There's an almost ethereal rawness to this film that gets way under the skin; these are real people struggling in a foreign place with intensely internal issues. The dialog is breathtakingly natural--edgy, hesitant, sharp and often hilarious. And these two excellent actors give astonishingly transparent performances! Murray brings all his experience into this role as a tired but mischievous has-been, playing on his history hilariously then twisting it into something deeply poignant. For example, the karaoke sequence instantly reminds us of his hysterical SNL lounge singer ("Star Wars, Those near and far wars!"), then suddenly shifts into something bracingly powerful. Meanwhile, Johansson gives another warm, introspective turn as a young woman on the brink of her whole life, but without a clue where to go next. Writer-director Sofia Coppola shows that The Virgin Suicides was no fluke. Sure she's well connected (Francis' daughter and Spike Jonze's wife), but she's also seriously gifted at capturing the emotional essence of a story, pacing the action gorgeously and meaningfully putting characters and themes ahead of plot and structure. The unspoken longings in this film are remarkably moving. And if it drags a bit in the middle, at least it's doing so for a very good reason.

How well do you understand the limbo situation, the jet-lag, the clashing of cultures, everything that goes with travelling to weird and wonderful places and ending up on your own?
Scarlett Johansson: I heard Sofia had a hankering for a meeting, and I couldn’t say no. So we met in a restaurant in New York and she basically explained to me that she had this idea that was shaping up into some script that it was definitely going to be with Bill Murray and if it wasn’t Bill Murray then she wasn’t going to do it. She said it would also take place in Tokyo, and this seemed like two very appealing things -- Bill Murray and Tokyo -- so I said, “Send me the script when you’ve finished it,” and sure enough, not that much later a little mini-script came, and I knew right after I finished reading it that it was a project I wanted to be a part of. It was such a beautiful, beautiful script. I had nothing to say about it really, everything was there. It was 75 pages, it was short, and a lot of it was visual, I mean the dialogue between Bill and I is pretty much: he’ll have one line and I’ll have one line, like a ping-pong, and it just read so well, like a really great novel, and when I finished it I was happy and I was sad and I just knew, I knew I could play the part.

Sofia, how much of yourself is in the character that Scarlett plays?
Sofia: The whole story is personal to me and there is myself in Scarlett’s character and Bill’s character. I definitely was thinking about that age when I was in my early twenties and not knowing what I wanted to do with work. I was just out of school and just that transition and in crisis a little bit. I’d always been interested in this idea of a man’s midlife crisis and this just seemed like the same thing -- two characters looking at the same questions. Also I like characters in JD Salinger stories where you have young preppie woman having this kind of existential breakdown and there’s something kind of funny and charming to me about that. So there’s definitely aspects of my experience. It was important for me to have control over it editing-wise and to make it exactly how I imagined. And the only way I could do that was to make it low-budget and do it on our own so we didn’t have a boss telling us how to make it marketable or something. So we just chose to make it this way.

What did you like most and least about Tokyo?
Scarlett: Well I guess I had the Bob Harris (Bill Murray) experience! I was really tired the whole time I was there, and we were shooting a week of days, then a week of nights, then a week of days, and I felt very discombobulated while I was there. I was also staying at the Park Hyatt hotel while we were filming there, so it was a very surreal reality, going downstairs in my pyjamas for rehearsal and so on. It felt like fun for me, and the days I had off, which was just one day a week unfortunately, I just tried to do what everybody else was doing. I’d go shopping and eat out and try to walk around but I couldn’t even do anything that touristy because I was so involved in what we were doing. For whatever reason, nobody really spoke English very well in the hotel. There was a Swedish hotel manager, I guess he spoke pretty well. Oh and there were a couple of people there that knew how to say “No!”
Sofia: I’ve been going to Tokyo once a year for the last eight or nine years, and I love going -- it’s an adventure. I still don’t speak any Japanese. The language is just really intimidating to me. I think it’s fun -- anything like going to get groceries becomes a big ordeal because you don’t speak the same language. Working with the Japanese crew was definitely frustrating -- you have to be patient. But for me I always wanted to shoot in Tokyo and film what it was like for me there. And that excitement and enthusiasm kept me going. I still think it’s overwhelming, you know. It’s crowded and really modern and there’ll be an ancient temple right next to this intersection and a hotel and the mixture of American and Japanese culture. I find it strange and wonderful.

The karaoke scene is great -- how much of it was planned?
Scarlett: Well for a start, Sofia wanted those particular songs and I had to learn all the words to Brass In Pocket. Even though the translation on the screen is really bizarre, some of it’s just not at all the words, it’s like funny, broken English. But other than the songs it was pretty much improvised.
Sofia: The idea was to kind of make it feel like that it was late at night, and they’d had sake, and it was more shot as documentary. The Roxxy music song came out at the last minute.

Did any of you go to a karaoke bar in Japan?
Sofia: We did, and we learned that Scarlett has an incredible singing voice.

Which song was your favourite to perform, Scarlett?
Scarlett: I do a really good Cher impression, I Believe.

So you’re a disco queen?
Scarlett: Only at night. And Bill was singing Mack the Knife, which was excellent.

And Miss Coppola?
Sofia: I prefer to watch!

Do you have a favourite scene in the film?
Scarlett: I like the whole sequence with Bill and I in his bedroom. It starts off with us watching TV trivia and then pans over to the window and ends up with us lying on the bed and falling asleep. It’s so telling; it’s really the one time when our characters are really honest. There are the jokes about his mid-life crisis: “Have you bought your Porsche yet?” and so on, and I have that self-help tape, but it’s the one moment where we’re trying to figure out exactly what it is that’s missing, and not just that but Bill really is so evasive. With my character I’ll say things like “I really like you”‚ and “I’ll miss you”‚ and he’s just like “OK”‚ and it’s sort of the one moment where he really makes an effort to connect and I think it’s really touching.
Sofia: I’m happy with the way that played. It had all the moments we wanted it to have. I like when he sings More Than This to her and the way she looks at him, in that one look. I totally get that feeling when someone starts to like someone.

Do you have any experience of Japanese commercials?
Sofia: You can’t walk down the street in Tokyo without some familiar Western movie star holding a drink. At the vending machines there’s the Brad Pitt coffee can. It’s just a part of being in Japan and it’s just really odd. And for American actors it’s a big-pay job -- they get tonnes of money for a day’s work and they think nobody’s going to see it. And all the Japanese people I know, they don’t think it’s cool. They don’t think like, “Oh, cool, Brad Pitt!” They think it’s cheesy. It’s funny because you probably think oh, it’s Japanese culture they’re all fascinated about stars coming over and being paid to endorse products they never use. So they’re kind of laughing about that too. It was just trying to think of how to get Bill Murray’s character over to Japan, and having seen all those ads I thought, oh yeah. I wanted to do a real brand and I remember my dad showing me a still of Kurosawa, who did a Santori ad in the seventies. So I just thought, I’ll make it Santori. But it’s not meant to be disrespectful.

Did you have any trouble with the authorities while filming?
Sofia: We did have to move around on the subways a lot because security was coming and we had to get off and go on another train. It was sort of fun to shoot in that way though. It was just the three of us and the DP -- we’d sneak in and out and see an officer and go on another train. It was hectic at times and you can’t get permission for certain things, but most of the time it was a fun way to work.
Scarlett: We could be pretty sneaky because nobody was ever looking at us.