Sex is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. But human relations, passion and tensions are central to his films, and are brought out through conversation or conveyed by means other than touch. Still, sex, and primarily its promise, plays a role in his films, as the web of relations he laces between multiple characters gets entangled and broken. Hamaguchi’s comfort zone is group dynamics and, since early in his career, he has relied on its potency for drama. His student thesis film Passion (2008), which was recently released in US theatres, portrays a group of friends in their thirties whose friendship is challenged by love triangles that twist and overlap over two nights.
While workshops and theatre are fed by lived experience in Intimacies (2012) and Happy Hour (2015), they also provide Hamaguchi’s characters with a setting where the everyday comfortable distance collapses to make space for meaningful connections. By temporarily inhabiting another person through role-playing, line readings or performances become outlets for the expression of true emotions. As seen in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) and Drive My Car (2021), power dynamics and social hierarchies are destabilised to demonstrate, perhaps only momentarily, the possibility of other relations and ways of being in the world. All of this plays out to riveting effect in cities across Japan – from Tokyo to Hiroshima to Kobe – that become more than just backdrops for Hamaguchi’s characters, whose lives and sense of being are tuned into and swayed by the everyday rhythms of the city.
Drive My Car, 2021. Courtesy of Culture Entertainment, Bitters End, Nekojarashi, Quaras, NIPPON SHUPPAN HANBAI, Bungeishunju, L’ESPACE VISION, C&I, The Asahi Shimbun Company
Julian Ross: Your films often begin with scenes set in a train, a monorail or a taxi. Why do you start your films in this way?
Ryusuke Hamaguchi: I think it depends on the film, but you’re right in pointing out that you see a character on a moving vehicle relatively early on in my films. In the case of The Depths (2010), the reason is simple, because the film is about a Korean character arriving in Japan, which means going from the airport to the monorail, and going deeper and deeper into the city from the outskirts. I suppose one reason I start my films in this way is to show the broader environment the characters inhabit. I think that living in a city basically means you’re often on a moving vehicle. Of course, people in the countryside also drive cars, but the public transport system is well developed in the city. I don’t own a car, but I still feel that I can move around freely, which means much of my life revolves around public transport, and I exist together with these vehicles. As a person who lives in a city, vehicles are a natural part of my physical sense of life, and they become part of the landscape that you inhabit and see in your everyday life.
Julian: When the stories of your films begin, the movement stops.
Ryusuke: Yes, I think that’s right. I feel that’s the way we live our lives. We have a home and a workplace, and a vehicle that connects the two. We might visit a friend, and then go home, and this involves getting into a vehicle. We move and then stop, move and then stop, and so on.
Julian: Some of your films were shot in Tokyo, but you also chose different cities as your locations, such as Hiroshima for Drive My Car and Kobe for Happy Hour. What are the challenges of shooting in the city, and are there differences for you between shooting in and outside Tokyo?
Ryusuke: It’s difficult to shoot outdoors in Tokyo, as it’s almost forbidden to do so. Of course, you can hold a camera and shoot footage by yourself like a YouTuber, but there are civic restrictions on using cameras and microphones in the city with a group of people. We basically have two options: substitute another city for Tokyo or film without permission, which we call guerrilla filmmaking in Japan. Getting a permit costs money, so guerrilla filmmaking is what I used to do early on in my career, as it was the only option. What you gain from this is capturing Tokyo as it truly is, which is probably most visible in my film Intimacies.
I learnt the most about camera positions to capture the city from the Taiwanese director Edward Yang. In a city, you have the living space but also the traffic network that expands behind it and is constantly moving. The transport system is always running, and there’s a kind of automaticity to the city. Edward’s camera position is such that it captures both the living space and the traffic network at the same time. Edward showed me how you can capture these multiple layers by choosing a camera position that brings in both. He taught me that a camera position has the ability to turn our lives into cinema. I tried to embrace this when shooting in Tokyo. Another thing that Edward discovered about the city is that it is made of glass. Glass is a partition: you can see but can’t hear much through it, which means you can communicate through it but some modes of communication are prevented. It establishes barriers but also connections. Simply put, this allows me to create visual layers: inside and outside. And it allows me to express the city’s automaticity. In our everyday lives we also use the glass surfaces of the city as a substitute for mirrors. When you go to the countryside, one of the things you realise is that there are no reflective surfaces to use as a mirror to take glances of yourself and check how you look. In the city, on the other hand, the environment always informs us how we look and how other people see you. I think this determines how we behave and sometimes makes it difficult to live in the city.
