HK magazine interview with Chiaki J. Konaka
Konaka's longest statement on the series. He says the producer first imagined a multimedia plan centred on a PlayStation title, with TV anime only a hope. The core team was ABe, Junji Nakahara (game director, and CG on the anime) and Ueda; Konaka set the game's background and wrote its animated parts, and the team called the result 'psycho-stretch-ware' rather than a game. When the anime was green-lit he chose to tell a different story, about the relation between inside and outside the network, and introduced the word Wired. As a horror writer, he began with a ghost story, an email from a dead girl, with the starting idea that heaven might connect to the network. He wrote the first four scripts without knowing the ending, paused, then found his direction from Nakamura's storyboards, and never wrote a full plot; the series composition credit was only contractual. He praises Kishida for retouching other animators' drawings through the night and says he and Nakamura were at odds over whether Lain should want to go to Cyberia. He denies Evangelion and Rei Ayanami as models and traces his on-screen text to Godard. The power lines came from Ueda's roughly 4,000 photographs. Kishida invented the bear pajamas, ABe the X hairclip, and Ueda the asymmetric hair. The Layer 12 ghost was shot on 8mm with Ueda and Nakahara under a blanket. Layer 09 is his favorite episode, and he notes that ABe drew Lain's final face to camera at his suggestion.
- The game came first; Konaka wrote its animated parts and its basic setting
- Konaka coined 'Wired' for the anime; the game never used it
- He wrote with no overall plot, finding the direction through Nakamura's storyboards
- Kishida made the bear pajamas, ABe the X clip, Ueda the asymmetric hair
- Rejects Evangelion as an influence; cites Godard and his horror-video work
- COS was named after Apple's cancelled Copland OS
- The Layer 12 ghost was filmed on 8mm with a blanket over Ueda and Nakahara
- Layer 09 is his favorite; ABe drew the final shot of Lain
Sources: konaka.com archived · konaka.com archived