Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
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“I Really Wanted Sounds and Images to Exist Independent of Each Other”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on 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 […]
by Leonardo Goi on Mar 18, 2024 -
“You Never Know When You Will Have a Great Image”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on the Oscar-Winning Drive My Car
Originally appearing here in July, 2021, Filmmaker‘s interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Drive My Car is being reposted today alongside the film’s Best International Feature win at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor It might strike some as sacrilege when I say that the excitement I’ve felt around Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s run of recent work reminds me of watching (and catching up with) the films of Arnaud Desplechin in the 2000s. Drive My Car, which had its world premiere in Competition at Cannes, follows the ecstasies and agonies and everything in-between of Happy Hour, Asako I & II (worth singling out […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Mar 28, 2022 -
Suspense in 8K: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Wife of a Spy
Despite his association with horror films, few contemporary filmmakers have covered as much ground as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has shifted back and forth across genres countless times in his prolific 30+ year career. Nevertheless, his latest film, Wife of a Spy, marks his first period piece. It takes place in 1940-41, telling the story of Yūsaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) and his attempts to expose his government’s atrocities in Manchuria, as well as that of his wife Satoko (Yû Aoi), torn between her husband and her country. With a script co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Wife of a Spy unsurprisingly features intricate […]
by Forrest Cardamenis on Oct 12, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3: Drive My Car, Bergman Island
“I am not really necessarily interested in performance, per se, but in emotion,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi told Vadim Rizov back in 2019 when asked how meaningful the work of Jacques Rivette was to him. The answer went on to more or less say “not very,” which is even more incredible now that his new three-hour Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, has landed, so absorbed with the art and nuances of rehearsal and performance that the French New Waver will inevitably be the default assumed touchstone once again. Indeed, Drive My Car is, along with its 40-page source material (found in Murakami’s […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 13, 2021 -
Pre- and Post-Pandemic Rohmer: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi on Berlinale 2021 Premiere Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Even after two of his features were derailed by the pandemic, Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi had a busy 2020. After breaking out with his 2016 film Happy Hour, Hamaguchi returned in 2018 with what he described as his first “commercial film,” Asako I and II, as opposed to a smaller, independent production. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, Drive My Car is Hamaguchi’s current “commercial” project, while the smaller-scale Berlinale 2021 premiere Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is his smaller, independent film. (When not in production on these films, Hamaguchi, along with director Kōji Fukada and two of his Happy Hour producers, helped spearhead a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2021 -
“My First Studio, Commercially Made Film”: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi on Solaris, Asako I & II and Japanese Film School
When Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour premiered in 2015, the 317-minute film raised a lot of questions, not least of which: who precisely was Hamaguchi, and what has he been doing for the last decade? There were some unkind trade reviews of his first feature films (Passion and The Depths) but not much else in English to draw upon, and his iMDB resume (including a full feature remake of Solaris!) raised more questions than it answered. Metrograph’s recent retrospective provided some clarity. After his first two features, Hamaguchi collaborated on a trilogy of documentaries collecting testimonies from victims of 2011’s Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 22, 2019 -
Happy Hour, The Best 317 Minutes of New Directors/New Films 2016
Bad news first: Happy Hour is pretty much a must-see. Given the option of watching 5+ hours on a weekend afternoon, I suspect most of us would rather not, but there are things it’s worth blowing your day up for. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute drama is a mysterious movie that begins as one kind of straightforward film before mutating into something much stranger — discussing it thoroughly without spoiling it is tough. I’ll try. Happy Hour initially presents itself as something like a shomin-geki, a term Wikipedia snippily notes is a “pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars”; Donald Richie defined it as “the drama about common people […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 25, 2016
