“All of a Sudden”, interview with the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi

In competition at the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, “All of a Sudden” marks a new chapter in the work of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, continuing the director’s exploration of communication, intimacy and emotional ambiguity after “Drive My Car”.

The film follows Marie-Lou, director of a care facility for the elderly, as she attempts to introduce a philosophy of care grounded in dignity and attentive listening. Her encounter with Mari, a Japanese theatre director living with cancer, gradually transforms both women, creating a profound bond that transcends language, illness and cultural distance.

Hamaguchi reflected extensively on the construction of the film’s dialogue, which constantly shifts between everyday realism and philosophical inquiry.

“I believe that the body can carry a lot of information,” the director explained. “There are things that cannot be verbalised, but the body still knows them.”

Adapting an Exchange of Souls

The screenplay originates in a correspondence between philosopher Makiko Miyano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono, two figures whose discussions on coincidence, risk, and illness deeply moved the filmmaker.

According to Hamaguchi, the challenge was not simply adapting ideas into scenes, but translating an invisible emotional exchange into cinematic form.

“I couldn’t create the same feeling simply by taking fragments from the original material,” he said. “So I kept reading the texts over and over until they became part of my body.”

The director compared the process to preparing soup: ingredients slowly dissolve, lose their original shape, and eventually become something entirely different. Rather than constructing dialogue through rigid intellectual design, he allowed instinct and physical intuition to guide the writing.

That same physicality also shaped his approach to directing actors.

“The actor’s body and voice carry enormous information,” he noted. “If dialogue is going to affect the actor physically, then I need to write it physically too.”

The Miracle of Multilingual Encounters

One of the film’s most striking aspects is its fluid movement between Japanese and French, extending a multilingual experimentation already present in “Drive My Car”.

For Hamaguchi, multilingual performance creates a unique emotional condition for actors. When verbal understanding becomes partial or unstable, performers instinctively rely more intensely on gesture, rhythm and bodily attention.

“When actors cannot fully rely on language, they must become attentive to each other’s bodies,” he explained. “That creates reactions that feel very alive.”

The director also described the central relationship between the two women as “slightly miraculous” because each character can speak in her own mother tongue while still being understood emotionally.

This dynamic demanded extraordinary preparation from the cast. Actress Virginie Efira had only two months to study Japanese before shooting, while her co-star had to learn French dialogue with equal precision.

“It was an enormous task,” Hamaguchi admitted. “Watching them work reminded me once again how extraordinary actors are.”

Franco Basaglia and the Politics of Care

The theatrical performance featured in the film was created specifically for “All of a Sudden” and does not exist independently of the screenplay. Its conceptual foundation emerged from Hamaguchi’s research into Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist whose work contributed to the dismantling of psychiatric institutions in Italy.

The director discovered Basaglia through Psychonautica, a book by the Japanese anthropologist Takeshi Matsushima that examines the history of Italian psychiatric care.

“I was shocked,” said Hamaguchi. “In Japan, abolishing psychiatric institutions feels almost impossible.”

The connection between Basaglia’s philosophy and the film’s themes became central. For the filmmaker, both the care philosophy known as Humanitude and Basaglia’s work revolve around restoring individuality to people reduced by institutions to diagnostic labels.

“Makiko Miyano resisted being defined only as a cancer patient,” he explained. “She wanted to reclaim all the other parts of herself.”

Humanism in the Attention Economy

Asked whether the film proposes a form of contemporary humanism, Hamaguchi responded cautiously, admitting discomfort with the term itself. Yet his reflections revealed a deep concern about how modern societies reduce people to functions, categories and consumable identities.

Drawing again from Matsushima’s writings, the director spoke about “animism toward humans,” questioning whether contemporary society still treats people as beings with inner lives and spiritual complexity.

“There are things that cannot be seen or verbalised but still exist,” he said. “We are more than our labels.”

For Hamaguchi, today’s “attention economy” systematically fragments human connection by commodifying time and focus. Against that logic, the film quietly advocates sustained attention and recognition.

“Perhaps we can accumulate days where we truly treated someone like a full human being,” he concluded.

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