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“I Really Wanted Sounds and Images to Exist Independent of Each Other”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Evil Does Not Exist
Ryô Nishikawa in Evil Does Not Exist Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s disquieting new film, is at once a major break from the Japanese director’s previous work and a distillation of the questions and anxieties around which his cinema has long orbited; it’s the film he seems to have been working toward his whole career. Anyone mildly familiar with Hamaguchi’s work will know the cardinal role dialogue plays in his films, which often double as symposiums—a proclivity evident long before Drive My Car’s meandering chats and late-night confessions. Pitted next to its talk-heavy predecessors, Evil Does Not Exist is a stark outlier; it may well be Hamaguchi’s most laconic work yet.
The film may skimp on words, but it routinely swells to an achingly melancholic score by composer Eiko Ishibashi, with whom Hamaguchi previously worked on Drive My Car. The alchemy between soundtrack and visuals marks another rupture in the director’s filmography. Evil doesn’t seem to originate from images so much as sounds, forsaking a linear plot for a more oblique and confounding journey. It’s not that things don’t happen, only that Hamaguchi keeps shifting narrative hierarchies until the main throughline is finally discarded for another, far more mysterious thread that leads to a finale as easy to follow on a literal level as it is difficult to decode symbolically.
Perhaps a good way of thinking about Evil Does Not Exist is to take it as a western. In its barest terms, the film centers on a rural community wrestling with the invasion of a group of Tokyo developers hellbent on turning the hamlet into a luxurious glamping site—never mind that this requires building a septic tank that would irreparably contaminate local freshwater springs. Hamaguchi, who also penned the script, singles out a father (Hitoshi Omika) and his eight-year-old daughter (Ryô Nishikawa) as the family unit through which the environmental and societal collapse will be refracted, but DP Yoshio Kitagawa’s camera seems less interested in the humans dotting this wintry, snowcapped landscape than in the landscape itself. Time and again, Hamaguchi turns to the mountainous locale for prolonged, human-free shots of trees, streams, local fauna and misty clearings. In another film, these segments would probably register as scenic fillers. Here, they speak to Hamaguchi’s overall project: Evil isn’t as concerned with telling a story as it is with questioning our expectations as to how one should unfold or what it should look like and heightening your receptivity to things and textures that would normally go unseen—or unheard. At its most transcendental, Evil feels like the work of a filmmaker trying out a new language and pushing his craft down uncharted paths, and the results are nothing short of entrancing.
Evil Does Not Exist premiered in Venice last September, where Hamaguchi and I met shortly before the film nabbed a Grand Jury Prize. Massive thanks to film programmer, producer and interpreter Aiko Masubuchi for her terrific help translating this interview. Evil Does Not Exist enters release from Sideshow/Janus Films on May 3.
Filmmaker: Going into Evil Does Not Exist, I knew Eiko Ishibashi would serve as composer, but I was surprised to see her given an original concept credit, too. In hindsight, for a story that seems to emanate from the score as much as the visuals, that’s nothing surprising, but could you tell me more about your collaboration?
Hamaguchi: Eiko received that original concept credit because, quite simply, her very existence was at the core of the project. Two years ago, after Drive My Car wrapped its theatrical run, she came up to me and asked if I would create visuals for one of her live performances. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next at the time, so I was really grateful for the offer. I had worked with her on Drive My Car, and the experience had been really wonderful; I knew she was a musician of great talent, and if I was going to make something that could meet her music’s standards, I knew the journey would take me to new places as well.
Filmmaker: I read that the feature you shot in the end, Gift, was a silent film.
Hamaguchi: That’s right.
Filmmaker: Which is very interesting when one thinks of how prominent a role dialogue usually plays in your films. Come to think of it, Evil Does Not Exist might be your quietest yet. I was wondering if you think the experience of shooting a silent film shaped the way you then approached the feature.
