Biography

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese film director and screenwriter. Hamaguchi, a graduate of Tokyo University and Tokyo University of Arts, attracted attention in his country with the movie Passion (2008), which he shot for his graduation.

Hamaguchi first gained international recognition with the film Happy Hour (2015) and followed it up with Asako I & II (2018).

He released two films in 2021, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car, receiving three Academy Award nominations for the latter, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Feature.

He is the third Japanese director to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Director.
- IMDb mini biography by: yusufpiskin

He has directed one film that has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Drive My Car (2021). It was the first Japanese film to be nominated 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 Woman in the Dunes (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.

[press conference for All of a Sudden (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] I received a proposal from a producer who said that I should read the correspondence between two Japanese researchers, an anthropologist and a philosopher who corresponded for several years. One of them, Makiko Miyano, had cancer and they exchanged ten long letters. In the meantime, the disease, the cancer, got worse and you can see this in the correspondence. I asked myself any number of questions as to how one could adapt this correspondence and I then received a proposal from the French producer, David Gauquié, who suggested that we work together on a film. The difficulty with correspondence is that these conversations cannot necessarily be adapted directly to the screen – you have to lend them some special shape. In any event, the possibility of making a film that encompasses both France and Japan struck me as the best way, the most accessible way for depicting the correspondence and putting it on screen. Hence we ended up with a French-Japanese co-production. When I read this correspondence, I was deeply moved right away - I shook. I was really overwhelmed by what I had read. I'm extremely pleased to be here today to present the film and I hope the spectators will experience the same emotion as I.