Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Oscar Surprise ‘Drive My Car’

[Wassim MH]

The Korean filmmaker and the Japanese director have long admired each other. The two explain why Hamaguchi’s best-picture nominee resonates.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, left, and his film “Drive My Car” are up for the same awards that Bong Joon Ho and “Parasite” won.Credit...Eric Gaillard/Reuters (Hamaguchi); Philip Cheung for The New York Times (Bong)

By Kyle Buchanan

March 2, 2022

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In January 2020, just weeks before his film “Parasite” would make Oscar history, the director Bong Joon Ho was in Tokyo doing a magazine interview. By that point in what had become a very long press tour, Bong had dutifully sat for dozens of profiles, but at least this one offered a little bit of intrigue: Bong’s interviewer was Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a rising director in his own right.

For Bong, a fan of Hamaguchi’s films “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” this was a welcome chance to mix things up. “I had many questions that I wanted to ask him,” Bong recalled, “especially since I’d been doing many months of promotion and I was very sick of talking about my own film.”

But Hamaguchi would not be deterred. He was a man on a mission — “pleasantly stubborn and persistent,” as Bong remembered him — and every time a playful Bong tried to turn the tables and ask the younger director some questions about his career, Hamaguchi grew ever more serious and insisted that they speak only about “Parasite.”

“I really wanted to know how he made such an incredible film, even though I knew how tired he was of talking about ‘Parasite,’” Hamaguchi said. “I felt sorry for him, but I still wanted to ask him questions!”

Now, two years later, Bong has finally gotten his wish: The 43-year-old Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, and Bong is only too happy to jump on the phone and discuss him. Hamaguchi’s film “Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese drama about grief and art, has become the season’s most unlikely Oscar smash, receiving nominations for best picture and international film in addition to nods for screenplay and directing.

 

Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”Credit...Bitters End
Those happen to be the same things “Parasite” was honored for two years ago, when that South Korean class-struggle thriller collected four Oscars and became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.

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A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  
Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. 
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“‘Parasite’ pushed open that very heavy door that had remained closed,” Hamaguchi told me through an interpreter this week. “Without ‘Parasite’ and its wins, I don’t think our film would have been received well in this way.”

Called a “quiet masterpiece” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis, “Drive My Car” follows Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director grappling with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. The theater company assigns him a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who ferries him to and from work in a red Saab while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own. Though Yusuke at first resents Misaki’s presence, a connection — and then a confession — is finally made.

 

“There are many directors that are great at portraying characters, but there is something peculiar and unique about Hamaguchi,” Bong said via an interpreter by phone from Seoul. “He’s very intense in his approach to the characters, very focused, and he never rushes things.”

And though that unhurried approach can result in a long running time, Bong felt that the three-hour length of “Drive My Car” only enriched its eventual emotional impact.

“I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time,” he said.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the film’s awards-season journey has been slowly building, too. Unlike “Parasite,” which rocketed out of the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Palme d’Or, the intimate “Drive My Car” (adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami) emerged from Cannes last summer with a screenplay trophy and little Oscar buzz. But after critics groups in New York and Los Angeles both gave their top film award to Hamaguchi, the movie’s profile began to steadily rise.

 

From left, Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin and Park So Dam  in “Parasite.”Credit...Neon
Still, the road to Oscar is littered with plenty of critical favorites that couldn’t go the distance. When I asked Hamaguchi why “Drive My Car” had proved to be his breakthrough, the director was at a loss.

“I honestly really don’t know,” Hamaguchi said. “I want to ask you. Why do you think this is the case?”

 

I suggested that during the pandemic, it affects us even more to watch characters who yearn to connect but cannot. Even when the characters in “Drive My Car” share the same bed, the same room or the same Saab, there’s a gulf between them that can’t always be closed.

Hamaguchi agreed. “We are physically separated and yet we’re able to connect online,” he said. “It’s that thing of being connected and yet, at the same time, not.”

To illustrate what he meant, Hamaguchi recalled that 10 years ago, while working on a documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, he traveled through eastern Japan interviewing survivors. As he lent those people a camera and his trust, deeply buried thoughts came spilling out of them.

“After the interviews, I wrote out the words, and I realized that the ones that really shook me were the words that were quite normal or ordinary,” he said. “They were things that perhaps these people had already thought but had never thought to verbalize until that moment.”

Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar Nominees
Card 1 of 10
“Belfast.” In this charming memoir, the director Kenneth Branagh recalls, through a rose-tinted lens and black-and-white photography, his working-class childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland.

“CODA.” A shy 17-year-old is the lone hearing member of her rambunctious family. As she confronts a newly awakened desire to sing, her efforts to share her musical talent with her deaf relatives are remarkably affecting.

“Don’t Look Up.” Two astronomers discover a comet headed straight for Earth. When they pass along the bad news, the president of the United States has other things on her mind to pay attention to than the impending catastrophe.

“Drive My Car.” A theater director grapples with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya.” A chauffeur assigned by the theater company ferries him to and from work while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own.

“Dune.” In this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, the young scion of a noble family departs for a desert planet home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice.

“King Richard.” This two-for-one superhero origin story follows young Venus and Serena Williams in their ascent in women’s tennis, as they fulfill an ambition that their father had conceived before the two were born.

“Licorice Pizza.” In Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age romance, a child performer who has hit maximum adolescent awkwardness is aging out of his professional niche. His encounter with 20-something Alana, whom he instantly falls for, gets the story’s juices going.

“Nightmare Alley.” A grifter with empty pockets and a mysterious past joins the sleazoid world of 1930s back-road carnivals. He soon begins cycling through women, including a clairvoyant whose husband once had a successful mentalist act.

“The Power of the Dog.” Phil Burbank has been playing cowboy his entire adult life, raising cattle on his family’s Montana ranch for decades. When his brother George marries a widow with a teenage son, a lifelong family dynamic is disrupted.

“West Side Story.” Steven Spielberg’s remake of one of Broadway’s most celebrated musicals — a modern take on “Romeo and Juliet” — centers on the forbidden love between Tony and Maria, who are involved with two rival street gangs in Manhattan’s West Side in the 1950s.

The same is true when it comes to the “Drive My Car” characters, whose internal struggles can only reach the level of epiphany when they find someone to confide in.

“It’s possible that when the characters say what they’re thinking, the audience could think, ‘Oh, they didn’t actually know this?’ But it’s about the journey of being able to get to a place to verbalize that, and for that journey to happen, it’s because someone is there to witness it,” Hamaguchi said. “Somebody being there to listen has an incredible power.”

 

And Hamaguchi wouldn’t mind some company himself, if only to help him process all those Oscar nominations. When I spoke to him last week, he was quarantining in a Tokyo hotel after returning from the Berlin Film Festival. “I haven’t seen anyone, so no celebration for me,” he said.

As the Oscar nominations were announced on Feb. 8, Hamaguchi was flying to Berlin; when the plane landed hours later, he turned on his phone and was flooded with text messages. Even now, recounting the story, he remains in a state of disbelief.

“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like all of this is real until I’m actually at the awards ceremony,” he said. “No matter how many congratulations I get, it’s hard to believe, especially when I’m confined to a narrow, small hotel room. Perhaps when I’m at the awards ceremony and I see directors like Spielberg there, reality might kick in.”

 

Bong was less gobsmacked by Hamaguchi’s nominations. “I knew ‘Drive My Car’ was a great film, and I didn’t find it surprising,” he said. “And since the academy lately has been showing more interest in non-English films, I expect that the film will do well at the awards.”

His own Oscar ceremony was a whirlwind experience — “I can’t believe it’s been two years already,” Bong mused — but he declined to offer advice to Hamaguchi on how to navigate the night.

 

“I’m sure he will do well,” Bong said. “He is someone who is like an ancient stone — he has a very strong center.”

Instead, Bong extended a request. When they first met in Tokyo, and again last year during a panel discussion at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, there wasn’t much time for the two men to hang out. “So this year, I hope we will be able to get together either in Seoul or Tokyo and have a delicious meal,” Bong said. And after the Oscars, surely they would have plenty of notes to compare.

Hamaguchi was eager to accept the invitation. “I’m truly delighted to hear that,” he said, though he cautioned that Bong might not like the topic of dinner conversation: “I would really love to keep asking questions about how he makes such amazing films. I want to keep asking him until he’s sick of me asking!”