David Bowie and I stood on a beach, at the water¡¯s edge, toward the end of the second week of August 1982.
The beach was on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and it was a balmy 20-odd degrees Celsius in the Tropic of Capricorn. The entire island was surrounded by a lagoon that led out to a reef; only ripples of waves were making it to shore in the soft mid-winter light. It was less than two weeks until the first day of principal photography on Nagisa Oshima¡¯s World War II film, ¡°Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.¡±
It was my job that day, as the director¡¯s assistant, to introduce Ryuichi Sakamoto to Bowie; and now Sakamoto, who had just arrived on the island from Japan, was walking toward us. I had only met him once, briefly, during the costume fitting sessions in Tokyo in June.
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