INTERVIEW: Shinjuku Author mink Talks Film Inspiration and Working with Yoshitaka Amano
Recently released in a brand new edition, Shinjuku is—as author Christopher “mink” Morrison describes it—a graphic novella that transports readers to the mean streets of Shinjuku with the help of illustrations by renowned artist Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D). With the second edition on shelves now from Dark Horse, we had the opportunity to speak with mink about writing inspirations, finding a home with Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender’s A Band Apart, working with an inimitable artist and more.
Can you tell us a little about your history with writing? How did you get involved with A Band Apart?
Thank you for the interview. First I would like to get something out of the way. YO JOE! I have always wanted to say that; I am sure you must get that a lot. Maybe someday you will meet Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow together and get to say that. In answer to your first question, I have been creative writing since middle school. I wasn’t a good student by any measure. I think school is not for everyone and I am firmly in that category. Writing has always been a creative joy for me like painting, dancing or music must be for others. My problem in school was I usually wrote about what I wanted to write about as opposed to the given assignment. This is a great skill when you are a creative writer, but in school you are labeled a troublemaker and you completely missed the point of the assignment.
I write my material the way I think about life, which for some is really entertaining. For others this style produces a “Huh?” reaction. So when I crossed paths with Quentin Tarantino’s A Band Apart production company at a Christmas party in the early 2000s I finally felt at home. I was with a wonderful group of other “Huh?s”. Some of the greatest Huhs in independent film and commercial work were assembled in one brick building on Beverly Blvd like the Justice League of Cool. It was one of the greatest honors of my creative journey to be asked to join their roster of talent and to be managed.
We were given one of the names of the characters from Reservoir Dogs when we joined. I am proud to say I was in the Mr. Pink club. Lawrence Bender, the owner, not only became a friend but a mentor who helped me immensely with my early career. True help in the entertainment business is often hard to come by so when you receive it you should recognize it and give them their flowers. Lawrence is a giant in the producing world and for him to welcome me into his circle was life changing, and nearly twenty years later the benefits of the friendship still carry on today.
Did you always have specific goals in mind for your writing—whether it be prose, scripts or something else entirely—and how has that changed over the years?
I am a screenwriter at heart. My goal has always been to tell a special story that is somehow different from what you expected. I love the screenplay format either to read or construct. I find it a liberating and creatively inspirational medium. When you pick up a script, it is different from a book or prose as it requires the reader to put much more of their own imagination into the experience. As the reader the script becomes a perfectly framed photograph and it is up to you to fill in the pieces of the story you don’t know yet, however if the writer has done their job you are redirected from what you are thinking back to the story that is on the page. It is a really exciting form.
The format for film or TV has technical rules you must adhere to in order to reach the audience in your story. I like these rules. Adapting this style to prose was a challenge and I accepted it. My writing over the years has gotten more playful as I have opened up to having fun during the process as opposed to when I started out, I was focused only the augmentation. I have accomplished a lot of my own personal writing goals and I think it is really important as a creative to acknowledge this. I think it helps you grow and get better. You see your career more honestly, both the good and the bad. Shinjuku to me is a blend of screenwriting and prose. I call it Script Noir. Just kidding. It is a graphic novella.
What kind of stories inspired you growing up? Are there any particular movies, books, comics, anime or even music that you keep in your back pocket for inspiration?
That is a great question. I would say fantasy adventure with sci-fi close behind. I love being transported to completely different places and then seeing it through a character’s eyes. Especially watching the learning experience of the players involved in the story. I was an avid consumer of movies, video games and television. I think anything that was out of the ordinary was interesting to me. Saturday morning cartoons, Charlie’s Angels, Godzilla and Airwolf reruns with Street Fighter after school come to mind. Sunday trips to the movies for Indiana Jones, The Last Starfighter or Gremlins. But the film that started it all has to be Apocalypse Now.
My friend’s dad had it on tape and we watched it over and over. Something about what Francis Ford Coppola did with the photography, cast and style that just mesmerized me. So going to photography college probably was partially inspired by Vittorio Storaro’s striking use of the camera, color saturation and lighting techniques. The Empire Strikes Back was another huge influence and it was so interesting that George Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now. I love how there are no coincidences in life or Hollywood.
What kickstarted Shinjuku? Tell us about how this work came to be.
I was working in Tokyo about 15 years ago. I really loved my time there. I made some wonderful friends who took me to off-limits parts of the city that most tourists don’t see. On one of the first nights at my request I walked the streets on a rainy night. We ate dinner in a tiny open air six-chair cafe just pointing at items I wanted to try. The owner, a thin chain-smoking chef in his thirties, recognized me as an American and decided to play Led Zeppelin IV through a tiny speaker as we drank whiskey and ate his delicious made-to-order food. With the rain pouring and Jimmy Page’s riffs of “Black Dog,” it was one of life’s truly magic moments. I knew this was something I needed to enjoy and figure out what to do with it.
