Kore-eda Hirokazu Says He Never Films a Child Crying
Hirokazu Kore-eda, the Japanese director behind Shoplifters, has a rule: he does not shoot children crying. "I don't shoot it," he said, according to Variety.
He made the remark on Saturday, 24 October 2026, at an In Conversation event at the Singapore International Film Festival. The onstage talk was with festival chair Boo Junfeng, and it ran for two hours at the National Museum of Singapore. Tickets cost S$10. Before the conversation, the festival presented Kore-eda with its Cinema Honorary Award, its top honour for lasting contributions to Asian cinema. The award began in 2014. Earlier winners include Im Kwon-taek, Garin Nugroho, Jafar Panahi and Deepa Mehta.
The director is known for drawing performances from young actors, and he explained how he does it. He said he never gets angry with children, never rushes them, and never lies to them. How he handles scripts depends on the film. For Monster, he gave the young cast their scripts. He judged the subject risky enough that keeping the children apart from their roles felt safer.
For Shoplifters, The Truth and Broker, he did not give the children scripts. He rewrote dialogue around each child's personality and vocabulary. On set he sometimes fed them lines, and at other times he let them talk freely.
Kore-eda credited two film-makers for lessons he still uses. The first is Hou Hsiao-hsien, who read the script for Kore-eda's 1995 debut Maborosi. That film won the Golden Osella in Venice. Hou also introduced him to a composer. Kore-eda described a technique he learned from Hou: join the children as they play in a scene, then slip away once the camera is rolling. He uses the same method now.
The second is Ken Loach. Kore-eda pointed to the film Kes as a lesson. When the two men met about 20 years ago, while Kore-eda was making Nobody Knows, Loach told him that he had only asked the boy to go looking for the missing bird. He had not told the boy how to act the moment.
The same instinct shows up in casting. While auditioning children for Like Father, Like Son, Kore-eda met a boy who answered every question with "Why?", including his own name. The director then wrote a character who does the same. The boy's habit became part of the film.
What stands out is the approach itself. Kore-eda does not try to make children cry on cue, and he does not ask them to act out things they may not understand. He builds the scene around what they already do, and he lets the camera catch it.
