Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus: an interview with director Neo Sora

Before he died, figuring out that the tip was coming, Ryuichi Sakamoto deliberate one final efficiency. The movie — which encompasses a career-spanning choice from his oeuvre of pop music, film scores, and experimental and ambient compositions — rearranges many songs for solo piano; a showcase of the energy and mutability of Sakamoto’s work. In a press assertion, Sakamoto mentioned the set record was locked a lot additional forward than he often deliberate. He defined: “The director, Neo Sora, was fairly strict.”

It’s a little bit of a joke. Neo Sora is Sakamoto’s 33-year-old son, and the individual the composer requested to shoot his final live performance. Well, technically, it was Norika, Sakamoto’s long-time supervisor, who made the request. (Norika can also be Sora’s mom.)

The timing wasn’t nice. Sora was in the midst of pre-production on his personal debut characteristic. But household got here first. Sakamoto had been combating rectal most cancers for a number of years, and his well being was declining.

“‘Listen, if we miss this window of taking pictures, I really feel like we’d not have the ability to do it once more,’” Sora recalled his mom saying. “‘So are you able to please do it?’”

He agreed, put his personal movie on maintain, and some months later, bought began on what would ultimately be Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, the lasting impression of one of many world’s most influential and celebrated musicians.

You may count on a career-spanning live performance movie to look one thing like, say, the maximalist business spectacle of Taylor Swift, or to take notes from the Talking Heads’ mischievous Stop Making Sense, rereleased in theaters by A24 late final yr. But the inspirations for Opus had been extra humble. Sora watched a efficiency of virtuosic pianist Glenn Gould and conductor Leonard Bernstein from the ‘60s titled The Creative Performer, in addition to the dramatized Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. What he realized was that by simplifying the visible language of the cinematography, it might pressure the viewer to pay nearer consideration to the music. With that, Sora started storyboarding and compelled Sakamoto to decide to a set record additional forward than he would’ve favored.

Was it troublesome working together with his father? Sora described their relationship on set as skilled: Sakamoto didn’t give notes on the filmmaking, and Sora didn’t weigh in on the efficiency. “I feel I’d take him not saying something to me relating to the filming course of as a illustration of his belief,” he mentioned.

Shot in simply over every week in September 2022, Opus is a spare and intimate movie. In stark black and white, the live performance is only a man performing behind a grand piano. Off digital camera, although, there was a crew of over thirty folks, contained in the well-known NHK Broadcasting Center’s 509 Studio in Tokyo, attempting to be as quiet as attainable.

The location, as with many choices for the movie, was Sakamoto’s alternative. He believed the studio had “the best acoustics in Japan.” But it additionally offered particular challenges. The previous wooden floors had been creaky, which means your complete crew — a mixture of Japanese and English audio system — needed to put on socks and no footwear. Because the studio was in a broadcast tower, no radio-wave-emitting tools was allowed, which means the whole lot needed to be bodily linked. (“There wanted to be a number of wire wranglers,” and extra folks meant extra folks making noise.)

And then there have been Sakamoto’s personal bodily limits. He may solely do a handful of takes a day. Sora recalled, “There had been simply sure songs that he simply couldn’t actually play that properly anymore. His fingers simply weren’t as dextrous, and I feel a part of it was the unwanted side effects of the remedy that he was taking, that it was affecting the extremities.” Sakamoto was placing Vaseline on his fingers to assist with the ache.

In the identical assertion, written after taking pictures, Sakamoto detailed how troublesome the efficiency was on his physique. “I felt completely hole afterward, and my situation worsened for a couple of month,” he wrote. “Even so, I really feel relieved that I used to be capable of file, earlier than my dying, a efficiency that I used to be happy with.” He died in March 2023.

I met Sora in New York forward of the film’s theatrical launch and almost a yr since Sakamoto’s passing. He was ending up his first, still-untitled characteristic movie, the one he’d briefly placed on maintain to make Opus. Sora instructed me that it’s about two mates who drift aside as one turns into politically acutely aware and the opposite stays willfully ignorant. He’s been engaged on it for the higher a part of a decade and hopes to submit it to festivals this yr.

“I didn’t need Opus to return out first, however these issues you may’t actually assist or management an excessive amount of,” Sora mentioned. “I’ve at all times simply wished folks to know me only for one thing I do individually from my father.”

Despite being the director of Opus, Sora is reluctant to say authorship over it. “I used to be attempting to be a conduit for no matter he wished to do, and I feel what he wished to do was a live performance,” Sora mentioned.

Though lots of the selections — the idea, location, items — might have been Sakamoto’s, it’s laborious to disregard Sora’s delicate hand all through Opus. For what was at all times meant to be the ultimate efficiency from a rare artist, the movie doesn’t really feel like a somber affair. Even as Sakamoto struggles to complete sure items, his fingers not what they as soon as had been, the power draining from his ailing physique, there’s a sense of triumph every time a music reaches its closing observe. So a lot is conveyed by the silence that comes after — the aid of execution, a glimpse of ecstasy.

That is, maybe, the magic of what Neo Sora has made: a live performance movie that’s only a efficiency, and in addition greater than that.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is in theaters now and can ultimately stream on the Criterion Channel.