When the makers of the Japanese version of “Sideways” approached Napa Valley wineries about location shoots, the response wasn’t always positive.
“We had people hang up on us,” said Cellin Gluck, director of the Japanese-language remake, showing Sunday at the Wine Country Film Festival in Napa in advance of its October premiere in Japan.
The problem, Gluck discovered, lay with the famous line shouted by Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles, in the original 2004 film. This line expressed wine snob Miles’ disdain for merlot – a variety grown widely in the Napa Valley – in no uncertain terms.
Several Napa Valley wineries eventually came aboard after assurances that this “Sideways,” gentler in many respects than its predecessor, would not disparage merlot or any other varietal.
“It didn’t make any sense to bash any wine,” said Gluck, a multilingual director raised in Japan who led a Japanese cast and an American crew during a shoot in Los Angeles and the Napa Valley. “Miles felt it necessary to be denigrating. Michio (the equivalent character in the new film) only cares about the finer points of things.”
If the remake becomes a hit in Japan, it might benefit the wineries highlighted in the film. After all, the impact of the original “Sideways” was great enough to cut into sales of merlot, elevate sales of pinot noir (Miles’ preferred red) and increase tourism in the Santa Ynez Valley, the setting of the first film.
The new “Sideways,” made by Fox International and Fuji Television for less than $4 million (roughly a quarter of what the original cost), lacked time and money to redo the signage outside the wineries and other businesses used as locations. Thus, the movie’s plugs for Beringer, Frog’s Leap, Newton Vineyard and others.
“Japan is by far our biggest export market,” Lara Abbott, public relations manager for Newton Vineyard, said in explaining Newton’s participation in the film.
Abbott has seen the movie and likes the way it showcases the winery’s interior and grounds. She’s also pleased with the screen time she was granted.
“My big thing is that I didn’t get cut!” Abbott said of her bit role as a winery hospitality specialist. She’s so excited about the film, she said, that “I’m personally taking myself to the premiere in Tokyo.”
Part of Hollywood studios’ nascent efforts to move beyond subtitles in attracting foreign audiences, “Sideways” will open widely in Japan. So it’s no surprise that the remake takes a more mainstream approach than the original film, which began its run in art houses.
Michio (Japanese comic actor Fumiyo Kohinata) is still a cranky, struggling writer, but without the self-loathing of Giamatti’s Miles.
Michio’s actor buddy (Katsuhisa Namase) is out for a few last sexual hurrahs on the eve of his wedding, just like the pal in the first film. But in the new “Sideways,” this character comes off as less pathological (à la Thomas Haden Church’s portrayal) than simply cheeky.
“We didn’t want it to be too dark,” Gluck said of the remake. “It was enough that it was a midlife crisis movie … we wanted it to be fun.”
For American audiences, the most recognizable name in the cast might be Rinko Kikuchi, nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar a few years ago for her performance in “Babel.” She plays the free-spirited young woman (Sandra Oh in the original) romantically duped by the actor.
Kikuchi “is probably the least known” in Japan, Gluck says of his cast, which features Japanese TV veteran Kyoka Suzuki as a winery worker tentatively romanced by Michio. Like Virginia Madsen in the original, Suzuki convinces as a luminous beauty who develops an unlikely attraction to a shlub.
Though the filmmakers based the Japanese “Sideways” on the original script, they moved the setting from the Santa Ynez Valley to the Napa Valley because they believed Japanese viewers would be more likely to connect California winemaking to Calistoga than to Solvang.
“We wanted it to be unfamiliar to Japanese audiences, yet familiar,” Gluck said. “They would not relate to it as much if it is an unknown little town that has a windmill.”
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