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| Yu Nakamoto Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
As new laws clamp down on yakuza activity, the Mikami clan is looking for a new way to make money, and middle-aged enforcer Kunio stumbles onto an opportunity in an unexpected way when a video of him improvising a dance-off goes viral on TikTok. This is Yu Nakamoto’s Break Free, screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, and it follows Kunio as he discovers a new life through dance, though he has difficulty getting away from his old life. On the eve of its screening, Nakamoto and star Fujii Akito joined me, with the support of a translator, to discuss the film.
“Everything started with Fujii Akito right here next to me,” says Nakamoto. “We wanted to make a movie in which he was the main character. As an actor he's played before in yakuza movies. They are perhaps not as well known, but there's also the fact that he's extremely good at dancing. He's done it for a long time. So it led us to this. We made a movie about a yakuza who dances and who gets viral. And so this is more or less the story of his life and indirectly, a little bit about Fujii's life as well.”
The role provides the opportunity not only to dance, but to do comedy and have something approaching a romantic subplot as well. I ask Fujii how he approached developing the character.
“Oh, well, that's a tough one,” he says, as taciturn as his character is at times. “Perhaps I could say I feel that I was working with the script. There really is not much more to it.”
We talk about the use of comedy in the film.
“It's a very important aspect of the movie, actually, because we're looking at a character who tends to be extremely violent,” says Nakamoto. “But I wanted to also portray him in a really cute way. So we have these three main characters, right. And with the way that they interact with each other, the way that they move, I really want this to be counterbalance to the violence that's in the rest of the movie. And so I think that's the way that I was able to make things acceptable to the audience.”
Fujii says that it was the director’s guidance that helped him to portray the sometimes awkward process of learning to dance, and Nakamoto confesses his inspiration.
“Oh, yeah, the montage. Anybody who sees the movie is going to recognise it instantly. It's an homage to Rocky, of course. We just took Rocky's training montage, and based our own off of it and imitated it, but of course, we couldn't use it exactly that way. So we added music, we gave it our own twist. And it's just really an homage to the fact that I love Rocky so much.”
There's another scene there that's very difficult to shoot, involving a fight in a car.
“Yeah,” he says. “As you might imagine, filming action in a really vast area is also really time consuming, and it requires a lot of people to make it work. Now, when it's the opposite, when you shooting in a very small place, well, that's actually something that I wanted to try, which is why we made it into the inside of a car. We basically just sat, all three of us, and discussed the way that they would move, move by move. And now I'll turn to Fujii san to see what he found.”
“I found it extremely difficult to shoot because, well, first it's really narrow and then the camera just barely fits in,” explains the actor. “And also it was just way too hot.”
It's a very physically demanding film in general, with so much action all the way through. How did he manage it physically?
“I believe it was mostly motivation because the director and the people took care of me well. I was so lucky to have people who took care,” he says.
We go on to discuss the scenes set in Kunio’s dance class.
“The scene was at a dance studio and we basically put the actors all together,” Nakamoto explains. “Some of them were extras, but they were all people who actually went to dance lessons regularly there. One of them was actually my wife and she helped us a lot. And then we had also a small girl called Uika that we picked from an audition. She was a dancer already, so it all ended up well.”
Did he have any young people to advise him on TikTok, in order to be confident of keeping up with current trends??
“Personally, I'm in my thirties,” he says. “I do know TikTok, and I'm not always on it and I don't watch a ton of it. So yes, I did actually ask people who are in their teens and in their twenties. We spoke mainly to TikTok stars and to people who are famous there, and they told us basically that just a scary man who does a cute dance, that's not going to grow, that's not going to be enough on its own. But what we found was that something that might go viral, is if we filmed from various angle this same yakuza man who is learning to dance step by step, learning, growing and getting better.”
He’s delighted that the film made it to Fantasia.
I don't usually go to movie festivals abroad. I was in Korea just last week and I've been to festivals in Asia before, but in North America, it's actually my first time. So I'm looking forward to my own movie being screened here. But I know this festival is one that projected a movie by Jackie Chan from 40 years ago before, so that's pretty exciting. We had the chance to look around the theatre and venue earlier. We're super nervous and really, we're vibrating with it for tonight.”
