Johnny Depp is W. Eugene Smith.
Native Americans believed that with each photograph taken of them they lost a bit of their soul. W. Eugene Smith, one of the fathers of photojournalism, pioneer of the photographic essay with his series on rural America and also on rural Spain (Spanish Village), he believed that the photographer also lost something of his soul in each snapshot he took. “That's what he thought too, when you click with the camera you steal a moment. In each of his photos he knew how to express what he saw and what he experienced, and each took something of his own soul from him, ”he said. Johnny Depp in the presentation of The Minamata Photographer in the past BCN Film Fest.
Depp plays W. Eugene Smith, a photographer he already admired before this script came into his hands. The film focuses only on his latest work, the one he did for Life magazine in Minamata, a small fishing village in southern Japan whose population had years contaminated with mercury by discharges from the Chisso chemical company. The intake of mercury through water and fish, practically their only food, had caused them a brain disease, with the same name as the town, which had attacked especially unborn children and children.
Johnny Depp in the dark room.
Smith, accompanied by Aileen, who proposed the report and ended up being his wife, lived for three years in Minamata, accompanying the victims and also all the relatives and neighbors who rose up against the company and the Japanese government. His report was published in Life and the courts agreed with the victims, recognized the disease and promised economic and moral compensation that was never fully settled.
In 1975, Smith and Aileen published the book Minamata. A Warning to the World, Minamata: A Warning to the World, because they not only wanted to talk about that small fishing village, they wanted to alert the world to the ecological and human atrocities. “The moment that this film captures was very dynamic and fueled the birth of the modern environmental movement. says the director of The Minamata Photographer, Andrew Levitas. He hopes that the film is also a warning and, therefore, with the final titles there are images of other major disasters caused by companies such as Chernobyl, Fukushima or the water crisis in Flint, USA. “These kinds of things keep happening. We live in a world where human protection has receded everywhere,” says Levitas.
Gene and Aileen.
JAPAN IN SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO
For the film, Levitas and Depp had the help of Aileen (Eugene Smith died in 1978) and the complete photographic archive of the actor. Also, they traveled to Minamata, They spoke with survivors of that, with relatives of the victims. They had all the details of the settings, thanks to the photos (always on 35mm black and white film) of Eugene Smith and Aileen, but it was impossible to find the Minamata of the 70s in the Minamata of today, transformed into a modern and sustainable city.
They could only shoot small details in the original Japanese village and the rest, its bay, its port they ended up finding on the other side of the world. In Belgrade, Serbia, They shot those port and company scenes. And the scenes in which Smith walks along the coast were filmed in Tivat, in Montenegro. The Island of Flowers, a small refugee community and home to a 13th century monastery, was the main location, where they built the beach bar, Eugene Smith's darkroom, and some of the old Minamata sheds.
In the river contaminated by mercury.
Inside one of those, recreated in Belgrade for the film, W. Eugene Smith took the photography that today is still the pinnacle of photojournalism and of this photographer committed that he saw it all, he lived it all and suffered it all: Tomoko in the bathroom. The image of a mother bathing her daughter, a victim of Minamata disease. The image that he went around the world and achieved what words had not achieved up to that moment.
Gene and Aileen, Johnny Depp and Minami.