Adapting the most celebrated Japanese writer of his generation, and the most globally successful to boot, is no small task. But with Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi proves he was up to the challenge. The three-hour drama, based on a Haruki Murakami short story, is one of the biggest surprises of this year’s Oscar season — picking up four Academy Award nominations, including a historic one for best picture and a best director nom for Hamaguchi. It’s proved a break-out success for the Japanese auteur, who has been a figure on the international arthouse scene for years.
In a video interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hamaguchi reflects on his “amazing year” with Drive My Car, what he changed from the original tale and how the combination of his cinematic style with Murakami’s prose created a “story about loss and revitalization” more universal than any he had made before.
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What was your first reaction to receiving four Oscar nominations for Drive My Car?
I was not expecting this at all. I’m incredibly surprised about what has happened, and to receive four nominations is far beyond what I had expected. I was very surprised from the bottom of my heart. I found even more happiness sharing the news and celebrating with the cast and crew. So, I’m very honored and proud and very grateful.
At what point did you know this film was connecting with international audiences and critics to such a huge degree?
This has been an amazing year with so many amazing things happening. I think the first stage really was at Cannes [where Drive My Car premiered] and seeing how the film was getting “top star” ratings from the critics. That’s when I really first thought many people out there in the world might accept this film. The second stage was the reception in the United States. Not just the Oscar nominations, but all these awards from critical circles [Drive My Car has won best film honors from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle] was a real confirmation for me. And to really see the U.S. audience responding confirmed to me that the story that I presented is a universal story. A lot of that has to do with Haruki Murakami’s original story and the fact that Haruki Murakami himself already had world recognition.
What was it particularly about Drive My Car that made it resonate so widely? It seems similar in style and structure to your previous, also excellent, films, that weren’t such global successes.
This will be a little bit of repetition on my part, but I think it really has a lot to do with Haruki Murakami’s original story. The story deals with themes that I had always dealt with in my own work. But in writing this script, I really felt that I had never written a story as universal as this one. Such as story of loss and revitalization. This isn’t so much in his short stories, but I think in a lot of the longer novels by Haruki Murakami, there are characters that have lost something and [the story] is really about how they can come out, come back from that sense of loss. A lot of Haruki Murakami stories really work towards finding that place of hope after that sense of loss. Because what is lost cannot be returned, but yet they still managed to get to a place of hope. I think that aspect is what really led to the wide acceptance from the international audience.
What was the most challenging thing about adapting Murakami?
One of the most challenging things was how to keep Haruki Murakami’s very unique world intact and how to recreate that world visually, through the medium of film. I think to just use the words in this original, quite literally and apply that into the film would not have worked, or would actually have worked against the experience of the original [story].
I decided it was important to have the film reflect what I myself personally felt from the experience of reading the original story. Part of that was keeping the sincerity and humbleness of the characters, none of whom overstay or overdo things; these are characters who really listen and observe the situations around them. But because of that, they are not characters that really work to propel the story forward. So it became a difficult task to make a movie out of this story and keep it true to the original experience.
What aspects did you add to the story?
In terms of things that I changed, I think it’s really about what I expanded of the original story and how I fleshed out the story. I gave the story past, present and future adds. Some of the past elements I actually pulled from a [Murakami] short story that’s part of the collection Drive My Car is in. It’s about a character who starts telling stories after she has sex and I had that character be our perfect good wife in the past section of the film. For the future part, I pulled elements from another short story where there’s a husband whose wife has cheated on him.
In terms of the elements I added to the present scenes, the main one is the production of “Uncle Vanya” [a plot point has the lead, Kafuku, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, stage an ambitious theater production of the Chekhov classic in Hiroshima]. I felt the audience could imagine Kafuku’s internal landscape by seeing him perform Uncle Vanya.
At the same time, I had many core elements from the original in tact. Kafuku is really one. And the Misaki character [played by Toko Miura] is another. And a lot of the dialog. I remember when I was reading the original, [Murakami’s] words really resonated with me. I knew that if I can have an actor say these words, and it is believable, it would be truthful and would be a very good film.
What were some of the biggest things you changed?
At the end of the day, I’m adopting a short story into a film. So, many things are different from the original. The most apparent difference is the color of the car. In the original story, it’s a yellow Saab convertible. But in the film, it’s red and not a convertible: it has a roof. That’s really for practical reasons. If we had an open car, we’d have noise coming, and we wouldn’t have been able to record the dialogue.
In terms of the color, we originally were going to go for a yellow Saab, but the person who set up the visit to see the yellow Saab actually drove up in a red Saab! And I remember thinking, “Oh, how cool is this car, this red car?” I knew in this film I was going to have the car drive through various Japanese landscapes and I felt the color red will pop out more. The color yellow, being very close to the color green, tends to blend into the landscape more.
Has Murakami seen the film? What did he think?
Haruki Murakami has, in fact, seen the film. I read in an interview that he had seen it, and I saw that one thing that he noted was that the color of the car is different. And that he was surprised by that. I was a little worried about how he felt when I was reading the interview. But he gave me the biggest compliment that I could hope to achieve. He said when he was watching the film, he couldn’t remember which parts were from him and which weren’t. I think that means we were able to keep the world of Murakami intact.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