Hamaguchi: I think Gift was really just what I was hoping to make in the end. Sure, the process resulted in the birth of two films, but that was the one we’d set out to finish. And Gift needed to be silent simply because it was going to be accompanied by a live performance of Eiko’s music. But as you said, dialogue has always been central to my work—and not because I wanted it to! If anything, that’s a testament to the limits of my abilities. That said, I was curious to see what I’d make if I were to take on the project. As for what I learned along the way, that’s really hard to put into words. But if the film, which as you said might be the most silent I’ve made, was able to truly work, then that in itself is a discovery for me.
Filmmaker: How did the writing unfold? I’m curious as to whether it was different from your earlier projects. Did you go through many rewrites, for instance?
Hamaguchi: Not really. Once I started writing, it was actually a very fast process; I didn’t have many rewrites, but it took me a while to get going because, as we just said, dialogue has always been paramount in my films. And when I’m working without much dialogue, what I need to do is to almost layer and build upon response and reaction. The difficulty with Evil Does Not Exist is that I really needed to think visually. Of course, I can’t just shoot whatever comes to mind because of the budgetary constraints I must wrestle with. And it took me a long time to muster enough confidence to know I’d be able to really and fully tell a story here. I did plenty of research. Once we knew where we wanted to shoot, and I went out there to see what we could actually show, that’s how I found the elements I needed to tell a story, elements that were already there, in the land we were going to film in.
Filmmaker: Speaking of visuals: The film is comprised of largely static shots, but even at its stillest, there is so much motion in every frame. Could you speak of how you achieved that sense of movement?
Hamaguchi: Eiko introduced us to some local friends of hers, who invited us to see how they lived, and I noticed certain movements that were integral to their routines, such as the chopping of wood, which I enjoyed watching a lot because it always seems to carry the possibility of failure. You sit down and watch these people hack logs, countless times, and you’re constantly aware of the chance they might miss. At the same time, I think the film needed to trigger a shift in people’s sensibility. Our budget didn’t really give us room for big set pieces, so we needed our audience to react to smaller gestures as well. Take the opening three minutes, when you look up at the trees. I think in a sense that really resets our ordinary way of looking at the world and invites you to notice other, quieter movements.
Filmmaker: I was wondering about your habit of changing cinematographers. You seldom rely on the same DP for more than one project, though you did make an exception here. Yoshio Kitagawa had already shot your 2015 breakthrough, Happy Hour. What was it about his approach that made you want to work with him again?
Hamaguchi: I don’t feel like I’m constantly changing cinematographers so much as I’m cycling through and then coming back to them. For instance, Yasuyuki Sasaki, who shot Asako I & II (2018), also shot my mid-length film, Touching the Skin of Eeriness (2013). All of this to say that sometimes I might work again with the same DP, but I feel it’s quite dangerous to be dependent on a single cinematographer. I’ve seen many films which I thought were really good purely because of the way they were shot, and I don’t want mine to be dependent on my DPs that way. I want to keep a certain distance from them. But it was such a wonderful experience to be able to work with Yoshio Kitagawa again! He radiates this natural charm, which is why he’s loved by so many and why actors are very happy to be shot by him. And he has this ability to show things as they are, an honesty that seeps into the audience quite straightforwardly.
Filmmaker: Ishibashi’s main theme is a harrowing piece, but you never let it play in full and almost always cut away abruptly. What motivated your choice to truncate it that way?
Hamaguchi: Many reasons, but the biggest was I didn’t want the relationship between visuals and music to be so clean and straightforward. I really wanted sounds and images to exist independent of each other. That was quite important to me. I think that the prettier your score is, the longer you’ll want to listen to it, but by cutting it as abruptly as I did, the audience might suddenly feel much more involved. And because the film gradually invites you to listen to and accept the sounds reverberating from the environment, shots that might have felt somewhat abstract suddenly seem a lot more lively and real. I think this experience also allows your senses to heighten.
Filmmaker: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that you ended up shooting very, very close to where Ishibashi resides. How important was it to set the film so close to her music’s birthplace?
