Profile: Akira Kurosawa (Part 3)
Trevor Hogg from FlickeringMyth.com with Part 3 of his profile on famed Japanese writer-director Akira Kurosawa:
“Since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book,” stated filmmaker Akira Kurosawa who has a great appreciation for literature. “I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college-style notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks.” A novel which left a lasting impression on the director was one written by author Maxim Gorky, which served as the basis for Donzoko (The Lower Depths, 1957). “Gorky’s setting was Imperial Russia but I changed it to Japan, the Edo period,” explained Kurosawa. “In Edo during this period the Shogunate was falling to pieces and thousands were living almost unendurable lives. Their resentment we still feel in senryu and rakushu [satirical poems and entertainments] of the period.”
An elderly man (Ganjiro Nakamura) and his discontented wife (Isuzu Yamada) rent out rooms to a variety of poor tenants from gamblers, prostitutes, and petty thieves, to drunkards. “This film was easy to make,” declared the Tokyo-born moviemaker. “We worked steadily and well; shooting did not take long. We had only one closed set, and one open set. We also had many rehearsals, and worked out all the choreography, movements, camera shots, etc. well in advance.” Akira Kurosawa was not above the idea of recruiting outside help to aid in the production, “Once, to get everyone in the proper mood, I invited on to the set one of the few remaining practitioners of the old Edo rakugo [humorous but highly satirical stories] — and we never had more fun than on that day.”
“If I make a heavy, serious film, then afterwards I want to make something light, which anyone can enjoy,” revealed Kurosawa. “For example, after The Lower Depths I made Hidden Fortress. It’s a biological need on my part. Whatever film I make is what I want to do at the moment.” In Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress or Three Bad Men in a Hidden Fortress, 1958) Toshiro Mifune plays a general secretly transporting a princess (Misa Uehara) from a defeated royal family through enemy territory only to be impeded by a pair of downtrodden peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara).
“I remember there was good weather at Arima and we worked fast, but Fuji! — the weather changes so rapidly that it is cloudy one minute and bright sun the next,” recalled the director. “Making it there was difficult enough, but just then a big typhoon came and torn up all our scenery. I remember, at one point, we waited over a hundred days for good weather, and so our film was considerably over its three-month production schedule.” It was well worth the effort as the picture was a box office hit and gained an admirer in American movie-maverick George Lucas, who used the film as an inspiration for Star Wars (1977). “The one thing that really struck and intrigued me about Hidden Fortress was that the story is told from the point-of-view of the two lowest characters,” observed Lucas. “Having the two bureaucrats or peasants is like having two clowns — it goes back to Shakespeare which is probably where Kurosawa got [the idea].” The tale, which echoes The Prince and Pauper, was socially ahead of its time. “In the Japanese context of Hidden Fortress we are talking about a strength of class structure that is unknown in the West,” stated the America filmmaker, “and therefore, her [the princess] assimilating into the lower classes is a much bigger issue.”
Laser in on this thought: “Since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book,” stated filmmaker Akira Kurosawa who has a great appreciation for literature. “I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college-style notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks.”
I remember reading a profile on Pedro Almodovar in which he did a similar thing: He likes to read 3 or 4 books at once, jotting down notes from each, then use whatever he surfaces as a key part of his creative / storycrafting process.
Always something interesting to learn when studying the creative habits of writers and filmmakers.
For Part 1 of Trevor’s profile, go here.
For Part 2, go here.