The next morning all these ideas started flooding into my head, so Shinjuku started right there on a fast food napkin in Shibuya. When I got back to LA I worked on it for a couple years thinking it was going to be something different than it is now. So in my world of no coincidences, a few years later I was invited to a gathering where Amano was in attendance. I thought to myself this seems fortuitous. I was so curious to meet him, as we did have some mutual creative friends and I now had a wild idea that he might want to do some work together on my project that had been stirring for years. Our conversation at the gathering turned out to be marvelous, and here I am doing this interview with many more stories to come from us in the future.
Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork adds something really special to the book, illuminating every other page with ethereal takes on the characters and key story beats. How did that partnership come to be?
Amano is a sensei, a one in a billion self-made talent who has traveled the world for inspiration. He is arguably one of the great Japanese art masters of our lifetime. I was familiar with Amano’s work as a Final Fantasy player and an art book collector. In another unexplainable turn in this story, I had been given a book as a gift from a rare European art exhibit he did many years before we met. It was an unusual German book with a minuscule print run, and what is even weirder is the sealed copy was purchased in a West Los Angeles bookstore. I had been using the book as an inspiration while I was working on it years before we met. So you can imagine what he thought when I showed it to him along with my other reference material. He also had grown up around Shinjuku and his first studio was very close to where I had set some of the story.
My vision had been that he would create some signature pieces that would anchor the project. I then would engage with some additional artists to bring it to print. It would be a more traditional four-issue comic book series which I had done before. So imagine my delight when he called me out of the blue and asked if he could illustrate the entire story. It felt like Andy Warhol or Gustav Klimt was on the phone with me. Was this really happening? Yes, he wanted to do a long form creative project with me. This is how we came to create our current format of screenplay, prose and art. He also did all the design and the logo. The oversize book format was a result of his magnificent images having to be seen in a larger format.
Was there a directly collaborative process, or was Amano going off and putting his own unique spin on the established world?
He is so creative in everything he does that it was natural that our collaborative process would be as interesting as any other part of our relationship. The process starts with each chapter. I put together a Japanese version of each chapter to go along with the English version. I have very interesting chapter titles as well. I gave him both versions in case he missed something. The two versions help to make sure things don’t get lost in translation which is pretty common and has created some hilarious moments. Dodger Blue in the story is a reference to a specific shade of blue from Los Angeles and also one of the characters is devoted to the same sports team. The first translation came out as a person who is blue in color. With Amano having both versions, we caught this. I did not ask him or indicate what he should create. I let him imagine new ideas from my ideas. He then will text me pictures or time lapse videos of what he is doing. He works in multiple physical mediums—ink, paint, watercolor—on different paper in different sizes. It is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever experienced. For example, the poppies were just a small part of my original manuscript and now they are a metaphor for the whole story. This is his genius.
What’s next for mink? Do you already have another project in the works?
I am working on my new project called THE PARK which encapsulates all my loves: music, fashion, toys, history, potato chips and fantasy. I am having a great time putting it all to paper and I think people will really like it. It is about an interstellar being who comes to earth to finish some business he started many centuries before. Usually my stories are grounded in freaky, but this story goes a few steps beyond that. I am not completely sure where it is all going to go but it is really entertaining at the moment. The main character does not talk and uses silent movie era type physical comedy to communicate. It is a fantastic challenge for me to tell a story with a character that does not speak.
Finally, I’m sure we have a ton of aspiring writers amongst our readers. Do you have any advice?
Ahhh… the last question in the lineup. Let me close by saying that it is wonderful that you are doing this interview. Some day one of your readers/writers will be being interviewed by Crunchyroll and remember this question. My advice: “You got to write it! Because no one else will!” Just keep typing, scribbling or dictating until you finish your narrative, whatever that is for you. The world today is a very busy place with limitless information at your fingertips, which makes it such a special time but also perilous; it is too easy to listen to others as opposed to yourself. All writers have an internal compass, it comes with having the desire to put words on a page. Always follow this compass, it can’t guide you to the wrong place. If you can gather endless confidence in your compass then that is all that matters.
This conviction in your own writing will slowly, word by word (like a TikTok dance), gather onlookers and before you know it you will have an audience plus one. Your words on the page are the plus one and of course you are the most important audience member. Always take the time to enjoy the writing journey while you’re doing it, be gracious with the people you share your words with and be humble about their response. I recently lost a good friend, the wondrous artist Sho Murase, and when we shared ideas together over delicious meals she would inevitably say, “Mink you got to do it because no one else will!”. This is some of the best advice I ever received. Love you, Sho! After all, writing is cathartic and a lot of fun. Never give up! Your time is next!
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Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. You can read his comics at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter @Moldilox.
