Film Music Reporter

Ryuichi Sakamoto has passed away this past Tuesday, March 28, at age 71. The Japanese composer has written dozens of scores for a wide range of international films since the early 1980s. He won an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Grammy Award for his music for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 feature The Last Emperor (shared with David Byrne & Cong Su). He was also Grammy-nominated for his scores for Bertolucci’s Little Buddha and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (with Alva Noto). His other film scoring credits include Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (for which he received his first BAFTA Award), Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (which earned him his second Golden Globe Award), Volker Schlöndorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Peter Kosminsky’s Wuthering Heights, Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes & Femme Fatale and Ôshima’s Taboo. In recent years, he composed the music for Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett, Alice Winocour’s Proxima, Andrew Levitas’s Minamata, an episode of Black Mirror, and last year’s Netflix anime series exception. He has also recently been scoring Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, which is expected to premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. News of Sakamoto’s passing was announced by Japan’s recording company Avex.