Julian: What do you gain, or lose, from shooting outside Tokyo?
Ryusuke: What you lose is money. Most film productions are located in Tokyo. As such, going to the countryside means staff and crew have to travel long distances and stay at a location for longer periods, which all costs money. It also means you lose time. This is the biggest challenge to making films in the countryside. One way to get around this is to shoot a film with a small team, which is what I did with Happy Hour. The city you live in becomes a shooting location, and living in a place becomes a way of location scouting. The basic topography of Kobe involves the sea, the railway tracks that run parallel to it, and the mountains behind them. I lived at the foot of a mountain, which meant that I had to walk up the hill every day to get home. Going up the slope, I saw the sea each day. I think this everyday experience is reflected in Happy Hour. But it’s not always possible to live where you’ll shoot a film, and you can only be a temporary resident. One way around this is for your character to also be a temporary resident, which was the case for Drive My Car. The characters in the film are driving around, as if they’re stroking the city. While you can’t capture a strong connection with the city in this way, I think you can transmit a sense of being there and spending time in a place.
Julian: In the film Twilight City (1989) by the Black Audio Film Collective, one of the interviewees in the film says cities might look similar but each has a unique sound. Would you agree?
Ryusuke: Probably. But I can’t say for sure. In Kyoto, there’s the Kamo River in the centre of the city, the noises of which become part of the city soundscape. Shooting in the city usually means that its clamour enters your film. For me, one city sound that is unavoidable is construction. The life cycle of a city building is much shorter than the life cycle of a human being. Naturally, construction sounds are everywhere, and become an obstacle to filmmaking. You don’t want construction noise echoing into your sound recording for a fiction film, as you can’t match the noises later. In Japan, we often use sync sound, so that becomes an issue, and production staff have to go to construction sites and beg them to pause their work for every take. Of course, it’s irritating for construction workers, and it sometimes causes trouble. In my case, I often shoot with a small crew so we don’t have the capacity to do this, which often means that we have no other choice but to accept these sounds. But I’ve come to embrace it as part of my films. Maybe it’s because my films have something disquieting about them and involve destruction, which is often followed by rebirth. Although these construction sounds are usually troublesome, when I embrace them they find their way into the film at perfectly suitable moments – to my surprise. Sometimes this noise tells us a lot about the city’s life cycle, as well as a character’s. As part of the city soundscape, construction sounds are baked into my films.
Julian: You made a series of documentaries after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, in which you interviewed inhabitants of cities that were decimated and no longer exist, at least in the way they used to. In the wake of the disaster, most Japanese filmmakers shot the ruins of these cities, but you chose to focus on the people and their memories of these places.
Ryusuke: The reason for this choice, which I made together with co-director Ko Sakai, is the camera is only able to capture the present and the passage of time that takes place at the moment of shooting. Naturally we visited these places in the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake. I have a prior relationship with Sendai, which is where the tsunami struck, but I had rarely visited the coastal areas, so I didn’t know what they used to look like. When you photograph ruins, all you get is a sense of the destruction. What you don’t get is somebody’s unique life that used to inhabit that space. It’s not something that can be captured by the camera. But what we can do with a camera, in the aftermath, is to capture what is taking place in the present. What we chose to do was to film conversations between survivors who spoke to one another about how their lives used to be. In this way, what you can capture on camera is their facial expressions as they share and replay their memories in their head. During these discussions, the participants would discover emotions and relive memories through talking with each other. Before opening up about their thoughts in these conversations, I think they had been holding onto certain feelings, which weren’t being given a shape or an outlet, for a long time.
Happy Hour, 2015. Courtesy of NEOPA / Fictive
Julian: Discussion plays a central role in your films. Did this experience in documentary filmmaking influence your fiction work?
Ryusuke: Yes, it did. I think that was a big turning point. In the documentaries I made, I was always filming somebody from a fixed position because the films mostly comprised interviews. As the person talks, something happens within them as they recall memories, and the camera is able to capture this emotional experience. Even if what is being said might be very ordinary, something happens in their voice. I used to write screenplays with a lot of dialogue, and I always had the feeling that words were the foundation of my films, and that words were an important building block. But while making these documentaries, I felt that voice is crucial in making something believable. This feeling I get from documentaries is something I try to bring into fiction.
