How Eiko Ishibashi created the ‘Drive My Car’ score
Though the Japanese film director Ryusuke Hamaguchi had already made several brilliant works of cinema by the time 2021’s Drive My Car arrived, including Happy Hour, Asako I & II and Wife of a Spy, it was his drama film based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name from his 2014 collection Men Without Women that earned the most recognition, winning the ‘Best Screenplay’ award at the Cannes Film Festival at ‘Best International Feature Film’ at the Academy Awards.
The film tells of a theatre director played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, who is tasked with directing a multi-lingual production of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya while coping with the recent death of his wife. Another problem arises when Yusuke casts the man who had been having an affair with his late wife in the lead role of Uncle Vanya.
There’s a real tenderness to Drive My Car as is often found in much of the patient dramatic work of Hamaguchi, but things are undoubtedly elevated to new artistic heights as a result of composer Eiko Ishibashi’s mesmerising score, which leans heavily into a lounge jazz ethos that drifts listlessly along with the emotive yearnings of the film’s main characters.
In an interview with Composer, Ishibashi spoke of how she took on the challenge of creating the score for Drive My Car. The writing process for the score occurred simultaneously with the film’s production, which allowed Ishibashi to interrogate the needs of the narrative more closely. The composer noted, “I felt that it sublimated a complex story of multiple layers of loss into a universal and simple tale.”
In turn, Ishibashi wanted to “accentuate the images” that Hamaguchi had conjured up in his script, i.e., the sounds of cars passing and the boats of Hiroshima. The Drive My Car score comprises two main theme songs that Ishibashi composed directly, as well as a series of variations that she improvised, either with her band in the studio or on her own.
Hamaguchi had resisted giving Ishibashi any direct instructions, which meant that she could set about working on the score without knowing which piece of music would be set to which scene. All that Hamaguchi had really wanted was for the score to “play a role in shortening the distance between the audience and the images, and that the music be like a landscape”.
The director was already a fan of Ishibashi’s work and knew that her style, which he likened to the American post-rock band Tortoise, would work perfectly for Drive My Car. The pair also shared similar tastes in cinema, including the work of John Cassavetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with Ishibashi telling Variety that she “spends far more time with films than with music”.
There was real freedom in how Ishibashi was afforded the chance to express herself with the score for Drive My Car, and the results were truly captivating. Emotion bleeds through each note of the work and sits perfectly atop the touching and harrowing story of Yusuke, adding another layer of poignancy to the already excellent film.
At the core of Drive My Car is the theme of grief and the great lengths we go to cover it up. However, Ishibashi’s score largely represents the kind of subconscious healing that takes place as we try to move on from the most difficult periods of our lives. It’s a truly masterful work in a film that resonates in the heart and mind long after the final credits have rolled.