‘Rental Family’ Producers Learned a New Way of Making Movies in Tokyo
Just like the actor played by Brendan Fraser, Sight Unseen's Julia Lebedev and Eddie Vaisman gleaned lessons about life and art amid a different cultural backdrop, where location agreements don’t really exist and respect for one’s neighbors is more important than making a film.
In the spring of 2024, the Rental Family team was preparing to shoot a scene at an apartment building in Tokyo when they got word they were no longer welcome. A neighbor had expressed concern about the commotion the shoot would cause, so the owner pulled out.
In America, a property owner backing out of a location agreement can lead to legal action and is rare. But in Japan, there’s no legal recourse and canceling a location shoot with short notice is an accepted part of the culture.
“They’re not willing to jeopardize the sense of community and the individual responsibility for each other,” explains producer Julia Lebedev.
It’s the sort of thing that might make an American producer apoplectic, but Lebedev and her Sight Unseen partner Eddie Vaisman grew to understand and accept it.
Says Vaisman: “There was always a backup to the backup. ‘In case this happens, we can go do this, and in case that happens, we can go do that.’”
All that contingency planning paid off. The Searchlight-backed film, which stars Brendan Fraser as a struggling American actor who takes a job role-playing for clients during key moments in their lives, bowed to strong reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in September ahead of its theatrical release Nov. 21. “Oscar winners, especially those coming from left field, don’t always find worthy successors to their award-winning roles. But Brendan Fraser has come up with a beaut in his first starring part since The Whale,” wrote Frank Scheck in his review for THR.
Lebedev and Vaisman’s Rental Family journey began in 2019, when they began early discussions with director and co-writer Hikari about the concept.
They sold the package to Searchlight in 2023 and held countless Zooms with their Japanese producing counterparts, where conversations scheduled for an hour might turn into a four-hour affair, as translators attempted to capture the nuances that are tricky to convey. Their counterparts explained the cultural differences (such as location agreements being far from iron-clad), while it was Lebedev and Vaisman’s jobs to get buy-in from Searchlight for making a film the Japanese way.
Nearly five years after Vaisman and Lebedev first met with Hikari, they landed in Japan for a 50-day shoot that put them 17 hours ahead of their spouses and children back home. They found themselves in the middle of a city so sprawling that it can take three hours to drive from one end to the other, meaning that they would generally only shoot at one location per day to save time.
