Ryusuke Hamaguchi on All of a Sudden and the Art of Drawing Audiences In

Would My Younger Self Watch This?

Before we get into All of a Sudden, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. You may not agree with this characterization, but I’ve always felt your films have a kind of unexpected accessibility to them.

Hamaguchi: Unexpected accessibility [laughs]? Thank you.

I remember casually saying to a group of friends, “There’s something oddly inviting about Hamaguchi’s films.” It unexpectedly turned into a whole conversation because everyone seemed to agree. So I thought I’d ask you directly — what do you think it is?

Hamaguchi: You mean, even though they don’t look like the kind of films that would be inviting? [laughs]

Exactly. [laughs] All of a Sudden is 196 minutes long, and many of your films have substantial runtimes. They’re also full of philosophical conversations, so they’re often seen as the work of a challenging auteur. And yet, once you’re in them, they never feel inaccessible. People seem to slip into your films with surprising ease. There’s a real pull to them, but it’s a very different kind of appeal from spectacle or entertainment.

Hamaguchi: (Leaning forward in his chair.) I think that’s probably because, at heart, I’m still just a moviegoer. I know how much easier it is to watch a film when there’s something that immediately draws you in.

As you watch more films, your idea of what makes something engaging changes. You start noticing subtler things and realizing, Oh, that’s compelling too. But most audiences don’t watch films that way. So I’m always thinking about how to help people enter the world of a film without asking too much of them.

There’s also the reality of being an independent filmmaker. Every film matters. If one doesn’t perform well, there’s no guarantee you’ll get to make the next one. So of course I care whether people enjoy watching my films. It’s never been about making films only for myself.

Hamaguchi: So if you ask me when I know something is going to work… I think it’s when, as a viewer myself, I can honestly say, This works. That’s the feeling I keep coming back to whenever I’m choosing the material for a story.

I’ve spent enough time watching films that my eye has changed over the years. But there was a time when I knew very little about cinema. That’s still where I begin. I always find myself going back to that version of myself and asking, Would he understand this? Would he enjoy it?

When you say “that version of yourself”…

Hamaguchi: I mean the person I was before I really knew much about film. If I were to make something simply because it’s considered “good,” but that younger version of me wouldn’t have understood it, I feel like he’d laugh at me.

In a book you published in 2024, you open by recounting the experience of falling asleep during one of those so-called “difficult” films. It suggests that your relationship with cinema before you became deeply immersed in it remains an important reference point for you.

Hamaguchi: Oh, I still fall asleep all the time. [laughs] If anything, now that I’m in my forties, if I watch a film after lunch, you can pretty much count on me nodding off.

Finding a Way In

What kinds of films did you find exciting before you became deeply immersed in cinema?

Hamaguchi: That depends on how far back you want to go. [laughs] If we’re talking about elementary and middle school, it has to be the Back to the Future trilogy. I remember thinking, I can’t believe something this entertaining exists. Even now, those films remain a benchmark for me as a filmmaker. They taught me that repetition alone — or rather, not just repetition, but the way it’s used — can make a film endlessly engaging.

The Terminator films had a huge impact on me as well. Looking back, I also loved movies like Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Really, anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was something I’d happily watch back then.

Hamaguchi: Then, when I got to high school, I started discovering the films that came out of Japan’s mini-theater boom. By then the movement may already have been losing momentum, but I was watching directors like Wong Kar Wai, whose films had an immediate sense of style and cool. I was also seeing the Coen brothers’ work, even if I couldn’t fully appreciate it at the time.

In Japan, though, the filmmaker who made the biggest impression on me was Shunji Iwai. I think I first saw Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom? on television. I remember thinking, This feels completely different from any other TV drama. It was probably the first time I became aware that there was someone behind the camera shaping a work like this — that films and moving images had an author. For me, that realization began with Iwai.

It clearly left an impression on you.

Hamaguchi: I think I sensed some kind of strange, excessive desire on the part of the filmmaker in the images. I wouldn’t have been able to put it that way at the time, but I felt there was someone behind them. It was the first time I’d ever felt that while watching television. It was almost like seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see.

When you talk about “that younger version of yourself,” do you mean the period when you were watching films like Back to the Future, or the period when you were discovering mini-theater films?

Hamaguchi: I think those things are connected. And since we were just talking about television, my middle and high school years also coincided with the peak of trendy dramas in Japan, so I watched a lot of those too.

