If there was a Mount Rushmore of cinema, the face of Akira
Kurosawa would almost certainly be on it.
To Federico Fellini, Kurosawa was “the greatest living
example of what an author of the cinema should be.”
Actor-director Clint Eastwood calls Kurosawa “the guy I
really idolized when I was young. I had always hoped to work
with him.” To Martin Scorsese, Kurosawa’s “influence on
filmmakers throughout the entire world is so profound as to
be almost incomparable.” Steven Spielberg called him “the
pictorial Shakespeare of our time,” and acknowledged that “I
have learned more from (Kurosawa) than from almost any
filmmaker on the face of the earth.”
Even those who may not have seen Kurosawa’s films probably
know him second-hand through such American remakes as The
Magnificent Seven, and even more so by way of Star
Wars, the George Lucas space epic that lifted its plot
from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and its cantina
scene from Yojimbo. Lucas, who was also influenced by
Kurosawa’s visual style, was introduced to Kurosawa’s work
in film school where a student film society screening of
The Seven Samurai opened his eyes to the Japanese
director’s brilliance. “I went and saw it, and it basically
changed my life.”
Kurosawa’s life was also changed by the movies. As he later
said, if you subtracted movies from his life, “the result is
zero. . . I am my films - nothing more, nothing less.”
He was born in Tokyo, Japan on March 23, 1910, the son of an
ex-army officer from a samurai background whom he later
described as “quite severe.” At school, a teacher encouraged
him to paint, and the skills he acquired served him well
when he turned from creating pictures on canvas to capturing
images on film. “I tried to add my sensitivity as a painter
to what I hoped was my increasing know-how as a filmmaker.”
Movies entered his life through his brother Heigo who took
him along to his job as a narrator of silent films. “We
would go to the movies, particularly silent movies,” he
recalled in his memoirs, “and then discuss them all day.” It
was Abel Gance’s film, La Roue, that he remembered as
the first movie “that really influenced me and made me think
of wanting to become a filmmaker.”
In 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo
and Yokohama, and killed 123,000 people. Years later,
Kurosawa remembered how his brother “forced me to spend a
day wandering through Tokyo.” When Kurosawa closed his eyes
rather than look upon the dead around him, his brother
scolded him. “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight,
you end up being frightened. If you look at everything
straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” It’s a
lesson that would stick with him as a filmmaker. “Being an
artist,” he said, “means not having to avert one’s eyes.”
After studying art at the Doshusha School of Western
Painting, Kurosawa found he was unable to support himself as
a serious artist, and turned to commercial work that left
him unsatisfied and financially strapped. He saw an ad in a
newspaper seeking assistant film directors at the film
studio of Photo Chemical Laboratories, later renamed the
Toho Film Production Company. The application process
required the writing of an essay about “The Basic Defects of
the Japanese Film Industry.” Kurosawa’s essay impressed the
right people, and, at age 23, he began work under the
tutelage of Kajiro Yamamoto, Japan’s most successful film
director.
Kurosawa was Yamamoto’s star pupil, and the apprentice was
eager to show what he could do as the commander on a film
set. In 1942, he got the opportunity with Sanshiro Sugata.
The film, about the rivalry between judo and jujitsu,
demonstrated how quickly Kurosawa found his style. Like many
of the films to come, it was notable for the bold camera
moves, forceful editing, wipes to move from one scene to the
next, and the use of harsh weather to symbolize conflict,
most evident here in the climactic battle staged against the
backdrop of a raging windstorm.
His next film was pure war propaganda. 1944's The Most
Beautiful attempted to boost morale with its depiction
of a girl working in a lens factory who is drafted into
helping the war effort.
For many film buffs, actor Toshiro Mifune is to Kurosawa
what John Wayne was to Kurosawa’s idol, John Ford. Mifune’s
first film with Kurosawa was as a gangster challenging a
yakuza boss in 1948's Drunken Angel. Watching Mifune
film a screen test, Kurosawa saw the actor “reeling around
the room in a violent frenzy. It was as frightening as
watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break
loose. I stood transfixed.” What really impressed the
director was “the speed with which (Mifune) expressed
himself. . . The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet
of film to get across an impression. Mifune needed only
three feet.” Kurosawa next cast Mifune as a guilt-ridden
detective in 1949's Stray Dog.
