[Japanese Interviews: Life in LA] Takashi Uchida Film Editor / Director

Takashi Uchida

Profession: Film Editor / Director
Born: 1988, Musashino, Tokyo, Japan
Higher Education: Studied Cultural Anthropology at a state university in a small town in New York
Film Education: In 2012, he entered the graduate program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he formally trained in live-action filmmaking
Instagram: @takashi_uchida

“I was born and raised in Tokyo, went through the whole junior high school entrance exam system—what you’d call the ‘typical track.’ But even then, I always had doubts about the idea that ‘getting a good score is all that matters.’ Something about that felt off to me. I believed that we should pursue what truly moves us—what we love from the bottom of our hearts. For me, that was film,” says Takashi Uchida.

Born in 1988 in Musashino, Tokyo, Uchida was given the name “Takashi” (尭) by his parents, who wanted to reflect a mindset like the rising sun—full of warmth and clarity. His father is a dentist and his mother a homemaker. He has a sister two years younger and a brother eight years his junior.
Uchida began attending cram school in the fourth grade and adapted well. “I enjoyed it because it gave me a wider social circle beyond school,” he recalls. But perhaps as a reaction to the intensity, he completely lost motivation after passing his entrance exams. Even if he did poorly on regular tests, he wasn’t concerned—so long as he could move on to the next grade.

Then, in his second year of junior high, he watched the final scene of Cinema Paradiso, which had been recommended in a magazine. That was the moment he realized: “This is what I want to do.” At his school’s culture festivals, he pitched ideas, involved his classmates, and directed his own short films. “Looking back, it was an all-boys school, so naturally all our actors were boys. I struggled with the gap between what I wanted to create and the limitations of what I could actually shoot,” he says.

Those junior and senior high school years were when he made up his mind to pursue a career in film. In his final year of high school, he spoke with his parents, who told him, “If you’re going overseas, we’ll support you.”

He went on to study abroad at a small state university in a quiet town in New York, majoring in cultural anthropology. He chose this path deliberately—believing that in order to make meaningful films, he needed to accumulate a broad range of experiences. That’s why he avoided a major in film at first and chose a less conventional route. In 2012, four years later, he entered the prestigious USC School of Cinematic Arts for graduate studies, this time fully committing to live-action filmmaking. After graduating, a fellow USC alumnus asked him to edit a film. The job was supposed to take a month, but Uchida delivered the first draft in just one week. The speed and precision of his editing impressed the team, and that became the spark for his career. In his first year alone, he landed editing work on three feature films.

Editing, he explains, is about approaching completed footage with total objectivity—rearranging scenes to reconstruct the story into something more persuasive and revealing. Sometimes, directors come to him with nothing but a mountain of raw footage, asking him to turn it into a cohesive film. His objective perspective and rigorous rethinking are what elevate the final product. In recent years, Uchida edited footage for Under the Sky, directed by renowned artist YOSHIKI. Post-pandemic, he has also begun working on his own directorial projects. “My next idea is to create a film that’s like a sketch—capturing the everyday lives of Japanese people living in America,” he says.