Sion Sono Explains How His Heart Attack And Karaoking Doors Songs With Nic Cage Shaped ‘Prisoners Of The Ghostland’ (2024)

In an artist’s life, there are a handful of pivotal events with the potential to alter their worldview, and with it, their creative output. Getting married, having children, losing a loved one, finding religion — they all have their way of changing a person, ushering their body of work into a new, distinct era. Sion Sono, the Japanese filmmaker known for gleefully profane paeans to sex and violence cranked out at a pace suggesting he’s eliminated the need for sleep, recently faced one such crisis point.

While preparing in 2019 for principal photography on his latest film Prisoners of the Ghostland — his characteristically outré, Nicolas Cage-starring English-language debut, in theaters and online this Friday — Sono experienced a heart attack requiring immediate hospitalization and a risky emergency surgery. Those presuming that a brush with death would slow the notorious workhorse down or diminish his indulgent spirit have another thing coming, however. Though he’s trying to dial down the reckless abandon a smidgen, he still lives like a guy who’d like nothing more than to croak on set, preferably during a take, ideally on camera, with instructions left behind on what to do with the footage.

“During the shoot of Ghostland, I was still smoking and drinking a little,” Sono tells Decider from his home in Tokyo, with an assist from translator and producing partner Ko Mori. “I lived the same, and then when I saw my doctor, he was furious. But I was shooting a movie! That’s my life. I can’t just change it.”

Self-improvement doesn’t happen overnight, and working nonstop for twenty-five years can get a person set in their habits. Sono has established himself as one of the major names in modern Japanese cinema on merit of his tireless work ethic and matching insatiability for baser pleasures. Early successes like Suicide Club and Love Exposure brought him the infamy he sought; the former tracked a rash of group suicides through an underworld of skin-flensings to a subterranean bowling alley, while the latter took four hours to tell the epic origin of an upskirt photography expert. As time went by, his perversions grew more refined and purposeful without softening the provocation, hitting a high point in 2014’s gonzo hip-hop gangster musical Tokyo Tribe.

In its unrestrained mash-up of genres, its idiosyncratic vision of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and all its testicle humor, that film is the apparent blueprint for Prisoners of the Ghostland, which repackages the transgressive Sono Touch for a Stateside audience. Cage, who anointed this project with the hotly contested title of the craziest movie he’s ever done, plays a criminal tasked with retrieving a Governor’s adopted graddaughter from the surreal dark dimension in which she’s being held. If he’s unsuccessful, the bombs strapped to his family jewels will detonate. It’s the single wildest import to grace Stateside cineplexes this year, but for Sono, it was also the ideal entry point for a new viewership.”I’ve been wanting to do an English-language film ever since around fifteen years ago,” he says. “But the projects in the past never fit with a Western audience, even though I wanted to do this at some point, hopefully sooner than later. Finally, the time was right.”

At first, everything came together in a perfectly felicitous manner. A lifetime spent devouring the output of Hollywood and European film industries left Sono feeling confident that he could emulate their tone and feel for his global hybrid of styles, and he found a spiritual connection in fellow madman Cage. “I met up with Nic for the first time in Tokyo, before filming,” Sono recalls. “When we met up, we went for drinks and discussed some of my films, we talked about Antiporno, and I was pleased to find that he knew my work quite well. We thought a lot of the same things. Later on, we went for a little karaoke, did some songs by The Doors.”

After what must have been history’s most incredible rendition of “Break on Through,” they got into specifics of vision. Sono knew his star had a fearless taste for the weird, and wanted to coax out the same heroism with a hint of malevolence that Cage flashed as a loverboy con-on-the-run in Wild at Heart. “When we discussed the script originally, we were supposed to shoot in Mexico, in more of a spaghetti Western style, Sergio Leone in its look,” Sono says. “We talked about the hero as a sort of Charles Bronson figure, not a pure soul. But then I had the heart attack, and Nic suggested we instead shoot in Japan. So then, I thought we could make a move to samurai action, in part. The project organically turned into more of an East-West mashup. Cowboys, outlaws, with rōnin included as well.”

As Sono tells it, the relocation to his home nation represents the one meaningful alteration motivated by the cardiac event that almost finished him. On set, it was business as usual, the production ranking among the larger and more extravagant in his maximalist filmography. He forged onward as if refusing to let his own veins and arteries win. “No big change, after the attack,” he says. “In fact, more changes probably came because of the pandemic than anything happening to me personally. That’s the reason that I haven’t made much after Ghostland in the last two years. That’s what’s holding me back. As for the the heart attack, that led to our shooting in Japan and inspired me to add samurai elements. So to my heart, I say: thank you!”

To keep things in perspective, his concept of not having made much includes a feature shot over eight days in 2020 and a short produced under lockdown for the omnibus film State of Emergency. Stopping just short of denial, he’s not at all fazed by a health scare that would’ve reoriented a less monomaniacally driven filmmaker. He’s not easing up for anyone or anything, and joining forces with a star of Cage’s caliber may shoot his career into its next phase, maybe his highest-profile yet. In the gloriously demented cinematic universe lorded over by Sion Sono, continuation is all the victory he needs. He’d prefer not to die any time soon, but he’d rather fill his remaining years on this Earth with as much productivity as humanly possible.

“It’s true that I’d like to shoot as many films as possible in my time on this planet, especially now that I’ve had my English-language debut,” he says. “I want to shoot more in America, maybe in Europe, everywhere I can. I’d like to take every opportunity. So, maybe if I want to do that, I’ll need to hold off on some of the things I like. I just don’t want to stop making movies.”

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to watch Prisoners Of The Ghostland