Ryūsuke Hamaguchi Biography

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi is the film director whose 2021 drama Drive My Car was nominated for four Academy Awards

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi graduated from the University of Tokyo in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts in Aesthetics. After working in the film industry for a few years, he returned to Tokyo University of the Arts for a film degree. His graduation project, the 2008 romantic drama Passion, received good notices and set him on his way.

In 2012 he completed The Sound of Waves, the first part of what became a trilogy about the Great Tohuko earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011.  Happy Hour (2015) was a striking drama, over five hours long, about four upper-class women dealing with the ennui of life. It became a film-festival favorite and brought Ryūsuke international acclaim. He followed it with the romantic drama Asako I and II (2015), and the anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021).

By 2021, the Japan Information and Culture Center was calling him “one of the most promising Japanese filmmakers of this generation.” That year he co-wrote and directed the drama Drive My Car; The New York Times called it a “quiet masterpiece” and “a story about grief, love and work as well as the soul-sustaining, life-shaping power of art.” The film was nominated for four Oscars in all, with Ryūsuke nominated for both best director and (with co-writer Takamasa Oe) best adapted screenplay.