It was 1951's Rashomon that first brought Kurosawa
international attention. Winning both the Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival and the Oscar as Best Foreign Language
Film, it was a dark tale of rape and murder in 18th
century Japan. Kurosawa wasn’t always aware of what he was
trying to say in a film (“If I knew that, I probably
wouldn’t be having to make the film. If I could just say it,
there wouldn’t be any need to show it.”), and in Rashomon
we get four contradictory views of events from a bandit,
a nobleman, a ghost, and a woodcutter. The fact that there
is no resolution, no final word on what happened, mystified
some viewers, and even many members of the film’s crew,
including the assistant directors. Kurosawa advised them to
read the script again. When they remained baffled, Kurosawa
explained to them that “Human beings are unable to be honest
with themselves about themselves. . . The film is like a
strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the
ego. You say you can’t understand this script at all, but
that is because the human heart itself is impossible to
understand.
It was never Kurosawa’s goal to be obscure. As he once said,
“A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand.
There’s nothing complicated about it.”
Although choosing one Kurosawa film as his masterwork would
lead to intense debate among his admirers, The Seven
Samurai is probably cited more often than any other
title as an example of Kurosawa at this prime. Released in
Japan in 1954 and two years later in the U.S., the violent
story follows a group of samurai who agree to protect some
farmers from bandits intent on stealing their crops. The
first of Kurosawa’s samurai films, it was named to Sight
and Sound’s list of the 10 greatest films ever
made in 1982, and ranked in first place on the U.K. Empire
magazine list of “The 100 Best Films of World Cinema” in
2010. Its reputation was only enhanced by the 1960 American
remake, The Magnificent Seven (the title by which
Kurosawa’s film was originally known in the U.S.), notable
for turning the samurai heroes into gunfighters played by
such stars-to-be as Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and
James Coburn. It is even believed to have inspired such
films as The Guns of Navarone and Oceans Eleven
in which a crack team of experts is recruited for a
dangerous mission.
Unlike many action films now regarded as classics, The
Seven Samurai was not unsung at the time of its release.
While praising it as “a solid, naturalistic, he-man outdoor
action film,” Bosley Crowther in The New York Times
also noted that “Kurosawa has plastered a wealth of rich
detail, which brilliantly illuminates his characters and the
kind of action in which they are involved. He has loaded his
film with unusual and exciting physical incidents and made
the whole thing graphic in a hard, realistic western style.”
To John Milius, the screenwriter of Apocalypse Now
and director of the first Conan the Barbarian movie
in 1982, said The Seven Samurai is “the best film
ever made.” Sam Peckinpah cited the film and Kurosawa’s work
in general as a major influence on his films, including his
1969 classic, The Wild Bunch. As Roger Ebert said,
“It could be argued that this greatest of directors gave
employment to action heroes for the next fifty years, just
as a fallout from his primary purpose.” George Lucas may
have said it best: “I mean it’s a brilliant, brilliant film,
and every time I see it I can’t believe the magic mixture of
a great story and great acting and humor and action and
suspense - wonderful cinema. The art of moving pictures is
on every frame of this movie.”
With Throne of Blood, Kurosawa tackled Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, setting the story in 16th century Japan
with Toshiro Mifune in the lead. “No doubt about it now,”
raved Time magazine, “Japan’s Akira Kurosawa must be
numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the
supreme creators of cinema.” It was, in the periodical’s
view, “the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to
put Shakespeare in pictures.”
The Lower Depths
was generally regarded as a comparatively minor work but
with “a hissing demonic energy” (Time) and “a
powerful unification of compositional and emotional indices”
(The New York Times).
Although George Lucas openly expresses his indebtedness to
Kurosawa, he maintains that 1958's The Hidden Fortress
was not as much of an influence on Star Wars as
many fans believe. “The truth is, the only thing I was
inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of
view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and
princess and a lot of very high-level people,” he told the
U.K. Telegraph. “I said that is a great device, and
that’s how I ended up with R2-D2 and C-3P0.” Some critics at
the time thought the film showed the influence of Hollywood
on Japan’s master filmmaker, with The New York Times
stating that Kurosawa “was not above pulling a little wool
over his audiences’ eyes - a little stooping to
Hollywoodisms - in order to make a lively film.”