Then, once I entered university, I fell into a much more cinephile way of life and started watching films constantly. But even then, when I watched “difficult” films, some of them were genuinely hard to sit through as a viewer. At the time, for instance, Truffaut felt far more approachable to me than Godard. I remember feeling how much easier it was to find your way into a film when there was even something as simple as a romantic rivalry.

Romantic entanglements are certainly a staple of trendy dramas.

Hamaguchi: Exactly. Later, in my final years at university, I discovered the films of Éric Rohmer. They had qualities that immediately drew me in. They also showed me how the traditions of classical Hollywood cinema could be distilled into something far more understated and deeply rooted in everyday life.

A little later, when I was in graduate school, I discovered Jean Grémillon. His films are extraordinary in every cinematic sense, but what struck me just as much was how effortlessly watchable they are. Love, jealousy, betrayal, obsession… those emotions pull you in almost instinctively. Grémillon, in fact, was a fairly direct influence on PASSION (2008), the graduation film I made at the time.

It’s not that those elements are the only way into a film. But whenever a story gives even a little space to human emotion, I find it much easier to enter as a viewer. It gives you something to hold onto.

Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is a perfect example. The first time I saw it was on VHS at home. The image was dark, and honestly, I could barely tell what was happening. But I could still feel the emotional connection between the young characters, Xiao Si’r and Xiao Ming. That was enough to guide me through the film. Looking back, I think it was through moments like those that I gradually found my way into cinema.

Between Idealism and Reality

All of a Sudden is based on the published correspondence between anthropologist Maho Isono and philosopher Maiko Miyano, who passed away in 2019. When did you start feeling that this could work as a film for a wider audience?

Hamaguchi: Producer Hiroko Matsuda at Office Shirous gave me the book about five years ago. Right away, I knew it couldn’t just be a film about two people typing letters back and forth on their computers.

The first thing that came to mind was turning it into a conversation. Instead of communicating digitally, I imagined the two of them sharing the same space and talking face to face—using their whole bodies, not just words. That immediately felt like cinema to me.

At the same time, the conversations between Miyano and Isono are highly intellectual and academic. So I kept asking myself how I could stay true to that while making the film something people could genuinely connect with.

Hamaguchi: About two years later, I was approached by Cinefrance, the French production company. That was the moment I started thinking the project might actually work — if it became a French-Japanese co-production. France has a long tradition of conversation-driven films. Looking back, I imagine that tradition is rooted in the country’s rich theatrical history. In any case, I felt France would be the right place to adapt the book while staying true to its spirit.

The film I had in mind was Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969). Much of it consists of philosophical conversations, yet it attracted an audience of around a million people in France. Of course, romance plays a major role in that film as well. (laughs) But I remember being genuinely surprised when I learned how successful it had been. I thought, That film reached that many people?

Why did you choose a care facility that uses Humanitude as the setting for the film?

Hamaguchi: Since the two authors were writing from different places — Tokyo and Kyoto, or perhaps Fukuoka — I felt the two female protagonists needed to have a certain distance between them as well. By making one of them French and the other Japanese, that distance became part of the film, and I thought it would make their attraction to each other even stronger.

So then the question became: what could bridge that distance? That’s when I thought of Humanitude, a French caregiving method I’d been interested in for some time. Its approach—trying to restore a sense of humanity to each individual person living with dementia — felt somehow connected to the spirit of the original correspondence.

Hamaguchi: But I didn’t immediately know how Humanitude should fit into the film. At first, I imagined a story about a Japanese caregiver traveling to France to learn the method. I visited several care facilities while researching, and some of them were using Humanitude remarkably well.

What I couldn’t quite understand, though, was how they had managed to integrate it so successfully. Was it because those facilities already shared the philosophy behind the method? Or was France’s healthcare system making that kind of care more feasible?

Then I came across a facility facing many of the same challenges depicted in the film. I interviewed the staff there, and one nurse in particular stayed with me. She was a little older and hadn’t yet received Humanitude training. She told me, “That kind of careful, attentive care would be wonderful if we could manage it once a week.” She never said it outright, but I got the sense that, based on her own experience, Humanitude felt impractical in the reality of day-to-day caregiving. There was no cynicism or ill will in what she said. I found that incredibly compelling. She ultimately became the inspiration for Sophie, the nurse in the film.

Sophie is the character who clashes with Marie-Lou over introducing Humanitude. She’s been working as a caregiver for years, and you get the sense that she takes real pride in the way she’s cared for people throughout her career.

