Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
Just months before his death in 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s son filmed his father’s final piano performance for the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.
Although the Japanese composer accepted his own mortality, Sakamoto was still highly amused by the film’s rather funereal ending, filmmaker Neo Sora tells Charlotte Ryan.
“He was like ‘I'm still alive. You killed me!’. I’m like ‘I know, I'm sorry but that's just how it has to be’. He was like ‘Okay, fine. it's good”.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus screens as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus was shot in late 2022, just months before Sakamoto died after years living with cancer.
Rather than making a “traditional” documentary about his famous father, Sora decided to make “a pure and simple concert film”.
“We were trying to really replicate the subjective experience of being awed by the music or being pulled into the emotions of music, having the melody show you a landscape, so to speak.”
At the time, Sakamoto was very aware that his performance days were ending, Sora says, and he and his wife Akiko Yano asked their son to document him on the piano one last time.
“I didn't want to regret anything, obviously, so I said yes.”
Over eight days, Sora filmed his father alone at the piano. In one scene, he tried to replicate his own childhood memories of approaching Sakamoto from behind when he was “in the zone”.
“There would be many occasions where my mother and I would be sitting in the dining room and dinner is ready or breakfast is ready. My mother would ask me to go and call my dad over because it's ready. And then I'd go down to the studio and he would be in the zone, playing the piano.
“It's really in those moments you don't really want to disturb him. So very gently I would kind of make my presence felt by sneaking up behind him very quietly. That's exactly the kind of perspective that I had.”
Japanese-American filmmaker Neo Sora Photo: Supplied
Sakamoto’s extreme sensitivity to music and sound was an “earnest reaction” that got misrepresented as “kind of snobby” in a 2018 New York Times article, Sora says.
Knowing how easily influenced he was by music, his father had to be very selective about what he was exposed to.
“If he knows that he doesn't like it he would rather distance himself from being influenced by that.
“The melody or chord progression or some element of the music he was just listening to somehow seeped into his mind and then got reflected in the music that he was composing.”
Growing up, Sora says he found his father’s intense curiosity about whatever was fresh in the world of music “a little bit annoying”.
“He would always ask me what the latest interesting music was coming out or being listened to by young people.
“He would message me on Facebook fairly consistently, being like ‘Hey, what's the latest? What's new’ and I would share it to him.
“Kind of really annoying was that all these artists that I would send to him, about a year or two later, he would do some collab with them or he would perform with them at a concert or something like that.
“I kind of felt like he was taking all the credit for all the music that I was exposing him to. It made him look like a really progressive listener, which he was obviously, but yeah.”
In Sakamoto’s final years, he and his wife Akiko were “very prepared” for the composer’s death, Sora says, and it was spoken about very casually.
Because of this and the fact that his father had been unwell for several years, Sora is unsure whether making Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus helped him reckon with grief - a concept he doesn’t quite understand.
“We all knew that the concert would probably be the last thing that we would work together on. In that sense it must have helped with the grief somehow but I don't quite know in what way it did.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto, a still from the film 'Opus' Photo:
