Sabu, the Japanese director of Venice and Toronto-bound “Arrested Memory,” says the film’s nearly two-decade journey to the screen – after stalled attempts to shoot in Germany, Korea, the U.S. and Japan – left it with more tension and poignancy than the version he first wrote.
Variety is unveiling the first trailer for the film.
“I was confident that the script had something special, so I always believed that it would eventually be made. It was really a matter of waiting for the right opportunity and the right timing,” Sabu tells Variety. “Compared with the film I envisioned in 2007, I think the finished version has more tension and a greater sense of poignancy.”
Sabu made his directorial debut with 1996’s “Dangan Runner,” and built his reputation on genre-blending, tension-and-release comedies including “Postman Blues,” “Monday” and “Miss Zombie.” “Arrested Memory” was finally shot in Taiwan, with cast and crew drawn from Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and France. The thriller follows a police detective who loses his memory, a premise Sabu used to rework his central character over the years the project spent in development.
The film’s protagonist Lee was originally conceived as a corrupt detective before Sabu turned him into a respected, judo-trained officer. “Originally, Lee was a person with a strong sense of justice who became a police officer because he wanted to protect people. However, over the course of 20 years, he lost something important, his convictions gradually began to waver, and eventually he became a corrupt police officer. That was the original setup,” Sabu says.
