A few days ahead of the premiere, Harris and Tera were spending plenty of time with their film’s young cast, some of whom had never left Okinawa before. “Our star, Naoto [Shimajiri], was standing at the airport in front of a guy who had a sign with his name on it, and he had no idea that it was for him,” Harris says. “He thought we would be there to pick him up.”
Despite that greenness, Harris and Tera had already seen flashes of readiness for the spotlight in their actors—particularly during a fitting for the Maison Margiela looks they’d all be wearing at the festival. “Once they put on the clothes, it was so cool to see how quickly they were able to ease into being movie stars,” Harris says. “There was no hesitation. It was like all of a sudden I saw Yuma [Taira] just putting her hands like this and standing on the carpet already in her head.”
Tera says that Margiela (whose team he also first met through GQ Japan) felt like the perfect choice to represent The Colour of the Sun, which was filmed entirely on 35 millimeter. “Margiela has always been so great at pushing for different textures, and the film is very much about that visually,” he says.
“A movie premiere is a moment when everyone gets to be in a band together,” Harris adds. “You want the band to all show up looking right and playing their parts properly, so you need a designer that is dynamic enough to really show off all of the different colors of the players in your band.” Unsurprisingly, when the crew hit the red carpet on Wednesday night—all glammed up in hair and make-up by Giovanni Errol—their luscious mix of velvets and tweeds and silks looked supremely rock-’n’-roll. (Today, the film was awarded the prestigious FIPRESCI International Critics Prize.)