Of Yojimbo, Time promised that “anybody who
sees this picture will be shaken by it. Rage like a gale,
action like an avalanche roar out of the screen, leveling
all resistance.” Here Kurosawa gives us a lone avenger, a
samurai who happens upon a town ruled by corrupt forces and
concludes that it would be “better if all these men were
dead.” Toshiro Mifune played the strong, silent hero, and
created a prototype that would serve Clint Eastwood well
when he played the same role, with a gun instead of a sword,
in 1964's Fistful of Dollars, another westernized
version of a Kurosawa film, though this time by way of
Italy’s Sergio Leone. “Fistful of Dollars,” Kurosawa
wrote in a letter to Leone, “is a very fine film, but it’s
my film.” The lawsuit that followed kept the film out of
U.S. theaters until 1967 when it transformed Eastwood from
TV actor to international movie star. Although Leone’s film
is a classic in its own right, its quality only reinforces
the impact and brilliance of the original. In Roger Ebert’s
view, a Western remake of Kurosawa’s most popular film in
Japan, was almost a given since the director was
“deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western,
so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier
town, the samurai could be a gunslinger, and the local
characters could have been lifted from John Ford’s gallery
of supporting actors.” The influence of Yojimbo did not stop
with a spaghetti Western. As critic James Berardinelli
states, “ without Yojimbo, certain key aspects of Western
cinema would not be the same today.”
Sanjuro,
like Yojimbo, was rightly praised for its action
sequences, but Kurosawa knew that action alone did not make
for a memorable film. “No matter how well thought-out your
fight scenes, that alone doesn’t make a film entertaining.
Making Sanjuro an interesting character - that’s the most
important thing.”
“Originally, this was a story by Shugoro Yamamoto. I changed
it around and finished the script before doing Yojimbo.
In my first version, the hero was not very good with the
sword but was smart enough - he fought with his head. After
Yojimbo was such a success, however, our company
decided to make something like it, and so this not-so-strong
samurai became the hero, Sanjuro. I rewrote the script and
was going to give it to Hiromuchi Horikawa to direct but,
again, the company decided that I’d better do it. So I wrote
it over yet again. And each time, Sanjuro was getting more
athletic, better with the sword. Eventually, we used only a
third of the original script and included lots of action not
in the original.”
To critic Michael Sragow, Sanjoro is “the sassy kid
brother to Yojimbo, and like many lighthearted
younger siblings, it’s underrated.” At the time of its
initial release, Stanley Kaufmann of The New York
Herald-Tribune had to wonder “how the people who could
make a film so superbly could be content to make one so
shallow.”
Kurosawa moved away from period pieces for his next film,
High and Low, based on an novel, King’s Ransom,
by an American author, Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) for whom
it was a title in his popular 87th Precinct
series. “I wanted to make the film because I’d read that
book,” Kurosawa said. What intrigued him was the “idea that
blackmail is possible regardless of who’s kidnaped. That was
a brilliant concept, so I borrowed that concept alone.” In
the story, a businessman’s son is the target of a kidnaping
attempt, but the culprit’s mistakenly take the son of his
chauffeur instead.
For the first time, Kurosawa used stereophonic sound for the
soundtrack. “The way Kurosawa used widescreen always
impressed me,” Martin Scorsese said. “No space is wasted.
This is especially true in High and Low.”
In one sequence, Kurosawa filmed on a moving express train
which required the use of nine cameras. “I figured that that
is the minimum to get what I want.” The use of multiple
cameras was another Kurosawa trademark. While most
filmmakers shoot a master shot, then shoot the same scene,
including close-ups, from different angles and piece it all
together in the editing room, Kurosawa sought a more
seamless method. “I put the A camera in the most orthodox
positions, use the B camera for quick, decisive shots and
the C camera as a kind of guerrilla unit.”
