Sophia Magazine vol.8 / WINTER 2018

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images instead of being merely passive consumers. “If you are simply consuming or repeating knowledge you won’t neces-sarily fail, but if you try to make something, you are almost bound to fail at first. Failing at doing something challenging is more interesting and empowering than simply repeating what the teacher tells you is true, which is the conventional way of learning here in Japan.”In the world we live in today, “almost everything is ulti-mately about selling something, which is not the point of human existence,” says Williams. He believes that good mov-ies answer the same questions that religions answer. “So I sort of preach to my students to interact more with art that has powerful, profound, and universal messages and not simply to be impressed by something that appears to be good because it sold more than something else.”Through filmmaking, students can satisfy their need for self-expression while learning to work in teams. “It is an in-teresting process of collaborating and negotiating with other people, and leading a team to create something,” he observes. Though some of his students wish to go on to work in film or other media, most will likely not become filmmakers. None-theless, notes Williams, these skills can be useful in business, teaching, politics, and daily life too. For the students who do go on to study film or media further he says: “I want them to make something that they have control over, and come up with a film that they can use as a calling card when they graduate from Sophia University.”Creating a calling card that best showcases what one can do was exactly what Williams did to gain his current position at Sophia.When he graduated from high school, there was only one film school in Britain, and it only accepted students over the age of 27. So he decided to study literature, his second choice, at Trinity College, Cambridge. “After I graduated I tried to get into the film industry but it was completely closed at the time. You either had to have relatives in the industry or some connections, and I had neither. I ended up working for a year in several part-time jobs, in a factory, a restaurant, a hotel, and a prestigious public school, and then I went back to uni-versity to study education and became a teacher in a com-prehensive (state) school in London,” he recounts. Looking back he believes that all these experiences were meaningful for him, since he saw the kinds of struggles that people in “the real world” face each day. “For example, the kids I taught in London weren’t the best behaved or most academically inclined, but when I managed to stimulate their interest in something I saw how they changed and how their eyes lit up. If I had gone straight into the film industry, I may have led a non-connected life in an enclosed world.”After two years of teaching, Williams saw a recruitment ad for an English conversation school in Japan. With only limited ways into the film industry in Britain and the entire economy depressed, he decided to work for a few years in Japan to save the funds needed to study filmmaking in the United States. At that time he was fascinated by the works of Akira Kurosawa, but also contemporary Japanese directors such as Juzo Itami, and Sogo Ishii, and he was keen to expe-rience something totally different from the culture he grew up in, so the choice made sense.Soon after arriving in Japan, he met a group of students on the streets of Nagoya, making independent films. “It was a major change, from not being able to get into filmmaking to suddenly finding a group of friends with whom I could make films. Funny I had to go to the other side of the world to do that,” he remarks. Eventually he decided against study-ing filmmaking formally, since he had already been through his own “film school,” learning the basics through actually making films with his Japanese friends.Later, Williams was offered a generous scholarship to pur-sue a Ph.D in Japanese history at the University of Chicago, but after thinking it through he decided to stay in Japan. “I already had the idea for ‘Firefly Dreams,’ my first real feature film, which I really wanted to make,” he says, “and I thought that if I went to America I would never get to make that film.” While many Japanese universities only consider books as published material in the selection process of research-ers and professors, Sophia also recognizes films. Williams’ “Firefly Dreams” was the calling card that led to his current position.“As a filmmaker, I am more and more interested in works that are not transparently obvious. Conventional patterns are annoying. I like something that is broken or has a hole in it, something unpredictable,” he states.Similarly, as a professor, he expects his students to “get lost first and find their way out.” Williams continues his creative process of teaching and making films at Sophia University, where faculty members and students are equally stimulated by each other. Career Path as Academic and Filmmaker12Research