Author: Yamaguchi Banri
Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi said he was surprised by the international popularity of his Oscar-winning film “Drive My Car,” but attributed it to the popularity of Haruki Murakami’s short stories. sex.
The film centers on the actor played by Hideo Nishijima, who is directing the multilingual production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” Actor Kafuku, still grieving the sudden death of his wife, led the rehearsal for the cast, who sat down and read their lines flatly, swallowing the language days before the performance.
The three-hour tale of grief, connection and recovery won an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last month.
“Actually, I was surprised by how well the film was accepted,” Hamaguchi said at a news conference in Tokyo on April 6, his first major event since the Oscars.
While attributing its popularity to the ubiquity of Murakami’s stories, Hamaguchi said the actors “brought it to the screen in a very convincing way, although I’m sure it was for them to embody Murakami’s worldview. A very challenging task.”
For his part, he’s trying to “show some kind of hope, as Mr. Murakami does in his novel, so we can feel that the character is okay for now — the process of losing and accepting it to move on. —If not, it’s fully recovered,” Hamaguchi said.
Hamaguchi said that the “inner reality” of the characters in the story is both the charm of Murakami’s story and the difficulty of visualization.
“Depicting inner reality…is what movies are not very good at,” Hamaguchi said. So he decided not to track down the written language of the original story. “The more engaging a story is, the harder it is for the visuals to transcend the image already formed in the reader’s mind,” he said.
Hamaguchi said he decided to visualize the heart of the story — the relationship between Kafuku and his much younger driver Misaki — who also lost his mother in a mudslide — through their conversations in his beloved red Saab. up to this point. Some colorful items from the movie.
Hamaguchi said the film combines the inner worlds of Murakami and Chekhov, reflecting their similarities.
The dialogue between Kafuku and Misaki is in stark contrast to the dialogue between Vanya and Sonya in Uncle Vanya, and when Kafuku plays Vanya in the show, he begins to realize that his inner words come back.
“So I found Drive My Car’ and“Uncle Vanya’ is wonderfully intertwined, as if they were translating each other,” Hamaguchi said.
Hamaguchi said he wanted to thank Murakami at the Oscars, but missed the opportunity because his “thank you” after giving a long cast list was misinterpreted as the end of his speech.
“I still want to thank Mr. Murakami and my staff,” he said.
Hamaguchi’s films, including last year’s anthology “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” were critically acclaimed, but he wasn’t well known in Hollywood until he won Best Screenplay at Cannes last year, when “Drive My Car” raised eyebrows. focus on. “
International audiences now see Asia as a source of interesting films, Hamaguchi said, and he hopes his filmmakers will create films that “penetrate the audience’s heart” and live up to their expectations.
What is the goal of his next film? “I just want to say that I made a little bit better than my previous one,” Hamaguchi said.
