Oscars: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ Ties Record Number of Nominations for Japan

Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s moving and meditative drama Drive My Car has been the awards season sensation from overseas in 2022. On Tuesday, the film matched the record number of Oscar nominations for a Japanese title, officially landing in competition for best film, best director, best adapted screenplay (Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe) and best international feature film.

Japanese cinema has been fairly well decorated at the Academy Awards, particularly in its golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, when classic works like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon took home honorary Oscars in a period before the advent of the best international feature category. More recently, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters was nominated in the best international film category in 2018, and Yōjirō Takita’s Departures was the last Japanese film to win in the category back in 2008.

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But Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic Ran is the only Japanese film to score as many as four nominations from the Academy. The Kurosawa masterpiece was nominated for best director, best cinematography, art direction and best costume design, winning only in the latter category (Kurosawa later received an honorary Oscar, presented jointly by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg).

Drive My Car’s strong nominations haul Tuesday was reminiscent of the historic 2020 Oscars run of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, which landed six nominations, ultimately winning four awards.

Hamaguchi, 43, has been on a stunning creative run over the past year and a half. He co-wrote Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s period thriller Wife of a Spy, which won the best director award at the 2020 Venice Film Festival; and his 2021 omnibus feature Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which tells three stories about contemporary Japanese women, was a hit at the Berlinale, winning the Silver Bear jury prize.

But Drive My Car, also released in 2021, is the film that has launched him far beyond the festival circuit and onto the radar of discerning moviegoers around the world. The film is an adaptation of a short story by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It stars Japanese leading man Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yusuke Kafuku, a stage actor and director coping with the sudden death of his enigmatic wife. Traveling to Hiroshima to direct a performance of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, a gruff, silent young woman is assigned to act as his chauffeur, ferrying him around the city in his bright red Saab 900. During the ride, an uncanny connection emerges between the two, with secrets and confessions revealed.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last summer and has been winning accolades ever since. Hamaguchi spoke with THR at length about the making of Drive My Car late last year.

A previous version of this story stated that Drive My Car had set a new record for most Oscar nominations for a Japanese film. It only tied the record.