Julian: Your films often include scenes of people reading out loud. This conveys not only the content of what they’re reading but something else also through the actors’ voices and their enunciations. I’m thinking of the second part of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, where a character reads out erotic passages from a novel that a professor has written in his office. This scene is probably more erotic than sex scenes in your films. Can you speak on the role sex and sexual tension plays in your films?
Ryusuke: First of all, more or less, sex is a form of communication, and that’s important for me to keep in mind. Of course, there are also risks involved in sex. In a sense, you expose the weakest part of yourself. In fiction films, sex scenes involve actors performing sex, which isn’t always convincing, as in many cases they’re strangers to each other or have only met a few times on the occasion of the shoot. And their bodies can’t help but show this on camera. John Cassavetes, a filmmaker I really like, said it is impossible to shoot a truly intimate moment between two people who love each other. I think this is really true. Maybe it is only possible for sex scenes to be about something other than love. If there is actual physical contact, there is a force between the actors that naturally pulls them apart, because they are not in love with each other. One strategy to get around this is to rely on words. There are scenes in Drive My Car that could be described as sex scenes. But I regard them a bit like conversational scenes with body movements. I hope it shows that Kafuku and his wife love each other but there’s a gap between them – and their sex scene emphasises this distance. Only words connect them. But, in general, I think there are not many successful sex scenes in cinema.
Julian: Do you have any sex scenes in mind that work for you?
Ryusuke: Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) comes to mind. Two actors perform actual sex in this film. Just having sex makes it no different from porn. But what makes this film different is that the characters’ resolve to face death overlaps with the actors’ resolve to have sex on camera.
Drama and reality come together, and there is an intensity that is born from this situation. Another film that made an impression on me is Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), where Vincent Gallo plays a vampire. He is deeply in love with his wife but has sex with other women, who he ends up biting and killing, so as not to do the same to her. Sex is linked directly with death in the film. In the sex scenes, sexual moans gradually become violent screams when the vampire bites. I feel these scenes work as an expression of sex. The experience of pain on the body is palpable; it seems so real that you almost feel it yourself.
Julian: You show physical expression through other art forms in your films, for example through dance and theatre.
Ryusuke: I think that’s because the Japanese body scarcely moves. It is very restrained, and touch seems to be at least subconsciously forbidden. But film is attracted to movement. The problem is Japanese people talk all the time and hardly move. I think the main reason I add these scenes is to make people move in ways they don’t usually. As there is little to no contact between people, voice and its tone become very important. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, characters barely ever touch each other. His films mostly involve people walking, sitting or standing. In his films with actress Setsuko Hara, especially, the characters manage to touch the deepest part of each other’s lives but only through words. I think this shows the potential language has in Japanese life. It’s almost as if by not touching each other, their relationship reaches something irreducible. I think Ozu’s films show this is possible, and I feel like I’ve learnt a lot from them.
Julian: Your characters express what they are unable to in their daily lives through line readings and theatre, in a sense by role-playing.
Ryusuke: In fiction filmmaking, an actor reads out lines that were written for their character. This means they have to speak words that were written, and they have no reason to say them other than they were assigned to them by somebody else. To put it simply, this isn’t something that happens in everyday life. So I ask my actors to read their lines dozens of times over a period of days, to familiarise themselves with the words. In this way, the words become part of you, and the muscles inside of your mouth remember what it’s like to speak those words and in which moments to breathe in and out. It becomes second nature. And I think words, and what they mean, are mysterious things. If you say words out loud unprepared, it has the capacity to affect you. Words can make you feel things that you didn’t expect to feel, and how you say the words can reflect this. Words can be like fishhooks that pull emotions out from within the actors that they themselves might not have been aware they possessed. In order to include believable voices in my fiction films, I use this method, which I borrowed from Jean Renoir, where actors repeat their lines over and over again.
…By going through the rituals of a ceremony, certain things that you don’t even know are on your mind can flow out of you and become visible to people who are attending, and even move them…
Julian: I noticed weddings are a central setting in several of your films, including I Love Thee For Good (2009) and The Depths. Weddings are a bit like theatre, where people are asked to perform a role. I’m thinking of the wedding scene in Nagisa Oshima’s The Ceremony (1970) where the groom is made to go through the rituals of a wedding without the bride. In your films, the wedding becomes a setting where previously hidden truths are forced to reveal themselves.
