose which re-enactments we absolutely needed and could pull off to tell the story.
The real Shinji Mikamo who I had the opportunity to meet, was still alive when we filmed this, though he was bed ridden and in no condition for a film production let alone a bedside interview. Finding a Japanese actor who could portray Shinji and tell the story in English was a dream and a wish that like many things along the way came into being. In that way a lot of this was divinely guided, of this I am certain.
This isn’t your first film and it’s not your first film in Japanese.
Let me start off by saying, my Japanese is good enough to get me into and out of a bar fight… The world had changed on September 11th, I graduated from BU the following spring and I wanted to see the world. I was offered a job to teach English in Tokyo and I took it. I had gone with some of my closest friends but we were all dispatched just far away from one another to have to make a solid go of it each on our own. I lived there for 2 years and 3 months. While there I wrote a screenplay; workshopping scenes in my classes, of course in English and I made sure I worked in the language structure we were covering that day, so as not to attract the attention of my bosses.
This is a much longer story than what you may need now but I made a film called Niji no Shita Ni / Under The Rainbow, a Neo-realist drama about the life a over-burdened and underpaid middle aged salaryman who is no longer in love with his wife, is humiliated at work but manages to escape for his troubles from the music he listens to through the wall. My students and community helped greatly, and I sold my body to science (another story for another day) to fund it. I spent a week on Kagoshima island at a health clinic where I storyboarded the film and won some additional money in a poker tournament we got going with the other gaijin. The film had its world premiere at the 28th Mill Valley Film Festival. It unfortunately has a killer soundtrack and I never properly got clearance for it so it’s not streaming anywhere at the moment.
I noticed you (first, by the way) and also Nolan both made the simple shot of flaming fire into an important visual. Aside from the obvious, why?
The building blocks of the universe had been weaponized. Fire consumed everything. The heat from the blast was 5x hotter than the sun. As Shinji said “It was hell on earth.” Flattered to be compared to Nolan’s Oppenheimer in this regard, of course we didn’t have the same budget, we had 1 tenth of 1 percent of the Oppenheimer budget. Massive shout out to Nick Von Gremp who was my VFX artist on this.
“They finally dropped them” — interesting choice to use that (or leave that), as the discussion seems to revolve around that vs. “they dropped them”.
When Fukuichi says this he is referring to the intense firebombing of Tokyo that had been happening. He didn’t know it was THE bomb, they did know it was something different and far worse than they could have imagined.
“Not a single star” — is this true?
According to interviews with Shinji as documented in the book by his daughter Akiko, there was not a single star in the sky - I imagine this was due to smoke and cloud cover, there was black rain that fell from the sky.
You must have seen this film and the footage more than 100 times. What keeps you from being immune now to the power of these images and story?
As an artist we have to confront unpleasant things and it's our job to be able to transform that information into a story that will move your audience, sometimes to feel a certain way, in a documentary it’s often to share information about the truth or ideally tap into some universal truth. Immune maybe isn’t the word, because images, lines, performances stay with me, I suppose I experience them differently the more I come into contact with them, perhaps a transmutation takes place… though there is suffering, there is also beauty; yes, in this case burned and under layers of debris but it is there; the love between a parent and his child, the resilience of the human spirit, the freedom in forgiveness… for me there is profound joy is in the process of unearthing these things and then in holding it up for you the viewer to see.
This actor, the main guy - I mean, it’s one thing to act with someone, opposite someone, but how hard was it what he did for this film? And in his second language?
Sotaro Tanaka is a genius and I hope to work with him again. Mind you we had one day with him at a sound stage in Hiroshima. He loved the book so much and knew the story of Shinji as stories about Hibakusha are covered by local and national news media. I think having the opportunity to express himself through the role of Shinji and have it be a re-enactment of an interview allowed him an opportunity to confront something that has shaped Japan and Japanese lives ever since. We are all taught to varying degrees about WWII, Japan’s involvement, the bomb and the aftermath, and the post war reconstruction. I cannot speak for him but maybe you should.
