As 'best movie of the year' prizes pile up, including a shout out from former President Obama, director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi explains 'Drive My Car.'
Perhaps even more impressively, it’s one of two films Hamaguchi released this year — the other being
I was attracted to the relationship between Kafuku and Misaki and their conversations taking place inside the car. I thought it was interesting that the relationship develops in that very enclosed space. That was the core. But the story itself is only about 40 pages long, so I didn’t think that there was enough material to create a film. I had to bring other elements from two other stories in the same Haruki Murakami collection [“Men Without Women”].
Although the passage of time moving forward, often reflected in leaps of several years within a story, is a constant in your work, you rarely use flashbacks. Tell me about this narrative decision.I don’t make much use of flashbacks because they make things too definitely descriptive, and they take away from the richness of how you want to portray something. I create this structure so that audiences can generate their own flashbacks, so I don’t have to use them.
This is about the movement of rotation. I think that somewhat represents what this movie is about. That scene that you just mention is about the only flashback I used or something close to a flashback. And it shows the realm of the dream for Kafuku and his emotional state. I like that scene and this movement of the rotation of the wheel and the tape. It signifies forward movement, and yet the tape just rotates and rotates meaning that it also returns.
In regards to acting, and how actors embody characters to materialize inner worlds, how do you feel these two dramatic mediums differ?I find acting is kind of a mysterious thing. Acting is something that’s made up or something that is a fiction, but when a performance is superb, then it becomes something beyond fiction, and you can’t believe it’s based on something that’s not real.