Metro Detroit born-and-raised filmmaker-producer Josh Woodcock touts the virtues of modesty.
“I have a strict rule with all the work that I do: Until I’ve actually completed something, I won’t tell anyone about it,” he tells Metro Times.
He’s had quite the busy year after what had already been quite a busy life, but he wasn’t going to start earnestly talking about the fact that he completed a feature-length film in the span of a handful of months until it actually started screening at national festivals (and eventually even garnering awards).
Woodcock admits that “it seemed daunting, at first, to say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make a 90-minute film.’ There’s something about it that seems scary until you just start breaking it down and figuring out how to piece it together.” It wasn’t until after he finished seven independent short films within the three-year span of time following the pandemic lockdowns that Woodcock finally felt ready, and even quite eager, to tackle the grander story arc permitted by a feature-length project. “It was always the biggest goal of my life,” Woodcock says, “just to be able to do it.”
Now, Woodcock’s finished feature-length film, a poignant and uniquely coming-of-age drama titled One Night in Tokyo, will be screened during this weekend’s Hell’s Half Mile Film & Music Festival up in Bay City, having already gained its distribution deal for a release in the near future. Back in April, his film won the audience prize for best drama when it premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. Woodcock tells us that this weekend is likely his film’s last stop on the festival circuit, meaning it’s your “last chance” to see it for several months until it’s eventually, and officially, released.
Woodcock’s pitch: “what would it be like if John Hughes made a French New Wave film set in Japan?”
Arc
One Night In Tokyo follows Sam (played by Reza Emamiyeh), arriving in Tokyo to visit his ex-pat girlfriend — only to be promptly broken up with, forcing him to then cut his trip short and return to America the next day. Stuck for the night awaiting the next day’s flight, he makes an unlikely friendship with Ayaka (Tokiko Kitagawa), who reluctantly takes him out around the city with her friends. Walking the streets of Tokyo together, they not only have to overcome obstacles to understand each other but also learn to break down their own walls to understand themselves.
“I think the characters resonated with me,” Woodcock says, “because they feel real. They have their own faults, and I think they’re all relatable snapshots of someone in their late 20s or early 30s, looking at their lives and the paths they’ve taken and where they’ve wound up, and [asking] do we have control over getting ourselves a little closer to where we want to be.”
We mention Woodcock having a busy year, the top bullet point being that he and his wife welcomed their first child. But along with that, as far as his professional life, late last year, Woodcock wrote Tokyo’s screenplay in just three weeks, then storyboarded everything and shot the whole film overseas with his cast and crew in just seven days. Oh, and then he did the first rough edit by himself within just another week. Within a furious four months, the film was pretty much in the can.
“I wrote all of [Tokyo] that December,” Woodcock says. “My wife was gone on a trip to India at the time but wound up having a long layover in Korea. I had the idea, then, of someone facing a long night like that, where they’re a fish out of water, somewhere. By the time she came back, I already had it all put together.”
He adds, “my wife thinks I’m crazy,” in a very loving way, of course, but specifically when it comes to his seemingly indefatigable creative drive. “I think the best quality you can have for filmmaking, or even in music too, is just focus,” he says. “Just being able to lock-in so much so that if someone chops your arm off the first thought you have is, ‘At least I still have one arm left and I can still finish this…’”
Focus
This focus and fortitude, as far as his work ethic, has been a constant in Woodcock’s life. We remember Woodcock from the late 2000s and early ’10s, when he was a bit of a fixture around the local punk scene, playing guitar in bands like Hit Society and the Ill Itches; particularly standing out for bringing his inherent fastidiousness and organizational work ethic into dive bar-environments showcasing musical genres of a typically ramshackle, chaotic nature. He even spearheaded an ambitious compilation celebrating what was then a new-ish wave of garage rock, The Pathetic Sounds of Detroit.
But that was almost just another sidequest for Woodcock the filmmaker. Much like the characters’ “arcs” in his new film, he’s also been ruminating on his own life’s path lately.
Film has been the lifelong passion of this Michigan-raised creative, who has fond memories of going to the movies as a kid and scouring the shelves of his local Blockbuster Video. In high school, he’d stay up late with friends watching and meticulously dissecting DVD copies of early-2000s indie arthouse cinema. Even before going off to college in Ypsilanti, Woodcock was wearing lots of hats: he’d picked up the guitar as a teen, started dabbling in graphic design, and even infamously started his own underground school newspaper (but that’s another story unto itself).
In college, he majored in Japanese language and culture, studied political science, and later on law, even briefly working as a law clerk before switching careers to become a professional producer amd cinematographer. Throughout the later 2010s, he sustained himself with steady commercial work in the U.S. and Japan, but also soon wrote and directed several of his own short films, showing them at festivals and even garnering dozens of awards.
When it comes to his new feature-length film, Woodcock stresses that “secondary to the character arcs, I also really wanted to show a larger snapshot of Tokyo — something that’s not told from a tourist’s point of view, something with a more natural look to it.”
This second aspect was important to Woodcock, who spent a profoundly formative span of months in 2014 living and working in Tokyo, where he got his first major job as a producer. That was the year Woodcock effectively diverged from his initial path into a law career and instead followed something involving his true lifelong passion: filmmaking.
After receiving “that awesome crash course into how the industry works,” Woodcock says of his time in Tokyo, “I felt that I’d finally found where my abilities worked best, even if it was going against what anyone else in my life really wanted me to do. But I said, ‘I don’t care, [film] is what I want to do and it’s what I’m gonna do, come hell or high water.’ I threw myself into it.”
Whole-hearted
Between 2015 and 2020, Woodcock was finding steady and fruitful work as a commercial producer around metro Detroit, but then caught a gig making documentary film series for the U.S. Navy, which is when he formally moved away from his home state of Michigan. In 2017, he landed a gig at a company near Seattle and started Kitsune Pictures to produce his own films.
He naturally still considers this his home. In fact, he’s excited to screen Tokyo here because he wouldn’t have been able to finish it without a crucial online crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, with much of the financial support coming from his home state. Now, he’ll look forward to the movie being officially released later this year.
For now, though, Woodcock is finally relaxing a bit. He’s looking forward to Hell’s Half Mile, where he’s eager to reconnect with other musicians-turned-filmmakers like Christopher Jarvis and Ryan Weise.
“[It’s] also a music festival, so there will be a lot of local bands there, too,” Woodcock says, adding that he’s also eager for hometown audiences to not only watch the film, but also experience its soundtrack, which was scored by local musician Topher Horn. “I remember calling [Horn] up and proposing he help score a full-length film, and then asking him, ‘Are we crazy for trying this?’ And he said, ‘No, let’s do it!’”
Call it daunting, or crazy — Woodcock did it. “I just wanted to make sure I’d gotten to a point in my life where I really knew what I was doing before I made anything public-facing,” he says. “I respect the art of [cinema], and I just didn’t want to ever do it in a way that wasn’t whole-hearted.”
One Night in Tokyo screens at Hell’s Half Mile Film & Music Festival at 1:30 p.m. on Friday and 5 p.m. on Sunday. More information is available at hhmfest.com.
