Biografie

16. Dezember 1978 · Kawasaki, Japan

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

He becomes the third Japanese filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director after his nomination for Drive My Car (2021). The other two are Hiroshi Teshigahara for Die Frau in den Dünen (1964) and Akira Kurosawa for Ran (1985).

[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.

[Cannes press conference for Drive My Car (2021)] In the short story the car was a yellow Cabriolet, the same make - a Saab 900 - but the colour and the shape are different. Initially, when I contacted Haruki Murakami - I wrote him a letter to ask him for the rights for a cinema adaptation - I had already warned him that I would probably not be able to keep the model that he had chosen in his short story. For me, the words spoken by the actors are very important inside the car, and with a Cabriolet, of course, the dialogues would not have been able to be used as such and that would have been a shame in my opinion. And so it was difficult to keep the Cabriolet for the film. Also, when the car is going through the city and through the countryside, visually we needed to see the background going past, the car needed to be very visible against the backdrop and I think the yellow would not be so visible; that's why I chose red which is a brighter colour. Also, the person who rented us the car initially suggested that I should go and have a look at the yellow Cabriolet, as it is in the short story, but when I saw the red model, it was a very well-maintained car and I preferred it to the yellow Cabriolet. And so the whole team and I were perfectly sure that we needed this red model.