In the 94-year-old history of the Oscars, Drive My Car is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture.
In the 94-year history of the Oscars, Drive My Car became this week the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture.
It’s also only the 12th non-English language film ever to be nominated for Best Picture.
Winning accolades the world over since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, Drive My Car is finally released into Australian cinemas on Thursday, and now with four Oscar nominations under its already weighty belt.
For those waiting patiently, they will be rewarded with a thoughtful film whose emotional power drives its ruminations on grief, regret, compassion and endurance.
Filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars, adapted the film from a Haruki Murakami short story, while weaving through it, both textually and thematically, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
Drive My Car tells the story of an actor and director, Yusuke Kafuku, who must grapple with the complex, unresolved relationship with his wife after her death. While staging a production of Uncle Vanya, he finds an unlikely companion in his quiet driver, a young woman who shoulders her own trauma.
Hamaguchi spoke to news.com.au about the process of adaptation, fact and fiction, and how we survive ordeals.
You’ve previously spoken about documentary and fiction. Often, within narrative fiction, you can explore truth and honesty more effectively than documentary – is that something you think about?
It’s easier to delve into what is truth as a question in fiction because on a certain level, you’re creating a very safe space for that question to be asked and it’s a very safe space for the actors to explore, not through their own words, but someone else’s words.
Therefore, they’re allowed to delve deeper into how they feel about the truth. I think that is why in fiction you can dig deeper into that very question.
You’ve made a documentary about tsunami and earthquake survivors and for me, this film seems to have elements about surviving our own regrets. Did you draw on that previous experience of the people that you met through making the documentary in crafting Drive My Car?
I think those things are very much linked. Ten years ago, when the tsunami happened and the whole disaster unfolded, it certainly shook everyone’s view. Including people who, up to that moment, thought that today will be like yesterday and tomorrow will be like today.
There’s this vague acceptance of humdrum, of everyday reality, and suddenly this event happened and it totally destroyed it. We were all put in a position where we had to reconstruct a new vision of the world. What is this world in which we live?
Through that process, I met a lot of people as I made the documentaries, and how they were working through those issues, as well as the physical issues of surviving that disaster. In this work, I’ve drawn on those experiences of how people deal with things and how they reconstruct a sense of the world for themselves and to try and get to the truth of how dedicated they are to their sense of what is real and what is true and what is important in a very serious way.
I think those experiences are all connected and they’re flowing into this current work.
Are there particular characters in Drive My Car that are mostly closely connected to those experiences?
Absolutely the two main characters possess this trauma that arises out of their everyday life being destroyed, and when they come together, they sustain the same level of trauma and damage in their lives.
As they exchange information, as they get to know each other, they come to understand the nature of that thing that was lost. Obviously as they go through that process, they’re headed towards a recovery, but it all stems from that kind of experience from outside the text as well as within the text.
How did you go about choosing which bits of Uncle Vanya was the most thematically relevant to your story?
The way I worked with Uncle Vanya is that I read it a number of times and what happens when you read a text more than once is that you start to notice what the important parts of the text are or what the lines are that truly have that kind of strength and resonance.
I would mark them out and put them aside, knowing that I wanted to come back to those moments and lines and emotional truths.
Naturally, you have this list of lines you want to get to in the context of Drive My Car, so it’s very much like working out how that would fit with what’s already there with Drive My Car. In a sense, Uncle Vanya came to rescue the Drive My Car project, that’s how I feel about it.
The main character said at one point that he’s scared of Chekhov’s words. Are you also scared of Chekhov’s words?
Yes, absolutely. We had to go over the Chekhov text to incorporate it into this film. When I was working with it, I could sense with the actors that when they were saying the Chekhov lines, they had to bring so much to it just to say those lines, regardless of the context that was around them, and that actually shows the depth and the power of Chekhov’s own writing.
I find that truly frightening and staggering that there is so much power in that kind of text, and it demands so much from the actors to be able to get their mouths around it and get it out into the world and make it meaningful.
I mean, on one level, I, as a writer, would aspire to writing something that has that much power and that much resonance and in as much we have to bring so much to actually dealing with it, I do find Chekhov a truly frightening writer.
You’re drawing on two esteemed literary figures, Murakami and Chekhov. What was the process of adapting a short story and a play and merging them into a three-hour film?
I started off adapting the short story and there was Uncle Vanya and, really, I couldn’t tell you what that process was that brought the two things together, but at the end of working on the script, it just seemed self-evident that this was the right thing to do.
But to go back a little bit into the background of the Murakami short story is that you’ve got these two characters who are on the same wavelength with the issues that they carry, but they’re very quiet, they’re strong, silent types. They don’t say much.
There’s a whole section for a month that they don’t say anything, and then yet it gets to a resolution.
In many ways, if you want to adapt that, you actually have to give them a way to resolve it and that’s what I meant before when I said that Uncle Vanya came to the rescue is that we could weave those elements in to get to a resolution, and Murakami himself, he actually draws from other authors a lot, not just to make his stories cohere, but also to refer to things.
It seemed actually quite natural to get Uncle Vanya into this in order to get to a resolution that’s actually not in the short story itself, but we would need as a film.
Drive My Car is in cinemas on Thursday, February 10
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2022-02-09 05:42:45Z
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