Even throughout the final years of his cancer battle, Ryuichi Sakamoto was resolute in his will to keep creating. Hyper-aware of his own mortality, the Oscar-winning composer and titan of electronic music used his last albums to reckon with his legacy, the passage of time, and his relationship with the piano, which he had played since age three. As if expressing himself through the instrument was an involuntary muscle, he decided he wanted to perform for the world one last time. But since his condition left him too weak to play a whole set, Sakamoto had to present his final concert as a methodically compiled film.
Sakamoto called upon his son, Neo Sora, a budding filmmaker who’s based between Tokyo and New York, to direct the project, titled Opus. In conversation, the 32-year-old director curiously refers to his father as “Sakamoto” and avoids referencing their personal relationship. But it’s clear that their closeness has allowed Sora unique access and familiarity to capture the musician in his most vulnerable state, just six months before his death at age 71 in March 2023. Opus was filmed across eight days last September at 509 Studio at Tokyo’s NHK Broadcast Center, where Sakamoto hosted a radio show in the ’80s. Due to his worsening health, he could only play an average of three songs per day, with one to five takes each.
Opus is an intimate portrait of an artist who spent a lifetime trying to break new musical ground. Across 102 meditative minutes, the black-and-white film carefully studies Sakamoto’s graceful fingers, furrowed eyebrows, and rounding lips as he plays 20 songs from throughout his life. The journey encompasses a slowed-down version of “Tong Poo,” the first of Sakamoto’s songs to be recorded by Yellow Magic Orchestra; key moments from his iconic film scores, like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; and selections from his somber final album, 12. The film begins solemnly, Sakamoto’s fingers trembling across the keys, but by its mid-point, he is playing his classical epics with determination, seemingly unaffected by the physical pain he feels.
Inspired by his father’s fascination with time, Sora conceptualized the film to take its course throughout an entire day, which he expressed through lighting choices. Ahead of Opus’ recent U.S. premiere at New York Film Festival, Sora sat down with Pitchfork to discuss Sakamoto’s energy while filming, capturing his “mistakes,” and his complicated relationship with the piano.
Neo Sora: A lot of the time, Opus gets billed as a documentary film, but I think that gives people the wrong impression. It’s really a concert film. It’s just him playing the piano. The film could’ve given information about his [health] condition, or all the things that he was thinking about leading up to the concert. But ultimately, when you go to a concert, do you pull out your phone and start searching Wikipedia? No, you listen to the music, and you can tell so much. To me, the music tells the whole story of his life in a completely wordless way, but it’s also more direct. The emotion and experience of the [performance] tells the story of his illness, his thoughts on mortality, and his thoughts on music.
We tried to really listen to each song to understand the mood. We tried to be honest to how we were reacting to the music. There were specific songs that I felt called for certain kinds of angles. The first song [“Lack of Love”] starts really gently, but then brings you into the full dynamic range of the song. We wanted to create this slow track from behind him that would go over his shoulder and then look at his hands, as he was beginning to play the bass tones. “Solitude,” the fourth song, was made for this film called Tony Takitani. The film features these incredible lateral tracking shots, that really convey a passage of time in one direction. So for that one song, you see a lot of lateral tracking shots that give you the same sensation.
There were other cases where the most important thing was his expression. We wanted to make sure we captured all the subtle twitches in his face and micro-expressions that he would make during parts of the melody, because that’s what communicated the emotion the most.
It was very tense. As soon as he stepped into the room, you could feel the air change. Everyone’s on edge, not necessarily in a bad way, but there was a sharp attention. We were shooting in this very old studio with amazing wood floors, but we wanted to use dolly shots and those are pretty heavy, so they’d creak the floors. We also couldn’t use any remote control or wireless things because of the location, so everything had to be wired. Basically it was a delicate ballet of pushing the camera so the floorboards wouldn’t creak, then a bunch of people silently wrangling cables, so it wouldn’t interfere with the music. You could really tell that he was putting his life force into performing, which I think affected everybody else as well, like we needed to be on par with that focus.
That song was “Bibo no Aozora.” The harmony is really smooth and nice, and then it enters this dissonant section that he would always improvise. I believe that was the first or second take, and he was trying to find the right dissonant chords, but it wasn’t right. It’s like he’s entered a forest without a path and searching for a way forward. Then there’s a moment where he enters a clearing, and all of a sudden, he’s back into the main melody and finishes the song, but he knows that wasn’t the right path. Obviously we do have a perfect take of it, where he does the improv section without stopping. But I think getting a peek into a moment where a performer is trying to discover that, is way more fascinating.
He definitely talked about this. You can see it in his previous documentary Coda, where he discusses a piano that was destroyed in the tsunami of 311. He spells out that the piano is this object of industrialization, wherein these objects of nature, like wood, are pressed with thousands of pounds of force to mold them into a specific shape. Then, it just takes a tsunami to [reverse] that human will to control nature and release itself back into nature. I think he was fascinated by that idea.
It harkens back to his lifelong fascination with the tension he felt between Western and non-Western music. He started to learn [piano] at three years old, and by age 18, he was totally proficient in the Western classical mode of composing. But at the time, Japan in the late ’60s and ’70s was a time of radical change and revolution, [where people were] criticizing and reconceptualizing the tradition they were steeped in. Simultaneously, he was learning a lot about ethnomusicology and the music of other traditions. So he started to really question this 12-tone system of Western music, and he tried to deconstruct that throughout his life.
At the same time, when the piano has been part of your body and muscle memory for so long, how do you escape that? It just happened to be the most familiar and fluid form of musical expression that he had. He wanted to fully explore its potential, and I think he finally came back to embracing the piano again.
To me, the concert film felt very intentional like, “I’m going to leave this behind for people.” Whereas, the album [12] felt a little different. It was more just for himself. Even in the liner notes, he writes that he was ill. Certain days, he would come back from the hospital and wouldn’t be able to do anything, whereas other days, he wanted to be showered in the sounds of the synth. Making the songs was almost like a journal reflecting his mood of the day, or what he wanted to listen to at that particular moment. So it’s more intimate, and it feels really unembellished and incomplete. I don’t know if it was a driven thing for him to do that—it was how he lived. It was like going for a walk, or eating something, music was just something he did almost every day. He had the wherewithal to hit “record” on the piano.
Opus screens at AFI Fest in L.A. on October 28. It is expected for wider release in 2024.
