TOKYO, April 6 (BUS): Japanese director Ryosuke Hamaguchi said he was surprised by the international popularity of the Oscar-winning movie “Drive My Car,” but attributed it to the universality of Haruki Murakami’s short story based on it.
The film focuses on an actor played by Hidetoshi Nishijima who is directing a multilingual production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”. Still, the actor, Kafuku, in mourning for the sudden loss of his wife, leads the actors into rehearsals as they sit down and emphatically read their lines, swallowing language for days before they act out, according to the Associated Press.
The three-hour story of grief, connection, and recovery won an Academy Award last month for Best International Feature Film.
“Indeed, I was surprised at how widely this movie was,” Hamaguchi said at a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, his first major event since the Oscars.
While attributing its popularity to the universality of Murakami’s story, Hamaguchi said the actors “put it on screen in a very convincing way, although I’m sure it was a very difficult task for them to embody Haruki Murakami’s world view.”
For his part, he tried “to show some kind of hope, as Mr. Haruki Murakami does in his novels, so we can feel that now this character is fine — the process of losing and coming to terms with her moving forward — if not so,” Hamaguchi said:
Hamaguchi said that the “inner reality” of the characters in the story is the charm and difficulty of transforming Murakami’s story into visual images.
“Describing inner reality… is something that movies don’t do very well,” Hamaguchi said. So he decided not to follow the written language of the original story. “The more engaging the story, the more difficult it is for the visuals to move beyond the images that have already formed in the minds of the readers,” he said.
Hamaguchi said he decided to imagine the gist of the story—the relationship between Kafuku and his much younger driver Misaki—who also suffered the loss of her mother in a mudslide—which gradually deepens through their conversations into his red-hard friend, one of the film’s colorful elements.
Hamaguchi said the film brings together the inner worlds of Murakami and Chekhov and reflects their similarities.
Conversations between Kafuku and Misaki contrast with those of Vanya and Sonya in “Uncle Vanya,” and when Kafuku takes on the role of Vanya during the performance, he realizes his inner words toward recovery.
“So I found ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Uncle Vanya’ intertwined so nicely as if they were translating each other,” Hamaguchi said.
Hamaguchi said he wanted to thank Murakami at the Academy Awards but missed the opportunity because his “thank you” was misunderstood after introducing a long list of actors’ names as the end of his speech.
“I still want to thank Murakami-san and my staff,” he said.
Hamaguchi’s films, which include the anthology “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” released last year, were well received but were not widely known in Hollywood before the Best Screenplay award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival drew attention to “Drive My Car.” .
Hamaguchi said international audiences now look to Asia as a source of interesting films, and he hopes fellow filmmakers can produce films that can “penetrate the hearts of audiences” and live up to their expectations.
His goals in his next movie? “I just want to be able to say I made one a little better than the previous one,” Hamaguchi said.