Hamaguchi: Most people watching the film probably won’t know what Humanitude is. They may not even be sure it’s a real caregiving method, or how much they should trust what they’re seeing. So I felt it was important to tell the story through someone who’s skeptical of it. Watching Marie-Lou try to build trust with someone who doesn’t immediately believe in the method gives the audience a way into that conversation as well.

At the same time, even though Humanitude can seem like an ideal model of care, it isn’t a magic solution. It doesn’t solve everything. That reality felt deeply important to me, and in many ways, it seemed to reflect the society we live in. Those interviews became the direct inspiration for All of a Sudden.

Hope Lives in Chance

What also stood out to me in the original book was how often Miyano and Isono discuss chance and fate. It felt like a theme that runs through so much of your work.

Hamaguchi: When I was making Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), I wanted to think more seriously about the idea of chance, so I read The Problem of Contingency by the philosopher Shūzō Kuki. Then, when I read the book that became All of a Sudden and found those same ideas being discussed, it felt like a coincidence in itself, or maybe even a kind of fate.

What made it even stranger was that producer Hiroko Matsuda had no way of knowing I’d been reading Kuki. At that point, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy had not even been released yet.

Hamaguchi: I found the relationship between chance and fate incredibly fascinating. Chance, to me, is something very small. Our everyday lives are full of chance encounters and moments that we usually let pass without giving them much thought. But if you choose to welcome one of those moments back into your life, it begins to take on the feeling of fate.

That idea is not explicitly laid out in the original book. Rather, it is embodied in the exchange between Isono and Miyano itself. After Miyano’s death, a book based on her doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of chance was published. Reading it, I came to believe that she had put into practice the very philosophy she had developed there.

Chance always comes from outside our own awareness. It is, in that sense, always the arrival of another person. If there were some being capable of seeing the whole world at once, there would be no such thing as chance. Everything would simply be necessity. But for us, with our limited perspective and understanding, chance always arrives from somewhere beyond ourselves.

That is why living with chance requires another person. Miyano had already developed her philosophy of chance in her academic work. But ideas only become real when they are lived. I think it was through her relationship with Isono that she was able to put that philosophy into practice.

That became my guiding idea for the film as well. Rather than simply adapting the book, I wanted to show two people putting that philosophy of chance into practice.

What also seems true of Mari (Tao Okamoto) and Marie Lou (Virginie Efira) is that they are brought together by chance. The way they keep pushing back against what they’re up against feels both inspiring and deeply moving.

Hamaguchi: They are resisting something, yes, but Mari herself calls it a desperate struggle. That phrase begins with the recognition that you’re probably not going to win. I think that’s a more accurate way of putting it. Even so, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to live a rich and meaningful life. To me, that’s what really matters.

The word resistance can make it sound as though oppression is the starting point. But I think what’s more important is how faithfully you can pursue your own desires. At the same time, if you want to keep pursuing those desires over the long term, you inevitably have to find a way to live alongside the desires of other people. That’s why I think the real question is how to continue realizing your own aspirations while making room for those of others.

Hamaguchi: One thing I’ve often heard in interviews is that people come away from the film feeling hopeful. I’m grateful to hear that, of course, but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as hope.

The film first passes through a kind of despair. It begins from the recognition that the situation may be impossible, that there may be no clear way out. Even so, there is always a space where the future remains uncertain, where you still don’t know what might happen. That is what you choose to place your faith in. And I think what allows you to move through that despair is chance.

Shūzō Kuki wrote that chance is the existence of something that should not be able to exist, yet somehow does. Thinking about it that way, I believe hope can only exist within chance. In other words, it can only emerge through encounters with other people and our willingness to embrace them.

All of a Sudden

Release Date: June 19, 2026
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Screenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Rea Rudimuna
Based on: All of a Sudden by Maiko Miyano and Maho Isono (Shobunsha)
Cast: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyozo Nagatsuka, Kota Kurosaki
Production: Cinéfrance Studios, Office Shirous, Bitters End, Heimatfilm, Tarantula
Distribution: Bitters End
Country: France / Japan / Germany / Belgium
Running Time: 196 minutes
Format: Color, 1:1.5
Copyright: © 2026 Cinéfrance Studios – Arte France Cinéma – Office Shirous – Bitters End – Heimatfilm – Tarantula – Gapbusters – Same Player – Soudain JPN Partners