Known for being involved in every aspect of his productions,
Kurosawa storyboarded his films from full-scale paintings he
created himself, and remained involved right through to the
editing which he acknowledged was a process that could make
all the difference in a film’s quality. He noted, however,
that “if the script is no good, then it doesn’t matter how
well you shoot or edit. With a good script, a good director
can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre
director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script,
even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For
truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone
must be able to cross both fire and water.”
He also believed in rehearsal. “Rehearsals take time and
everything, but in the end they take less time than any
other method of working.”
“Stylistically,” critic Richard Schickel wrote, “Kurosawa is
without peer. . . He holds scenes, without cutting, for
minutes on end, forcing the eye to choose its own emphasis.
His use of telephoto lenses to foreshorten perspective is so
expert that it is often unnoticeable.”
A prophet, as they say, is without honor in his own land,
and the Japanese have often been critical of Kurosawa,
believing his films are too “westernized.” This view, along
with the decline of the film industry there, may have made
Kurosawa consider moving his base of operations, as well as
to consider offers from other countries. Runaway Train,
for the U.S. based Embassy Pictures, was to be both
Kurosawa’s first film in English and in color, but language
barriers and an uncompleted script hampered the project
which was to go before the cameras in 1966, but was delayed
several times before it was cancelled altogether two years
later.
Another offer he accepted came from 20th Century
Fox which was planning an ambitious epic about the December
7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that commenced World War II.
Tora, Tora, Tora would depict the fateful day from
both the American and Japanese perspective with David Lean
filming the former and Kurosawa taking on the Japanese
segments. Disillusionment with the project set in early, as
Lean, the prestigious Oscar winning director of Bridge on
the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, was never
signed. Journeyman director Richard Fleischer (The
Vikings, Fantastic Voyage) was hired instead.
Kurosawa struggled working with an American crew and was
devastated to learn his segment, for which he had prepared a
four hour script, would be reduced to 90 minutes of screen
time. After three weeks, he was fired from the project,
which proved to be a bloated bomb when released in the fall
of 1970.
By this time, Kurosawa was in despair, and in 1971 he
attempted suicide by slashing his wrists 30 times with a
razor. By this time, he was having difficulty securing
financing for his films, but in 1977 Star Wars was
blasting its way into popular culture, on its way to
amassing the biggest box-office gross in history. Heavily
inspired by Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, director
George Lucas used his clout with 20th Century
Fox, and the studio that had fired Kurosawa from Tora,
Tora, Tora a decade before, agreed to bankroll
Kagemusha with Francis Ford Coppola as co-producer.
“One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa,” Coppola said,
“is that he didn’t make a masterpiece or two masterpieces,
he made, you know, eight masterpieces.” Upon its release in
1980, Kagemusha was hailed as another Kurosawa
masterpiece, proving a massive hit in Japan, and a success
with both critics and audiences worldwide. It received the
Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Kurosawa himself would regard 1985's Ran as his best
film. Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, its title
means “chaos.”
“A reason I couldn’t shoot this film for so long,” Kurosawa
told Gerald Peary, “was that producers complained that the
ending was tragic. We are always closing our eyes.” Although
Japan failed to even submit it for consideration as a
Foreign Language Film nominee at the Academy Awards,
Kurosawa received his only nomination as Best Director in a
year in which Out of Africa and its director, Sydney
Pollock, proved victorious. Kurosawa joined two other
legends, Billy Wilder and John Huston, in presenting the
Best Picture Oscar that year. Five years later, he was on
hand to accept an honorary Oscar from George Lucas and
Steven Spielberg for “cinematic accomplishments that have
inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide
audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world.”
There were several more films to go – Dreams,
Rhapsody in August, and Madadayo – made with
great difficulty since Kurosawa was losing his eyesight. If
his physical eye was failing him, he still had the camera.
As he once said, “A film is never really good unless the
camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” He died at age 88
on September 6, 1998.
For Kurosawa, the master was John Ford whose Westerns had a
major impact on him. “Westerns have been done over and over
again, and in the process a kind of grammar has evolved. I
have learned much from this grammar of the Western.” But as
critic Richard Schickel noted in his obituary for Kurosawa,
“Whatever Kurosawa borrowed from the West, he gave back
tenfold.”