Ryusuke: At the time I made those films I was at an age where people around me were getting married, and I found myself attending more and more weddings. Those experiences, and my thoughts on being a part of them, are probably reflected in these films. On the one hand, weddings have a certain silliness for the guests, and sometimes for the marrying couple. I think in my films this aspect is kind of emphasised. But on the other hand, such ceremonies actually have the ability to bring out emotions in people. In a way, it’s similar to reading out loud, as we discussed earlier. By going through the rituals of a ceremony, certain things that you don’t even know are on your mind can flow out of you and become visible to people who are attending, and even move them. There’s something performative, almost fictional, about ceremonies, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it might be that we need such performances in order to live. We shouldn’t ridicule human activities that have been taking place over such a long period
of time.
Julian: In Drive My Car and The Depths, you have characters speak to one another through interpreters. What attracts you to this kind of communication?
Ryusuke: In the case of The Depths, the reason was that it was an international co-production, albeit a small-scale one. The film involved Korean actors and crewmembers, and my communication with them happened via an interpreter. While interpreters make communication possible, you sometimes doubt them and can’t help but worry if they’re conveying your words correctly, as you’re so dependent on them. When I was discussing the script with one of the Korean producers of The Depths, I felt there were occasional miscommunications. The interpreter is not just a pathway or a conversion device: they have a body, they receive words and they find a way to interpret them into another language. In this process, something changes. I found this curious and, in a sense, it echoes what I find interesting in acting, as I discussed earlier. What the interpreter is saying is not their own words, but somebody else’s, but they’re still speaking those words. And by speaking those words they become somebody else. I feel I am witnessing their transformation right in front of my eyes. It made me curious about this form of communication.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Courtesy of NEOPA / Fictive
Julian: I’m an occasional Japanese–English interpreter, and it’s often a surreal experience speaking other people’s words with your own voice and watching other people looking at you as if you came up with those thoughts yourself. As we were discussing the body and the voice earlier, I wanted to ask you about sign language, which is a form of communication some characters in your films use. I feel we’re seeing characters sign more than ever in Japanese films of recent years – such as Love Life (2022) by Koji Fukada and Small, Slow but Steady (2022) by Sho Miyake. This might be due to your influence, but why do you think sign language is getting more attention than ever in Japanese
films?
Ryusuke: I think it’s probably coincidental. Maybe it’s something in the societal situation that has made people pay more attention to it. I personally became interested in sign language around ten years ago, when I went to a film festival for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Their main language was sign language, so I felt like a foreigner even though I was in Japan. I feel like there is a connection with what I said earlier, but people who sign look at each other a lot, especially when they’re communicating of course. Although we’d communicate through an interpreter, when I speak they’d look at me directly. I had never experienced being looked at so directly for such a long time. It is not common in Japan. I felt as if I couldn’t hide anything in this form of communication. From my own experience as a film director, I thought this directness was very similar to how a camera operates. A language that involves looking at each other so intensely, such as sign language, inevitably requires more honesty. At least that’s what I felt watching people converse in sign language.
Julian: In an effort to increase accessibility, I’ve seen some initiatives in recent years where the artist or filmmaker themselves make their own closed captions. Would this be something of interest for you – to describe sounds, or tones of voice, with written words on screen?
Ryusuke: I wonder. Closed captions and accessibility are undoubtedly important. But I’m not convinced I’d be able to describe the tone of voice. I think sensing itself is much more important than reading or interpreting. I have always worked with words, and this will probably remain a pillar of my work into the future. But I’m becoming interested in everything that is taking place around the spoken word. I believe voice is one of the most honest expressions of the body. The voice often can’t help but reveal that an actor is acting – you can hear it. It’s almost impossible to overcome that issue. It really only works when an actor, perhaps by coincidence, feels the words they’re saying are their own. I don’t think this quality of voice can be described. It can only be heard. But actually, even if you can’t hear it, you can find the same quality from the very subtle body movements that a camera can capture. Seeing and finding this kind of body movement can be difficult, but when you achieve it, you can integrate yourself with cinema. The foundation of the cinematic experience lies in the audience’s own senses.