Actors are liars. They come to set armed with premeditated tears, rehearsed vocal inflections, and a desperate need to show you how much they are feeling. It is the director’s job to strip away this artifice and expose the terrifying truth beneath. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a devastating masterpiece precisely because he refused to let his actors act.
Directing the Performance: The Emotionless Read
To achieve the profound emotional resonance of the film, Hamaguchi employed an extreme, almost sadistic rehearsal technique. He forced his cast to endure extensive, repetitive table reads of the script—and of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya—completely stripped of emotion.
Bref, he demanded a flat, monotonous delivery. No inflection. No crying. No “acting.”
This technique serves a vital mechanical purpose: it destroys the actor’s defenses. When an actor is forbidden from leaning on their established habits or emotional tricks, they are forced to simply read the text. More importantly, they are forced to truly listen to the other voices in the room, rather than just waiting for their cue to speak.
The Inevitable Eruption
C’est le risque du métier. You push a performer into an emotional vacuum, and the pressure begins to build. By depriving them of emotional release during prep, Hamaguchi ensured that the actors internalized the text at a cellular level.
When the cameras finally rolled and they were permitted to feel, the emotion did not have to be artificially constructed or pushed. It erupted naturally, organically, devastatingly. The actors were no longer performing grief; they were simply surviving it. Hamaguchi proves that the most powerful direction is sometimes a complete prohibition of performance.
Insights regarding Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s unconventional, emotionless table-read rehearsal techniques and the integration of Chekhov’s text were extracted from an interview with the director published by Screen Slate, alongside critical analysis from Rogers Movie Nation.