The man behindDrive My CarandWheel of Fortune and Fantasybreaks down his filmmaking process.
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With good reason, too.
Haruki Murakami is a monumental literary figure, and adaptations of his work have been very uneven.
But he originally suggested a different story, which I found too difficult to adapt.
(Im not going to tell you what story it was.)
However, Drive My Car had appeared ina magazineabout eight years ago.
Id read it back then, and felt maybe thats one I could do.
So I suggested this back to him.
The short story Drive My Car is structured differently from your film.
So I needed to figure out the most natural way for that relationship to develop.
Additionally, within the story, there is Takatsukis character and his dialogue.
I actually pulled some of his words from the short story into the film.
I also knew that I needed to inflate the story to make a feature.
And Murakamis world is quite unique, so I couldnt just pull from anywhere.
So I chose two stories, Scheherazade and Kino, and I created one story out of these three.
In the original story, the loss of the wife is something that has happened in the past.
I dont really like the mechanics of a flashback.
I also didnt think that flashbacks would work for this story in particular.
Hes lost the person that he can reveal his private self to.
You really understand Kafuku and his loneliness without him actually speaking so much.
The production period actually overlapped between the two films.
I had shot the first and second stories ofWheel of Fortune and Fantasybefore the pandemic.
During that period, we shot the third story ofWheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
I wanted to get used to thinking about these similar themes.
Theres something very abstract about it.
That abstractness is something I was drawn to.
I also think that words said at night are different from words said during the day.
Daily life is farther away, and you draw out something different from the characters their inner selves.
Conversations during nighttime drives often end up being deeper conversations.
Its interesting to hear you say the majority ofDrive My Carwas shot after the pandemic started.
Why include the pandemic at that point, after avoiding it for the previous parts of the film?
The pandemic very much affected the conception of the film.
All the scenes in Hiroshima were originally going to be shot in Busan, South Korea.
But we were no longer able to travel abroad, so we considered other options.
We thought about what Japanese city would be a good place to host a theater festival.
So I really had to think about whether that would be the right choice.
So, Hiroshima ended up clarifying that theme in the film even better.
So I researched and interviewed a lot of people who direct and work in theater.
I sort of mimicked him and pulled that approach into my own.
That was a big moment for me.
Thats when I first tried out this process.
Your films tend to be quite long.Drive My Caris three hours, butHappy Houris over five hours.
The same goes for when I was making documentaries.
ForHappy Hour, the length was kind of an accident.
I had originally thought it would be a two-hour film.
We had about eight months to shoot.
We decided to shoot as much as we could and then decide in the edit what to cut.
If I took away anything, the strength of the whole piece would be lost.
RegardingDrive My Car, I figured it would be about two and a half hours long.
While I was on location, I could tell it would get longer.
It ended up being longer than expected.
The first story to me is very understandable; its a simple story about a love triangle.
The second story has a darker, sexual element to it.
The third story, I felt that people could watch it and feel good coming out of it.
With that experience, people might want to watch the later stories when they come out.
I want to make it a cycle between short films and feature films.
The short stories will ultimately meet the needs of that film.
Tell me about the decision to make Chekhov more of a presence inDrive My Car.
His work so often inspires these meta approaches, like withVanya on 42nd StreetorThe Last Metro, or TarkovskysMirror.
I went back and rereadUncle Vanyaand really saw a correlation between Kafuku as a character and Uncle Vanya.
Some of Vanyas dialogue can directly be used to talk about what Kafuku himself is going through.
SoUncle Vanyawas really helpful.
SoUncle Vanyaallowed me to do the same thing within this film.
When I sawHusbands, I had just just turned 20 or so.
Seeing that really was a determining experience for me.
In my opinion, nobody else has done that so clearly.
That said, I do feel that American people and Japanese people dont necessarily act the same way.
