Soon after he was born, they moved to New York City due to his father's job transfer and he lived in Manhattan until he was 4 years old.
[5] At the time, his favorite films included Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, and Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly.
[10] He did not find a job after college and thought he could make it as a freelancer in the video industry, but he had no work at all during his first year.
The film is based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka, and Fujii was initially involved as a screenwriter, he was a stand-in for a director who left halfway through.
[1] He said his twenties were a dark time for him, as he was not accepted by the world, and in 2016 he went to Taiwan, his grandfather's homeland, on journey of self-discovery and stayed in Taipei.
[3][14] There he met Toyoharu Kitamura (Japanese: 北村豊晴, Chinese: 北村豐晴), who introduced him to Taiwanese film workers.
Father, and together with Abe and actor Takayuki Yamada, they spent four years since 2013 working on the script for Day and Night.
[8] In 2018, Fujii received a call from producer Mitsunobu Kawamura, who saw dailies of Day and Night and asked him to direct The Journalist.
[17] At first, Fujii turned it down twice because he was not interested in politics or social issues, but Kawamura did not give up after that and eventually asked him three times to direct the film, which he accepted.
[22] The film was a smash hit,[23] grossing over $26 million in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam combined.
Since then, Yokohama appeared in Fujii's film We Are,[29] the music video for amazarashi's On that night when I couldn't be the future (未来になれなかったあの夜に),[30] and DIVOC-12, a Netflix TV series The Journalist,[31] which was shot at the COVID-19 pandemic.
"[32] Fujii also said that at times, "I feel like Ryusei is a part of my body,"[33] and that he will work with him from the script development because he understands that he will perform as expected.