GoKawiilImagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball, and hanging out with his friends. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. And then the worst thing that ever could happen happens: A freak accident takes your son away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to live with the grief for long, because now there’s an AI company that can bring your kid back in the form of a robotic double that looks indistinguishable from a human.
This is the world that acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, has created with his latest sci-fi drama, Sheep in the Box. It’s the type of story that might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago but feels less so as AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives. This is a tension Kore-eda is acutely aware of — so much so that he sat down with a robotics expert while he was writing the script to get some answers of his own. They told him that because of the robots overheating, “we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots,” Kore-eda recounted.
But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human film. Grief work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s vast filmography. Though it might be set in a near future, the core of Sheep in the Box is still a family learning how to move through their loss. And if we give ourselves permission to suspend disbelief and go on this journey, we might see ourselves in it too.
The Verge sat down with Hirokazu Kore-eda at Neon’s offices days before Sheep in the Box’s US debut. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda tells all about writing and directing this picture, including what happened when he fed the script through ChatGPT.
Robyn Kanner
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?
What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.
In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?
I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.
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