Part 1 I Part 2

Kon: Good evening, I am Kon, the director. This is the last episode. The movie is approaching its climax. Mima’s path through confusion, dream and reality, her self doubt. We will explain them together with the storyboard. Well then…

Nagai: Good evening to the third lecture about Perfect Blue. Today is the last lecture and the movie is approaching its climax as well.

Kon: Yes.

Nagai: So let director Kon explain to us what we will get to hear today. [cut] Mima’s nudes and the concert of the new CHAM overlap. Mima’s remorse and the fan‘s hopes call the virtual Mima to the concert. A very complicated scene.

Kon: Yes, very complicated indeed. The reading alone is difficult. In this scene Mima, virtual Mima and CHAM move around. [Perfect Blue starts playing] And everything is happening at the same time. Mima just appeared from the poster, here we used over exposure of the light. It mirrors the scene from earlier where Uchida looks through the camera and sees Mima between the two girls of the „new CHAM“. And here, in this tunnel virtual Mima appears again. Just like earlier we return to her subjective view. To get to her subjective view we drive through the tunnel. The orange light of the natrium lamp simultaneously expresses Mima‘s feelings. The question was: who drives the car virtual Mima sits in? During the recordings we decided, that it is a virtual Tadokoro. [laughs]

Nagai: A virtual Tadokoro? Who is that?

Kon: The man…

Nagai: Oh yes.

Kon: There exists a virtual version of him, too. But that doesn’t matter in the end. Well… here… The two CHAM girls Yukiko and Rei say something intangible here. Mima is „ke-bon“! Hair naked. What is that? [laughs]

Nagai: The following scenes make it clearer.

Kon: Exactly. The „kebon“ refers to this very characteristic part of my porn video Perfect Blue. Of course this did not appear like that in the script.

Nagai: I see.

Kon: A script writer who seriously writes „kebon“… You cannot write that.

Nagai: Does anybody use this word?

Kon: Of course not. It appeared on a meeting with an animator and we decided to use it.

Nagai: „Kebon“!

Kon: „Kebon“. It is good, isn’t it? „Kebon“. Ah, this almost borders on sexual harassment. I will sit straight from now on.

Nagai: [laughs]

Kon: Why do I sound so weird now?

Nagai: Totally different then earlier!

Kon: Hm. Emotional chaos is chaos in her room. Do you tidy up your room properly?

Nagai: Well… Sometimes, sometimes not so much…

Kon: In my room there is a huge chaos!

Nagai: So your feelings, your inside is chaotic, too? [laughs]

Kon: Well… All I need is a small, this small [gesticulates with stick] free space for work. But then I search my material frantically. „Where is this setting?!?“ This way my feelings get chaotic. Well… this scene in the bath. For the bath in a small apartment it looks to big. Things often look too big when you draw them. It is like a law. Drawing something narrow is very difficult. Well, I am giving it my best. But up to now we only talked about quotes I made. But this movie was quoted once, too! Honestly.

Nagai: You found out about that?

Kon: Well… Do you know „Requiem for a Dream“?

Nagai: No, sadly I do not.

Kon: Darren Aronofsky directed it. His first movie was „Pi“. „Requiem for a dream“ was his second movie. Well… he once said he would like to make a live action version of Perfect Blue.

Nagai: He is from overseas?

Kon: Yes, he is American. Well… it seems he liked Perfect Blue. And when he was in Japan for „Requiem for a Dream“ we met for a conversation. Of course I watched „Requiem for a Dream“ before that. This shot in the bath from the birds eye view, how she dips her head into the water. It looks as if she would suffocate.

Nagai: At first I thought she was already dead.

Kon: She dips her head under water. And then she cannot hold it in anymore and shouts „Damn it!“. These two shots with the same angle, the same pose…

Nagai: First from under water and then from above…

Kon: Yes, these two were used in „Requiem for a Dream“ as well. When we talked about this he said: „It is a homage!“. [laughs] It is a homage, a homage for me! And the person who assumes Mima’s pose in „Requiem for a dream“ and dips her head under water is Jennifer Connely. Jennifer Connely did that.

Nagai: I see.

Kon: Just like in my storyboard! [laughs] And last year I was on the same plane as her. Of course she flew first class. With her family. I flew business class. First class leaves the train before business class.

Nagai: So you talked to her?

Kon: „Yo Jennifer!“ No, no. [laughs] „You stole from me!“ Oh well, that was not her. [laughs]

Nagai: You are turning into different people right now!

Kon: I am just very busy with arranging different shots. Well, „Requiem for a Dream“ is about an older woman, too, who dreams about appearing on TV. At the end she has hallucinations that people are coming out of the TV.

Nagai: The plot lines seem similar as well.

