COURTESY OF SIDESHOW AND JANUS FILMSĭuring that first actor-director meeting in Tokyo, Hamaguchi sensed Miura might be perfect to play Drive My Car‘s central female chauffeur. Toko Miura landed the role of the chauffeur in Drive My Car only after learning to drive a stick shift. “It’s like he’s a bottomless well of ideas.” “Just as a writer, he’s a true genius,” Yamamoto adds. “I don’t understand how he possibly came up with all the ideas that are in these two films in such a short amount of time,” says Hamaguchi’s now Oscar-nominated producer on Drive My Car, Teruhisa Yamamoto. The latter film is now in the final stretch of a historic Oscars campaign, having surpassed nearly all expectations by earning nominations for best film, best director, best adapted screenplay and best international film - tying Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 feature Ran as the most nominated Japanese film ever. Drive My Car then screened several months later at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, winning three prizes including best screenplay. The finished Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy eventually premiered in competition at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, becoming a critics’ favorite and winning the event’s Silver Bear audience award. Over the course of their long car rides, a mysterious bond begins to form between the two strangers, opening a path for mutual unburdening and new beginnings. During the director’s stay, the local theater company provides him with a chauffeur - a gruff, somewhat mysterious young woman named Misaki - to ferry him around the city in his cherished red Saab 900, a perk he doesn’t particularly want but can’t refuse. Cannes: Malaysian Genre Mash-Up 'Tiger Stripes' Wins 2023 Critics' Weekĭrive My Car tells the story of Yûsuke Kafuku, a stage actor and director who travels from Tokyo to Hiroshima to mount a performance of a play by Anton Chekhov while still in a state of mourning over the sudden death of his enigmatic and adulterous wife.

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