‘Drive My Car’ Director and Soundtrack Composer on Crafting Film’s Emotional Score: ‘Our Film Language Was Very Similar’

A.D. Amorosi
·6 min read

To complement Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s grieving, soft-spun vision for “Drive My Car,” which has received four Oscar noms including director and best picture, the choice of composer to create a melodramatic and delicate score was crucial.

Enter Eiko Ishibashi, an experimental Japanese multi-instrumentalist whose 2018 “The Dream My Bones Dream” was a turning point in an already decade-long career of scores for theater and short films.

More from Variety

Ishibashi’s 2018 album of haunting soundscapes and its electro-acoustic mix of noise, oddball pop, improvisational jazz and minimalist, modern classical music made her a cinematic force equal to Hamaguchi. The more textural and sweeping aspects of Ishibashi’s bittersweet melodies were an elegant match for Hamaguchi’s vision.

“It was a very unique experience for me to be able to create music with relative freedom and enjoyment,” says Ishibashi of her cinematic compositional scope.

After being known for crafting blunt, short films since 2001, Japanese director Hamaguchi’s romantic “Asako I & II” of 2018 signaled an aesthetic shift, a turn toward sweeping narratives with shadowy, but tactile, atmospheres. Such expanse was necessary for 2021’s “Drive My Car,” a tale of a theater director reckoning with the finality of death while working on a stage production of “Uncle Vanya” during long car rides.

To that end, Ishibashi’s contemplative song-score for “Drive My Car,” re-released in February on major streaming services with bonus tracks, is as distant and off-putting as it is intimate and readily engaging.

“Typically, I don’t use a lot of music in my films, but hearing the music Ishibashi made was the first time I thought ‘this could work for the film,’” says director Hamaguchi, who was introduced to her music by “Drive My Car” producer Teruhisa Yamamoto as filming was set to commence. “Hearing her work, I was struck by how wonderful her talent and technique was. It reminded me of a band I enjoyed in my 20s, Tortoise. It had a similar feel that really matched with my taste, so I was very happy to work with Eiko.”
The director says he and Ishibashi share similar backgrounds, generationally, as well as a shared career trajectory. “I think that comes from listening to the same things around the same time. We also share similar tastes in film. She watches a lot of movies and loves John Cassavetes, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and all these filmmakers who I really enjoy. Our film language was very similar.”

Ishibashi — a cinema enthusiast who “spends far more time with films than with music,” with a love for John Barry scores such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Walkabout” — has spent the past decade working with avant-garde composer-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke. A post-rock contemporary of Tortoise, O’Rourke also happens to be a member of Ishibashi’s band for the recording of “Drive My Car,” and her duet partner for their recently released “For McCoy,” an album in sonic celebration of actor Sam Waterston’s “Law & Order” character, Jack McCoy.

“I am very lucky because I have been allowed to make music for many films rather freely so far,” says Ishibashi, while making a note of previous works such as a feature-length live-action narrative score for 2019’s “Blade of the Immortal” anime. “Thanks to director Hamaguchi’s wonderful talent, I feel that all the hard work I did on ‘Drive My Car’ was rewarded by his good use of the music.”

Giving credit where credit’s due, Ishibashi notes how crucial O’Rourke and additional musical collaborators have been to her experimental aesthetic.

“Without O’Rourke’s support, I would have quit music a long time ago. Listening to Jim’s music and mixed-sound sources is like breathing delicious air. … Through my collaborations with Jim and Masami Akita [Japanese noise producer Merzbow] I have come to see sound itself as a living thing, that the intensity of sound is not about volume or sound pressure.”

After writing to “Drive My Car” author Haruki Murakami with a detailed plot schematic for his film, Hamaguchi and producer Yamamoto called on Ishibashi to create a score. Working with her ensemble in lines similar to how she crafts her solo projects (“not at all apart from what I do with my albums,” she says with emphasis), Ishibashi and her team fashioned an intuitive score, “from scratch,” based on drum patterns and using synthetic and organic instrumentation. For a cinematic vibe both pastoral and sinister, Ishibashi wanted to faithfully reproduce the sounds that came to her from reading the script and watching the visuals the director presented her.

“It was very important for me to be able to experiment with whatever came to my mind without any restrictions on what kind of music should be used, and to be able to hand over the results of my experiments to the director in their entirety,” says the composer of free music without genre or boundaries.

“What I felt from the images and the script became the axis of the project. The director told me, ‘I want the music to be like a landscape,’ and ‘I want the music to connect the audience to the film, because the images will be the ones that separate them,’ and, ‘For the theme song, I want a melody like Henry Mancini’s that people will remember even after they finish watching the movie.’”

Hamaguchi agrees with his composer’s estimate of events while adding how Ishibashi’s music, “very rich in emotion, and very thick,” aided in creating another layer of catharsis and intellectualism.

“Her music is compressed, and at times you could even say it’s flat because it is so compressed,” notes the director. “Something that I asked of Ishibashi early on was that the music feels almost like the scenery — the landscape of where this story is taking place. With that, it just feels as if it’s there as part of the environment, not so much matched to the emotion of the moment, but more like a natural part of that environment. When the depiction emotionally became somewhat cool in the visual, we decided to expand emotionally on that musical palette. I think we did that well and I think she brought out this amazing flat and calm, yet at the same time, a very emotional flavor that suits the film.”

Hamaguchi and Ishibashi both agree that making the music of “Drive My Car” in spurts — before and after the pandemic shutdown, as well as during the shoot itself — was a huge help in making her compositions for his cinematic vision their own living, breathing entity.

“Working on it step-by-step with director Hamaguchi while he was filming was very gratifying for me,” says Ishibashi.

The director continues: “We shot the first 40 minutes of ‘Drive My Car’ in its first chunk, around mid-2020, but had to stop because of COVID. We had Ishibashi work on that chunk first — she would send us motifs of different moments, and we would add those pieces into the edit as we went. That process of combining the edit and the music worked really well. Based on those motifs she came up with, I would give notes and she would record a final version after more back-and-forth. It wasn’t this abstract way of communicating an idea of what I wanted … it was visual to begin with. That went very smoothly and I will use that way of working with a composer in the future.”

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.