Kon: And in the end, in the hallucination, she wears a red dress.



Nagai: The director really followed you.

Kon: He followed me… more like he stole from me! [laughs] But when I met him and told him about this he said all of this is a homage. From now on I will not make any quotes either, I just make „homages“.

Nagai: You are very talkative today!

Kon: Everything is full of homages! Oh well, when I make a movie myself I inevitably follow other movies I liked or that influenced me, impressed me… and I make a „homage“. Thats what it is.

Nagai: Yes. Now an acclaimed actress, Mima visits Rumi at the hospital at the end.

Kon: This is the last scene of Perfect Blue.

Nagai: Yes, the last scene.

Kon: Rumi, who has experience a lot of psychological damage, probably still believes herself to be Mima. And now this Rumi is visited by an adult Mima. Wit this visit… the most important thing is, that you see her (Mima) through glass. That was my opinion back then. She (Rumi) should not see her directly but rather that the glass works like a filter between them. In other words: She now sees her objectively.

Nagai: Rumi sees Mima objectively…

Kon: And to the doctors‘ remark in this scene Mima answers, that she knows that she will not see Rumi ever again but that thanks to Rumi, she is who she is today. That is said by Mima here. The „you“ refers to Rumi and her work as her manager of course. But it also refers to herself, her old self. That her new self as an actress is successful or at least successful enough that after all these incidents the two nurses say: „Isn‘t that Mima Kirigoe?“. She is at least this successful. And she achieved this success also thanks to her older self, back when she was a pop star. Thanks to this older self she is the person that she is today. Instead of outright stating that she became what she is now because Rumi cared so much for her as her manager she refers to both people with the vague term „you“.

And about Rumi, she is trapped in her own past, unable to free herself. Rumi an her world in the mirror… The mirror depicts her imaginary world. She is trapped in it. She cannot leave. Mima on the other hand fought against it when her own past threatened to trap her, she strikes back. And thanks to that she can take a step forward now. One can see the difference here: One character developed while the other is trapped in the past. And in the very last shot… here they say „Isn’t that Mima Kirigoe?“ „Of course not, why would she be here?“ Or something like this. Then Mima puts down her sunglasses. Here she says her last line: „I am real.“ Why do you see her in the mirror? Well, there are multiple interpretations and everybody is free to believe what they want, but an interesting interpretation is, that actually Mima was the culprit.

Nagai: For a moment I thought this, too. This ending makes one think that maybe what one thought to be true is wrong. You suddenly think: What was that?

Kon: Well, who was it then? When we screened the movie overseas, somebody told me, that since you see her in a mirror what she says must be a lie. When I made the movie it was not my intention to deceive the audience like this. Well… Through these incidents Mima grows up. Surely she now is much more confident now than in the past. In other words: she has grown up. However… because she succeeded at her farewell to her past self she could develop her new, confident self. That is how easy the story is in the end. It is not like one does not need to continue growing when one has grown to something. One destroys their own, old moral values, discovers a horrible phase of chaos and out of this one develops something new, one grows up. I believe everyone repeats this again and again. If I had shown Mima not in the mirror but up-front in this scene, one would believe this to be the end. I wanted to say: „It continues! It isn’t finished yet.“ Because in reality Mima doubts her words „I am real.“. The real self does not exist here but rather develops in this consecutive process. It is not as if Mima Kirigoe, the human Mima Kirigoe, is completed at this point. Thus I decided to show her in the mirror.

Nagai: And there are more interpretations.

Kon: Yes, and that is good. The more interpretations, the richer the movie. And altogether it is not like what I say has to be true word by word. There are other reasons why Mima‘s image might reflect in the mirror, one can also think that she is reflected because actually she was the culprit.

Nagai: Under this assumption the end of the movie is much more scary I believe. If one considers „Ah, maybe actually it was really Mima?“…

Kon: That is right. Well… there were not many but among those who shared their opinion with me there are also ones that say „Actually you deceived us!“. And in this situation I always think „That is great!“. It is good when people think about the movie.

Nagai: Because it is so peculiar it makes one think. Not only here, also at other scenes.

Kon: That is right. A magic trick for example is mysterious. And when one dislikes that it is so mysterious… As soon as one discovers how it works one cannot enjoy it anymore. One only has fun as long as one wonders about it. When one analyze it too much one does no longer have fun. Why on this display there appears an image, how such a DVD works… I do not know. If I dismantle the DVD player I wont be able to watch DVDs any longer. Because of this, something that exist as an entirety should be enjoyed as such. For this my interpretations were pretty presumptuous though.

Nagai: It was wonderful how much you could explain in such detail.

Kon: Yes.

Nagai: Now all secrets are revealed.

Kon: That is fine.