Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

British cinemagoers finally get a chance to catch up with Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi with his eighth feature, the Haruki Murakami adaptation Drive My Car, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes earlier in the year. You’d have to look to Eric Rohmer, for instance, to find another filmmaker who has balanced out intimate insights and narrative constructs with quite the same reflective impact. While 2015’s 317-minute saga of thirtysomething Kobe womanhood, Happy Hour, remains Hamaguchi’s magnum opus, the still-expansive three-hour span of Drive My Car, in which a theatre director works through love and loss thanks to his stoic chauffeur, is still a magnificent achievement by any measure.

Hamaguchi: In Japan, Murakami is legendary because he doesn’t give up his rights easily. And we also knew plus additional material from two other stories in the same collection, and a significant input from Chekhov’s , with a note to say that there might be further changes in the same vein. Somehow that worked.