Hamaguchi: I honestly think we wound up there because at first I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I’d been given the freedom to work on any kind of story I wanted, but all that freedom had paralyzed me; I didn’t know where to start. So, for about a year I wondered how and if I could ever move forward with the project. I needed some kind of specificity to limit my options because there were too many things to choose from. Finally, I traveled to Eiko’s region. I knew she’d moved there to find inspiration, and I figured I might get lucky, too. What I found in the end was nature, and nature became a motif in the film. Thinking back, it feels like I happened upon all these things almost serendipitously.
Filmmaker: We talked a lot about listening, which seems to be a sacramental activity across all your films. But Evil Does Not Exist seems to take it a step further, as the whole film often feels like an invitation for us to listen anew and rejig our sensibilities. Can you tell me a little bit more about the importance of listening in your cinema at large, and its significance in this film in particular?
Hamaguchi: When you hear a sound, it means that two things are touching or rubbing against each other. In other words, something has to be moving for there to be sound. And that’s true about human voices, as well. The way our organs move generates them. Whether that’s the tongue or the throat, something has to be moving in order for you to be able to speak, and I think that when you’re hearing a voice, no matter the pitch, you also can imagine the way that person’s body is moving or feeling. Sounds allow for that kind of imagination to happen. A lot of information can be caught through our ears; that’s something that I only realized through filmmaking. As for Evil Does Not Exist, the music was born from the exchange between sounds and images. The theme song, for one, was actually composed after the edit; all the music is doing is effectively translating or amplifying something that’s already part of the film. That to me is an honest way for the music to help the image. Generally speaking, I don’t like to use too much music in my work. If the film is good enough, it won’t need music all the time. But with this one, I think music and images work together wonderfully. Whenever I re-watch it, the film never bores me, which I guess is a result of the harmony between the two.
Filmmaker: Still on the subject of voices, I remember you once stated that it’s very important for you to get to the moment when you can hear a change in the actor’s voice.
Hamaguchi: That’s right.
Filmmaker: How do you then encourage those moments, and how do they come about?
Hamaguchi: The change in the voice you’re referring to is something that usually happens during the script-reading sessions. What I do is I ask my actors to repeat the lines without any emotions. But even as they follow my instructions, their voices will still almost imperceptibly change—not in one day, sure, but over the course of a few. What happens in those moments doesn’t have much to do with emotions but with a certain “thickness” that happens in the words themselves. It’s almost like a muscle reaction that kicks off when the actor no longer finds discomfort in saying the words, and the script starts being one with their body. But I think it’s also a manifestation of the fact that, psychologically, the actors no longer experience resistance to saying the text and don’t have to act purely from the need to utter it, and that results in a kind of thickness in the voice. Once that’s established, then, if we go to set, something might happen. And that “something” is what we call the emotion, because only then do I tell my actors they can bring in whatever feelings they might experience in that moment. But I always tell them to show those emotions through their voices, too. By that time, I think they’re able to detect those changes in feelings themselves, and once they can pick on those by listening to each other, they can also express emotions in return. That’s how you get a genuine relay of feelings, and whenever that happens I always struggle to believe my own eyes: It really feels like something is happening right before you, like a chemical reaction expressed through your actors’ voices. This whole project started with the intention of making a silent film, but once I heard the cast speak, I wondered if the audience might go through different emotions if they could listen to them, too.
Filmmaker: Can we talk about your actors then? I know your lead, Hitoshi Omika, has an intriguing backstory. He was a crew member in the production team behind Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and initially joined Evil Does Not Exist as a driver. When did you realize that he was going to be your lead, and what qualities intrigued you about him?
