Masahiro Motoki

When “Departures” won the Oscar in February as best foreign-language film, no one was more surprised than director Yojiro Takita.

But then, “Departures” was a surprise hit in its native Japan. The story of a cellist who loses his job and finds a new calling preparing bodies for burial, the film is an engrossingly soulful story of the many forms artistry takes and the way empathy and affection can give depth and meaning to the grieving process.

As Takita and Masahiro Motoki, the film’s star (and the driving force behind getting the picture made), said in a recent interview in New York (conducted through a translator), “Departures” has always been “the little movie that could.”

Q: “Departures” depicts a process called encoffining, in which the main character of the film washes and prepares the corpse for the coffin, in a ritual performed before the family. Is this a common practice in Japan?

Motoki: No, most Japanese learned about the practice through this film. It’s a dying ritual that persists in a few areas. It’s hardly common. It does linger. You can order it as part of a funeral service. But it’s hardly common or typical. (More…)

Forget directing actors. If you want a challenge, make a movie on a train.

“Trying to direct trains in snow is challenging,” says writer-director Bent Hamer, about choreographing the iron horses for his film, “O’Horten.” “You have to use trains that are in service. So it’s hard to shoot a small scene with personal stuff. To get it all together, to catch an atmosphere and have everything correct – that’s the challenge.”

The Norwegian-born Hamer, 52, built his new film around a simple idea about aging: “The basic premise was what happens after you retire after 40 years in a job with no social life?” Hamer says in a phone interview. He laughs, then adds, “Maybe I’m preparing for my own old age.” (More…)

In person, Tilda Swinton looks like, well, Tilda Swinton – but not the Tilda Swinton we see in her new film, “Julia,” or during her extended cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control.” Or the one from “Burn After Reading” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

Tall, angular, pale, with a starkly cut bob of yellowish blonde hair, she seems both sturdier and more ethereal than she does onscreen. But she offers a hearty laugh when asked if her hair has been styled and colored for a coming role.

“No, this is my head,” she says with a shrug. “This is how it comes.” (More…)

No, Carlos Cuaron says with a laugh, the title characters of his new film, “Rudo y Cursi” – rival sibling soccer players in Mexico – are in no way meant to be stand-ins for Cuaron and his filmmaking brother, Alfonso, director of “Children of Men” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

“Besides the fact that we are really idiotic, there’s very little similarity between us and the characters,” Cuaron says with a laugh, amused at the very thought. “People are free to think what they want; I’m not a dictator. But it’s not true.

“My relationship to my brother is probably the same as anyone’s. I’ve had huge fights with Alfonso. We stopped talking for a while when I was a teenager. It was a physical fight. Relationships are like that. You fight with your wife and you get the silent treatment for a whole week. It’s just humanity.” (More…)

From his first day of shooting until its premiere in L.A. last week, Scott Hamilton Kennedy spent more than four years working on “The Garden.”

“But my fascination with the story never waned,” Kennedy says in a telephone interview. “The story got more and more complicated.

“I thought this would be a courtroom drama. But it wasn’t. It just kept getting more and more fascinating. It was difficult to hold on – but I wanted an ending.” (More…)