Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

His film Drive My Car (2021) is the first Japanese film ever to be nominated for Academy Award for Best Picture.

[press conference for Drive My Car (2021) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival] The first time that I read Drive My Car, the short story, was in 2013. It was a friend of mine who suggested I should read it because he thought I would enjoy it. There were indeed elements which were familiar to me: drama, acting and, as the title says - Drive My Car - cars, vehicles. I think the inside of a car is a very good environment for intimate conversations; I have personal experience of this and had already explored this in other films. I think that in this film, Kafuku and Misake, in this enclosed space of the car, connect, and their relationship develops and I think their intimacy also increases, and that relationship already existed in the original short story, and I think it is at the heart of this film.