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‘Anger compels me forward’: Drive My Car composer Eiko Ishibashi on evil, experimentation and exploding genre

Her score for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s opus helped it to Oscar glory. Now the Japanese musician has reunited with its director for a collaboration unlike any other

“There was a big awards rush, festivals, and I think Hamaguchi was ultimately quite fatigued from the whole experience,” Ishibashi says, elegantly wrapped up in her cold-looking recording studio in the Yatsugatake mountains west of Tokyo, speaking via interpeter over a video call. So Hamaguchi expanded the film on the fly to make Evil Does Not Exist, a parable about the schism between urban and rural, between capitalism and its muffled opposite, as a glamping company arrogantly rocks up with plans to site a development in a peaceful village. “Anger that felt directed towards the way humans work, the unfairness of this whole world.” Watching the raw footage, she says she drew on that feeling to create the film’s central musical theme: long, gorgeous overlapping chords for strings that take left turns into darkness.

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