There’s a poignant part of the film where the subject of shadows being forever etched onto things - is this an actual thing?
Yes, the heat from the blast was so hot it burnt shadows into the ground and in this case, the shadow of the hand onto the face of his father’s pocket watch.
So since you mentioned it, can we talk about the watch?
I’ll try not to give anything away here, but… actually, it’s impossible not to, so let me rework the question slightly:
If you can, talk about the watch.
I don’t think I can say too much about the watch without dropping some major spoilers, but I think this might be the best pocket watch story ever told - even better than Butch’s in Pulp Fiction (spoken, of course in the great Christopher Walken's voice.)
You helped write, shoot, cut — I even saw you played on two of the tracks — with so many hats being worn, where do you start? What comes first? And how do you step in and out of the different roles?
I come to everything deeply curious and ideally operating from a place that is open to possibility, attune to the magic of it all, ready to embrace chance, luck, serendipity if you will and surrender to a divine guidance that is sure to lead the way. With my first film I learned that obstacles are opportunities—we had no money, so there were a lot of obstacles and I really didn’t know what I was doing… I think as a filmmaker even with all the resources in the world, you are dealing with limitations and you need to have that mentality to create something. I guess I am an auteur, of course I cannot proclaim myself one but if you wanted to I wouldn’t mind it, I’ve been called worse. I write, I shoot, I direct, I edit, I make music - those don’t all happen in that order and I got to collaborate with a lot of talented people who connect the project in a deep way and bring their magic to it. Ideally you're making music when you're filming, finding the rhythm and then hopefully you get to dance to it; for me it’s all happening at once in some way, the act of doing one thing is informing and inspiring the other. In fact, the idea of having Akiko listening to tapes came well after we shot the principal in Hiroshima and after we shot the green stuff in Brooklyn.
One more fun fact: she's sitting in a hotel room overlooking the United Nations which is important because of the watch we cannot talk about.
Did I see on your own Instagram that this will be (or has been already) shown on PBS? And is there / will there be a place for folks to see it?
The film had its world premiere at the Nashville Film Festival and then Hiroshima International Film Festival. It was acquired for Japanese distribution by Shin Nippon Films and had a nationwide roadshow for a year. Since we’ve screened during the last G7 Summit, which was held in Hiroshima and have had global virtual screenings in partnership with ICAN and Humanity for Peace. Most recently we began airing on PBS on August 5th 2023, (you’ll have to check your local listing.) We are close with making the film available on a streamer - hope to be able to share that news with you very soon.
Lastly, what’s next? Is it a razor’s edge, both allowing this film to grow while at the same time, already looking to the next project? I ask it in that way because this wasn’t some Marvel film or whatever. Even for you, it must have been emotionally taxing.
My wife and I moved to Gainesville last year and I just finished my first semester teaching film at the University of Florida (Go Gators! - I’m contractually obligated to say that, I think). I’ve got my hands in a few different projects with Runaway Horses (my agency). The one I’m interested in the most currently is the story about how my family left Puerto Rico and moved to Brooklyn. My dad was a whistleblower, something about illegal chemicals being dumped in the projects and kids playing with needles… My father, being proud of the family name, Heffelfinger, decided not to report this anonymously. Ultimately there was an attempt on his life. Our young family had no choice but to flee the island and my father became a bus driver for the city of New York. Roma meets A Bronx Tale, with lots of Fania All-Stars and Hector Lavoe.
Brother, I love you. I’m proud of you. I can’t wait to see you again—who knows when that might be. And I can’t wait to meet that entire gorgeous family.
COME VISIT! Hopefully OKC vs KNICKS in the finals.
I'll end this with a photo of a much younger us. Look at these two babies on a boat.
(Laughs) We definitely need an updated photo of us together. I see your Brooklyn boat photo and raise you a very excellent Mardi Gras.
Is that us or the Olsen Twins? Obviously no fun was had that Mardi Gras. 2015?
I think so.
Here's to our next stoop.
Follow Heff:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/h3ff3lfing3r/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jrheffelfinger
