Best known in Japan as a fashion photographer and music-video director, Kazuaki Kiriya has made his feature-film debut with "Casshern," the Japanese film industry's most extravagant marriage yet between live action and 3-D animation.
Bilingual -- in English and Japanese -- Kiriya is already getting offers from Hollywood, while fending off local tabloid interest in his marriage to former client and pop diva Hikaru Utada. In person, he is something of a shojo manga (girls' comic) dream -- tall, slim and handsome in a thin-faced, fair-skinned way and dressed in impeccably stylish black. He was also the ideal interviewee: outgoing, enthusiastic and frank. Our conversation at the Hotel Otani ran overtime -- not because we were pestering Kiriya with questions, but because he had so much to say about a film that has been his consuming passion.
"When I first saw the TV animation series 'Casshern,' I was wowed by the images of futuristic robots and its European setting," says Kiriya.