Since he watched Home Alone at the age of 6, Ryo Takebayashi became enamoured with film.

All it took was for his father to buy him a film camera while in school, and the young Takebayashi would start embarking on his own little projects, making short films and amateur videos, vowing to one day make a feature film of his own.

Now, that day has finally come, and Takebayashi can proudly call himself the director of his debut feature – MONDAYS: See you “this” week!, a Groundhog Day comedy film where a group of office workers find themselves in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same week over and over again. Selected as the opening film of the 2023 Japanese Film Festival in Singapore, the premiere of MONDAYS: See you “this” week! also saw Takebayashi in town as part of a post-show Q&A.

In Singapore for the first time ever, we spoke to Takebayashi about his path towards becoming a director and the Japanese film industry today. “Actually, despite my father giving me the camera, he was very against me pursuing film at university, because he thought it wouldn’t be stable or profitable,” says Takebayashi. “These days though, we no longer avoid speaking to each other and are on good terms again. During university, I did my best to keep pushing myself, where I would keep submitting films for student competitions, helping me build up a portfolio and in a way, got me into commercial work after graduation.

Takebayashi was invited to join a company started by his close friend, specialising in commercials for TV and online formats where he would build his professional career from. “It was a good place to get started – I’d always admired commercials in Japan, and I knew that the film industry in Japan was a tough one to enter. It gave me a lot of experience with storyboarding for short content and shooting the footage, and I find the process of filmmaking always exciting, regardless of the format or the length,” says Takebayashi.

“But there were also times that it wasn’t easy. Being in my 20s, working for so many clients, I did find that it was almost like being caught in a time loops, where I’d spend the weekends still working away, whole nights sleeping on the floor of the office, and you’d lose track of which day it was,” says Takebayashi (he also mentions the gyu-don near the office as typical supper fare).

That was also the same idea that informed MONDAYS: See you “this” week!‘s plot, where advertising company coworkers Yoshikawa, Endo and Murata are having the worst week ever, reliving the same mundane Monday over and over as they find a way to end the eternal Monday.

“Initially, we actually wanted to just make. a short, 30-minute film, but when we started writing, it quickly got out of hand, and we ended up with a 180-page script,” says Takebayashi. “So we decided that it would end up as a feature film instead, which is quite amazing considering the small budget we had and how we shot everything over seven days.”

Amidst his team, Takebayashi counts co-writer Saeri Natsuo as a close friend and easy colleague to get along with – literally, as the two of them joined the company (CHOCOLATE Inc.) at the same time, and were frequently paired up across various projects, including their viral short film Hello! Brand New World which was supported by Suntory Holdings Limited. “We were both newcomers, and ended up hitting the ground running, working together to figure out the structures of films we could follow or how we could experiment to do more interesting things to our films,” says Takebayashi. “It’s not a case of battling our ideas, but always working towards a common goal, and that’s why we decided to work together again on this film.”

“Sometimes I wish we had more mentorship to show us the ropes and guide us along the way, but I also appreciate how hands-on we had to be,” he adds. “One thing I do hope to see improve in the film industry is to be able to garner more support and sponsorship, because it’s really difficult to survive as a filmmaker in Japan. Often there are very tight deadlines and limited budget, and I do hope that for future projects this changes.”

All things considered, MONDAYS: See you “this” week! marks another notch in Takebayashi’s growing slate of film credits, having already directed coming-of-age feature-length documentary film Bookmark 14 in 2021, which chronicled the personal stories of 35 teenagers in the same class at school. “That was a tough one, where we really had to think about how we would arrange everyone’s stories and how it would flow from one student to another, and capture each life succinctly but accurately,” says Takebayashi. “We stayed in the vicinity and filmed these students for two months, and for me, it was important to not only capture the reality, but also balance it into something accessible for people to enjoy and understand watching. That really is the goal of my films I guess.”

For now, Takebayashi is just happy that his film is reaching and connecting to a larger audience, and that he’s actually achieved this lifelong dream of his, and is already looking forward to the next project. “I think that now we’ve made this film, it gives investors more confidence in us to deliver what we promise, and I’m looking at a film that is about family bonds, where they need to free themselves from what they only see, as well as combining science-fiction into it,” Takebayashi concludes. “I haven’t decided what exactly makes a ‘Ryo Takebayashi film’ yet, but what I do know is that I want audiences to remember that our time in a day is limited, and that you can find time to do something that really has meaning for you.”

The 2023 Japanese Film Festival runs from 5th October to 20th December 2023, as presented by the Japan Creative Centre (JCC), Embassy of Japan in Singapore and the Japan Foundation (JF), in collaboration with Singapore Film Society (SFS). Full programme lineup and tickets available here