Hamaguchi: I just loved his way of being, of carrying himself into the world. It felt very good working with him. And that was something the actors picked up on, too. He was able to conjure this very positive, good-feeling environment around him. And he was an excellent crew member. Whenever I had some small odd jobs or work that I need to do, I would often call upon him because I really liked the energy he radiated. We kept working together, and as I first headed over to Eiko’s area with my cinematographer, I asked him to be our driver for the location scouting. Eventually, I asked him to serve as a stand-in for a few test shots, and the more of those we did, the more I seemed to like his face. You see, when you’re talking to him, chances are he’ll give you this impression of being a good, stand-up young guy, but when he’s not talking there’s something almost scary about him; you kind of wonder what he might be thinking. There’s a mystery to his look which I was really drawn to. And he wants to be a director, too—in fact, he is one! He’s directed a mid-length film which I was able to watch, and when I did, I found a new side to him. There’s a really deep sensibility to him that [emerged] from his film, and it took me by surprise. Only after I saw his own film did I feel that he could play the protagonist, and that through acting he could convey the same feelings I’d experienced while watching his work. I asked him if he was up for the role; he said he was keen to be directed by me and accepted.
Filmmaker: What’s the name of the film?
Hamaguchi: Hitoshi’s? It’ll be released theatrically in Japan in December 2023 and doesn’t have an English title yet, but the Japanese translates as “Father-in-Law” or “Adoptive Father.”
Filmmaker: You talked about the importance of rehearsals, and how pivotal they are in generating that harmony between one’s body and the script. How many did you go through here?
Hamaguchi: It’s really hard to say exactly because it really depends on the difficulty of the scene. If a scene has a lot of dialogue, then we’ll rehearse it a lot more—meaning we’ll do a lot more script reading. In Evil Does Not Exist, there were many scenes where the action was quite central. For those, I asked Hitoshi to go and live in the area we’d shoot for a couple of days and practice wood chopping. As for the acting rehearsals proper—let’s call them “emotional rehearsals,” practice sessions that would encourage the actors to play with feelings, too—that was something we barely did. What we focused on instead were the movements of their bodies and the dialogue itself. I had to make sure everyone had memorized it because that helped me capture emotions in a fresher way.
Filmmaker: One of the things I love about your cinema is its permeability. Your films often exist in conversation with different art forms. Theater was paramount in both Happy Hour and Drive My Car; in Evil Does Not Exist, there’s an indissoluble bond between music and cinema. How important is this cross-pollination for you?
Hamaguchi: I must confess I’m not really conscious of this idea myself. [pauses] But to tell you the truth, I really don’t feel like I’m super talented. I’m not somebody who’s constantly got new ideas popping up left and right. I always need some kind of help from something else, some kind of impetus to trigger my ideas. Sometimes, that inspiration may come from theater; sometimes, it’s the rehearsals I do myself. As for this particular film, it was music that gave me the inspiration and a way for me to move forward with my thoughts.
Filmmaker: I was asking because I was thinking of your work as a documentarian in the very early 2010s, when you shot a number of docs around the areas that had been ravaged by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. How do you think those projects influenced the way you approached the landscape here? But also, and just as important, I was curious as to whether you think that experience—interviewing victims of that calamity, establishing a sense of empathy and trust with perfect strangers—allowed you to better relate with a community such as the one in Evil Does Not Exist, another remote enclave under threat which you film with so much affection and respect?
Hamaguchi: Making those documentaries had such a huge, huge influence on me. It was just a couple of years, between 2011 and 2013, and we were constantly interviewing victims of the tsunami, all while listening to the legends and myths people would relay from those rural areas. And as someone who lived in a big city, I like to think the experience helped me better understand people who didn’t. The influence those memories and those projects have had on me since… It’s just unfathomable. I think it’s really shaped the way I see people, and the way I see and capture landscapes, too, which was particularly interesting in those documentaries, where I couldn’t exactly film the landscapes people were talking about. Those had all been destroyed by the tsunami, and because they only survived in the memories of the people who’d seen them, we had to listen to their stories very carefully to understand and visualize them. It was by listening to them that I realized there were other ways of understanding people’s perspectives and new ways to look at landscapes, as well. That’s another thing I learned—that we can have many intimate connections to the places we live in. That influenced my approach in Evil Does Not Exist; the snowy landscapes you see here aren’t postcard-friendly vistas but more personal and vulnerable spaces.
