Drive My Car is a Japanese film by director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The film is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami.
Let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the film.
- Drive My Car is a 2021 Japanese drama-road film
- The film is co-written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
- It is primarily based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name
- The story if from his 2014 collection Men Without Women
- The film also took inspiration from other stories in it
- The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku as he directs a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and grapples with the death of his wife, Oto
- Drive My Car had its world premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival
- There it competed for the Palme d’Or
- At Cannes the film won three awards, including Best Screenplay
- The film received widespread critical acclaim
- With many declaring it one of the best films of 2021
- It earned four nominations at the 94th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film, and Best Adapted Screenplay
- It is the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture
- At the 79th Golden Globe Awards, the film won Best Foreign Language Film
- It became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture from all three major U.S. critics groups (LAFCA, NYFCC, NSFC)
- The 2021 Japanese drama film is directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who co-wrote the script with Takamasa Oe
- It is primarily based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami from his 2014 short story collection, Men Without Women
- The script also features elements from Murakami’s stories “Scheherazade” and “Kino”
- Both also part of Men Without Women
- The film was originally set in Busan, South Korea
- But was changed to Hiroshima due to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Hamaguchi wished to incorporate the Beatles’ song “Drive My Car”
- The film and story are named after this song
- However, it was too difficult to get permission for its usage
- He instead included a string quartet by Beethoven
- This is directly referenced in Murakami’s original story
- The original story features a yellow Saab 900 convertible
- It was changed in the film to a red Saab 900 Turbo to visually complement the Hiroshima landscape
- Drive My Car had its world premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d’Or
- On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97%
- It is based on 189 reviews
- With an average rating of 8.80/10
- The website’s critical consensus reads, “Drive My Car’s imposing runtime holds a rich, patiently engrossing drama that reckons with self-acceptance and regret”
- According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 91 out of 100
- Based on 41 critics
- The film received “universal acclaim”
- Metacritic reported that Drive My Car appeared on over 89 film critics’ top-ten lists for 2021
- This is the most of any foreign-language film that year
- The film ranked first and second on 23 lists
- Hamaguchi and Oe became the first Japanese individuals to win the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes
- At the 79th Golden Globe Awards, the film won Best Foreign Language Film
- It was picked as the Japanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, making the December 2021 shortlist
- It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Hamaguchi, Best International Feature Film, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamaguchi and co-screenwriter Takamasa Oe
- It is the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture and Hamaguchi is the third Japanese director nominated for Best Director
- The other two are Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1965 and Akira Kurosawa in 1985
- It became the latest of the only six to win Best Picture from all three major U.S. critics groups (LAFCA, NYFCC, NSFC)
- Though it is the first non-English-language film to do so
- The other five being Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, L.A. Confidential, The Social Network and The Hurt Locker
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