Fascinating interview at Midnight Eye with Donald Richie about the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Richie is the OG gaijin, and I always like reading what he has to say about Japan and things Japanese. But what really caught my atention was his discussion of Ozu’s approach to filmmaking:

The way he made a film, for example, was that he and his fellow writer Kogo Noda would write the dialogue first, without even knowing who was going to say it. They wanted to create characters out of dialogue. Then they allocated the dialogue to the people who became the characters, and it was only later on that they decided the locations where this should happen.

It made me wonder if a media automation tool might be able to take chat logs, or recordings of voice calls, or archived videophone calls, and make compelling shorts out of them, perhaps using machinima.