Politics & Power Quote by John Foster

Outsider ambition is doing a lot of the work here, and John Foster knows it. He frames his project as a statistical anomaly first: an American director stepping into the highly coded world of the Japanese yakuza film. That genre carries its own etiquette, iconography, and moral math; by naming its specificity, he signals respect and warns the reader that “curious” is a polite synonym for “skeptical.”

The next move is strategic vulnerability. Admitting he “doesn’t speak much Japanese” isn’t just self-deprecation; it’s a preemptive strike against the most obvious critique: cultural trespass. He’s telling you he felt the risk in real time, that any authority he claimed would have to be earned on set, through collaborators, not assumed through confidence.

Then comes the indie-finance detail, which changes the stakes from artistic experiment to personal wager. Financing it himself implies obsession, but also insulation from institutional gatekeepers who might have demanded safer choices or a more digestible, export-ready version of Japan. It’s both romantic and slightly alarming: the purity of intent can look like stubbornness.

As an architect by profession, Foster’s subtext reads like a designer entering a neighborhood with its own vernacular. He isn’t selling fluency; he’s selling commitment. The line about people being “curious” captures the social weather around cross-cultural art: fascination mixed with doubt, the kind that follows anyone audacious enough to build in a style they weren’t “supposed” to touch.