Ryusuke Hamaguchi talks to Greg Bruce about the meaning of his three-hour Oscar-nominated epic.
There's a crucial scene in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar-nominated masterpiece Drive My Car in which one of the characters says to another: "I get the feeling that you both value the finer details that people won't evennotice." Because the line is said to a character playing a director, and is referring to both that character and his screenwriter wife, and because it's spoken in a movie in which the level of detail is itself extraordinarily fine-grained, it's hard to believe director Hamaguchi, who co-wrote the film, didn't intend the line to be self-referential. But when I asked him about it, he was self-effacing.
"What I do is quite ordinary. It's quite normal. I don't think that what I do is more special than anybody else. I'm just doing what's ordinary for me. But sometimes people do come up to me and say, 'You really look at people in fine detail.' And when people say that, I go, 'Oh, maybe I am that kind of person.' But I'm not necessarily consciously trying to look at the world or human beings in finer detail. It's just maybe the way I am. I'm just living an ordinary life."
In one way that is true, but in another way his ordinary life just got him nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director - something that happens to very few people, and even fewer whose films aren't in English - and a substantial part of the reason for that recognition is the movie's extraordinary level of attention to detail. Every scene, every shot drips with meaning, inviting you to consider every element. It's the type of film that would reward repeat watching in slow motion, if it wasn't three hours long.
For instance, the movie spends a lot of time in the protagonist's car, looking at the faces of the characters or gazing out the front or side windows. Then, late in the film, just once, and for no immediately obvious reason, it turns and looks out the rear, giving an uninterrupted view of where we've just been and all we've left behind. I found myself thinking intently about that scene at the time and still do now, long after the movie finished. I assumed it said something about the nature of time, about our relationship to the past and our ability to leave it behind - one of the movie's key themes - but I couldn't say exactly what. When I asked Hamaguchi why he'd done it, he said: "To be quite honest, I'm not entirely sure."
I found this funny and telling as a comment on the ways in which we try to "get" art. As Haruki Murakami, who wrote the short story on which Drive My Car is based, once said to someone who asked about the meaning of cats in his fiction: "Sometimes a cat is just a cat."
Great art is great because of the way it uses its raw materials to evoke something in us. If it succeeds, it does so because audiences see something in it they like, which may or may not have anything to do with what the creator intended. In other words, if the reader sees the cat as meaningful, the cat is meaningful, whether Murakami thinks so or not.
Maybe, Hamaguchi speculated, he'd turned the camera to the rear in that scene because the visuals were more dynamic that way, because, unlike when the camera is facing forward, objects come into the frame from all four corners and appear much bigger as they do so. Then he had another thought: "But I have had people say to me that, 'You keep shooting films as if you're trying to throw away what happened in the past.' And after receiving those ideas, I started to think perhaps part of me does make films that feel like I'm throwing away something in the past."
Actors Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura in Drive My Car. Photo / Supplied
He didn't say what that thing might be, but he did say that, because of his parents' work, he spent his childhood moving house every two years or so, and he has come to realise he has developed a tendency as an adult to reset his personal relationships on the same timeline. He said: "A part of me thinks that perhaps I will continue the rest of my life this way."
So it's possible that had something to do with it.
Drive My Car is, to a large extent, a movie about the power of words. Of Chekhov, Beckett and Murakami, whose literary works are all central to the film, Hamaguchi says: "In reading their works, I have this sense that the words that they're using are really being produced out of their physical bodies. And it's only when these words are actually coming out of their bodies that I think the words have the ability to actually move the actors' bodies and also move the actors' emotions. If the words are merely symbolic, I don't think it can really move the actors in emotional and physical ways. I think these words need to be grounded in some kind of life experience."
I don't know exactly what he meant by this, and clarification was difficult because we were talking through an interpreter, but I think it was something to do with the difference between someone who is writing about something they feel deeply and someone who's constructing impressive-sounding bulls***, and what he was saying that only one of those techniques has the power to move us.
In the final scene of Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya, the rehearsal and performance of which is the narrative engine of Drive My Car, the title character says: "Oh, my child, I am miserable; if you only knew how miserable I am!"
I asked Hamaguchi if he felt, as Uncle Vanya does, the unbearableness of life. He said: "I think the answer is yes, of course, I feel these things. But I think at the end of the day, I think when you hear or read Uncle Vanya's words, it has a mysterious power to make you really sympathise and empathise with the character. And I don't think that's necessarily related to whether I am, in fact, experiencing the same things, but rather that I hold the possibility for something similar to happen to myself. It's almost as if I have a seed in myself that hasn't necessarily grown into something. But I think it's true of everybody, that everybody has the possibility, can feel the seed inside them that Uncle Vanya's words are expressing."
The seed of which he was speaking in this instance sounded like emotion, and its failure to sprout sounded like repression. I asked about this - the feeling that is below the surface in all of us - and how much of this was what he was trying to communicate in the film.
Actors Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura in Drive My Car. Photo / Supplied
"Probably that's something that really compels me," he said. "And I say this because I find that I always end up making films about this idea, especially when I'm writing my own original stories. I find that that's the theme that I'm really dealing with. But even when I'm adapting something, I realise that I choose stories that perhaps deal with this element. Or, in turn, I find that I've turned the story into something that deals with this theme. I sort of used the metaphor of a seed earlier. But I think when I'm dealing with fiction, there's a part of me that wants to grow that seed into something, to see what actually blooms out of it."
There are three deaths in Drive My Car. The cause of one of them is clear enough but the question of who caused the other two, and how, is ambiguous. The question is, how responsible are we for the lives of those we care about the most? And the way the movie addresses that question is central to its moral outlook.
But then again, maybe it's not. Hamaguchi says the notion of who holds responsibility for the deaths is not a question of morals or ethics. He says he believes we all have the ability to be both victim and perpetrator. He says the acceptance of that idea is necessary for us to move forward in life.
"It's really about whether we have the ability to precisely see things as for what they are," he says, "and whether we can accept and at least see that fine line of being both perpetrator and victim. And I think that's one way for us to try to live a healthy life."
