Japanese writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has had a remarkable year, releasing two film festival favourites, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car . The first, a collection of three short episodes , premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival , where it won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Oe then won the best screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Drive My Car , which has since been selected as Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at next year’s Academy Awards. Adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car focuses on theatre director Yusuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima), whose life changes dramatically when his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) dies. At nearly three hours, the film is a deep dive into complex relationships surrounding Kafuku and his wife, whose sexual fantasies inspired her writing for television. Hamaguchi’s films have an organic, free-flowing feel, as if they were improvised on the spot. But apart from some workshop scenes in his 2015 drama Happy Hour , he says performers in his films essentially repeat exactly what’s written in his scripts. “But there’s room for emotional improvisation. I don’t give my actors direction about how to feel things. I leave interpretations up to them,” he said via translator Aiko Masubuchi at the New York offices of film distributors The Criterion Collection, in October, when both of his latest films were screened at the New York Film Festival. One such instance took place in the third episode of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy , where the character Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) returns from a party to her hotel room. She falls onto her bed, the camera studying her face closely. It’s a moment that shows everything you need to know about her. “We didn’t have much time shooting that scene,” Hamaguchi says, laughing. “I explained to her that we’re going to shoot the scene after the reunion which we had already shot. And please take off your shoes and dive into the bed. I think that’s all I said – everything else came from her as an actor.” The characters in Drive My Car are marked by what they can’t say, because they are afraid or unwilling to speak the truth. Kafuku and his driver Misaki (Toko Miura) are paralysed by their pasts, Oto by her desires. “I can sense these characters are unable to talk,” Hamaguchi says. “It’s actually crucial to my writing – the story starts to rely on what they are not able to say. At the same time I think it’s amazing that actors are able to perform that feeling of not being able to reveal themselves.” Asia’s top 10 contenders for 2022’s best international film Oscar Hamaguchi’s films are filled with glimpses into guarded lives. When characters finally get to express themselves, their emotions can be overwhelming. Park Yu-rim, who plays Yoon-a, a mute actress from Korea, in Drive My Car , has two scenes, including a speech from Anton Chekhov’s classic Russian play Uncle Vanya that she does in sign language. In both, her impact is extraordinary. “Dialogue is not just about expressing meaning,” Hamaguchi says. “There’s also something about the sound, the voice, the timbre, all of those things that are also happening with dialogue. I’m interested in the effect it has on the body, on emotions. For me there’s not a huge difference between spoken dialogue and dialogue in sign language. They both trigger new ways of expressing emotions.” Relationships aside, a large part of Drive My Car shows Kafuku at work, performing in multi-language versions – including Mandarin, German, Tagalog and Japanese – of Uncle Vanya and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . The movie’s portrayal of auditions, casting, table readings and rehearsals both amplify and alter the themes in Murakami’s original story. “Murakami welcomes changes,” Hamaguchi says. “He’s very open to it. Uncle Vanya is in his original story, albeit in a very short passage. I believe he finds a lot of similarities and relationships with Chekhov’s work to begin with. For instance, he quotes Chekhov in his novel 1Q84 . “ Godot wasn’t in Murakami’s story, that was a suggestion by Takamasa Oe,” he adds. “He said not many directors would do both plays. We see Godot , an avant-garde piece that depicts a kind of godless world, before Vanya , where there is a sense of god or spirit. Perhaps that reflects Kafuku’s development, that something is pushing him towards more humanity.” Beckett’s estate guards the writer’s work closely, which meant Hamaguchi could not change lines. His actors worked from a Japanese version that was translated into Indonesian. For Chekhov, the director took from several Japanese translations. “A lot of the dialogue in Vanya comes across as theatrical, because it was, after all, written for a play. So I was thinking about how to change the dialogue to make it feel more natural, make it easier for the performers to actually perform the dialogue,” Hamaguchi says. “The same thing applied to the non-Japanese actors in the film. I personally don’t speak any Tagalog or Chinese, but I asked them to make certain changes to make it feel more natural for them as well.” Hamaguchi has been making movies for over a decade, including the Tohoku Trilogy , documentaries he co-directed with Ko Sakai, and The Sound of Waves and Voices from the Waves , for which he collected interviews with survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. That experience changed his approach to working with actors. “Talking to the victims of the tsunami, I learned that people always have fear, nerves, when they are in front of a camera. Even though these were people who wanted to tell their stories, it was still very difficult to get rid of that fear. It made me realise how important it is to spend time with them, really talk to them, to get rid of that fear,” he says. “I thought it would be really interesting to bring that into a fiction setting. Actors also have nerves being in front of the camera. Why don’t I try my best to get rid of that kind of fear for the actors as well? By doing that, I saw that the actors and their performances shine brighter.” As you might expect in a film called Drive My Car , Hamaguchi and his crew devised several long driving scenes, both night and day, urban and rural. For the most part they were filmed live, without CGI, despite the complications involved. “I thought it was really important to have the car actually moving, the landscape actually moving, rather than sitting on a soundstage. I don’t think I would have been able to get those performances otherwise,” he says. “The car scenes result in a lot of silence, but to me they are rich silences. When the conversations do happen, they reveal the deep connection between the characters.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook