The director who received for “Drive My Car” the Oscar of the best foreign film tells, in an interview at the “World”, his work with the actors on “Tales of chance and other fantasies”.
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After ten years in the anonymity of independence and self-production, the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi has experienced, since 2015, a dazzling ascent by becoming a safe bet of major international festivals. In addition to a price harvest, including a prestigious Oscar, Drive My Car has encountered success in the French rooms, with nearly 200,000 entries despite a pandemic output and its duration of almost three hours in VO. With stories of chance and other fantasies, the 43-year-old director rehabilitates the shape of the film in sketches and declines in three stories a series of love coincidences.
What is the origin of the movie?
Initially, my desire was to make short films because the format allows you to work in a much more flexible economy, to find a freedom to experiment that we do not necessarily have bigger budgets. But the disadvantage of the short format is that it does not have a lot of diffusion windows. In February 2019, I had the opportunity to exchange with Mary Stephen, who was Eric Rohmer’s editor. It suggested the idea of gathering several short movies to make it a long program, a kind of collection, allowing an exit under normal conditions. The advantage of such a project is that it can extend to leisure and give rise to all kinds of small series. In April 2019, I read some segments to producer Satoshi Takata who had accompanied me on Senses. He told me, “We leave on that”.
The actors are at the center of your work which is an art of dialogue. How did you work with them?
The relationship to actors is what interests me most in the staging work. The film being made with a very modest budget, it was necessary that the actors should not only be interested in the content, but also agree to invest in the long term. Thus, we took a lot of time before shooting to repeat, make readings of the scenario. We find ourselves around a table to read the text devoid of any feeling, any emotion. We focus on words. The purpose of these readings is that the staging is revealed from itself through the text. In fact, I do not give almost no game indication. It is the meeting between the actors, their bodies and the text that emerges the rest.
The Word notes most often at home of the respondent. But here it has a more sensual, even erotic dimension …
The principle of conversation is to mingle with others. It is a movement that aims to abolish the borders between oneself and the others. This gives the feeling of being alive and the happiness that accompanies it. Sexuality is a way to reach it, but its effects are ephemeral, the sexual relationship often leads to a kind of vacuum, disappointment. Get closer to each other through the words, mix psychologically to someone, if one can say, finally allows access to this joy in a much more intense and perennial way. The movie dialogs try to express this design things that I draw from my own life.
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