An interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi is like an interview with no one else, and I say that as someone who has done hundreds.
A pioneering experimental filmmaker in the 1960s who became an in-demand maker of TV commercials in the '70s and, in partnership with maverick producer Haruki Kadokawa, a director of films starring popular female idols in the '80s, Obayashi would seem to be a classic example of the movie wunderkind who goes commercial. But, dig deeper in his filmography, beginning with his 1977 feature debut — the wacky, wonderful horror-fantasy "House" — and you will find a fiercely independent type who took even work-for-hire assignments in directions distinctly his own.
In his most recent film, "Labyrinth of Cinema," Obayashi addresses a frequent theme in postwar Japanese cinema: Japan in the closing days of the war. But, based on his own original script, the film goes on another Obayashi imaginative flight, with three young men traveling in time from an old theater in Onomichi — the director's seaside hometown in Hiroshima Prefecture and the setting for many of his films — to Hiroshima on the eve of the atomic bombing.
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