‘Drive My Car’ Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi On Being Behind The Wheel Of The Worldwide Hit That Stormed The Oscars
Every year at the Cannes Film Festival there is a critics’ favorite. Last year, it was Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a loose adaptation of three stories from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 compendium Men Without Women, that stars Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yūsuke Kafuku, an actor and theater director dealing with a tragic loss. Two years after the death of his playwright wife, Kafuku is invited by a theater festival to stage a multi-language production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is assigned the taciturn chauffeur Misaki and meets the dangerous young actor Takatsuki. Though it only left Cannes with an award for Best Screenplay, Drive My Car went on to be the arthouse bulldozer of 2021, leading to a surprise three nominations—for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay—outside the expected Foreign Language Film nod. This interview took place shortly after Hamaguchi’s stint as juror at this year’s Berlinale…