The upcoming Hollywood live-action adaptation of anime classic Ghost in the Shell has attracted quite a bit of controversy for its casting of Scarlett Johansson in the main role — the white American actress plays The Major, a character known as Motoko Kusanagi in the source material. In an on-stage interview at a Tokyo event where the first trailer for the movie made its debut, British director Rupert Sanders addressed the issue of Johansson’s casting.

“To me, you know, I cast very much from the gut and I think I was very lucky to be able to get an amazing international cast of people that I’ve always really wanted to work with,” he said. “Scarlett was one of those people, and to me there’s very few actresses who’ve had 20 years of experience, who have the cyberpunk aesthetic already baked in. You know, she comes from such edgy films from Lost in Translation to Under the Skin — she’s got an incredible body of work and the attitude and toughness of her really is to me The Major.”

“But also what she’s done incredibly in this film is she’s playing an android, she’s a synthetic body with a human mind inside. She did an incredible job of nuancing the human evolving through the machine, and in a way I think why it’s very relative to a large audience, it’s kind of a coming of age story and it’s a realization of ‘I am what I am — whatever’s happened to me, good or bad, that is the sum of who I am now.’”

When it was put to Sanders that some people would be critical of Johansson’s casting considering the origin of the source material in Japanese manga and anime, the director deflected the question:

“I think whenever you cast someone someone’s going to be critical about it. To me it was, you know, I stand by my decision — she’s the best actress of her generation and I was flattered and honored that she would be in this film. So many people who were around the original anime have been vehemently in support of her because she’s incredible and there are very few like her.”

Previously, Ghost in the Shell producer Steven Paul had responded to the backlash by downplaying the story’s Japanese elements. “Ghost in the Shell was a very international story, and it wasn’t just focused on Japanese; it was supposed to be an entire world,” he said, “That’s why I say the international approach is, I think, the right approach to it.”

If you watch the first full trailer for the movie, however, you’ll notice that it looks… pretty Japanese. There are austere restaurants with cyborg geisha, street scenes bathed in neon kanji characters, and yakuza movie stalwart “Beat” Takeshi Kitano playing a soldier who only speaks Japanese to Johansson.

It’s too early to say how the new Ghost in the Shell is going to turn out, of course, but if the movie really is trying to transcend the Japanese origin of its source material, it’s picked strange footage to show off in its first trailer — footage that’s unlikely to assuage critics of Johansson’s casting. It won’t be too long until we can judge the final product, however; Ghost in the Shell hits theaters on March 31st next year.