Akira Kurosawa – A Legacy

Do you know who the man on the right is?  With all the flashy directors nowadays, like James Cameron or Michael Bay, chances are that you probably don’t. And though you may not even bat an eye if you saw him walking through downtown, you are currently looking at the man who is regarded as one of the most influential and pivotal filmmakers in the history of cinema. That is to say, you are looking at Akira Kurosawa: iconic Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Kurosawa has directed 30 films in an astonishingly successful career spanning 57 years.

Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936 after a brief unyielding career as a painter. He made his debut as a director in 1943, when, during World War II, he created the popular Judo Saga. Shortly after the war, in 1948, Kurosawa cemented his reputation with the creation of the movie Drunken Angel. From 1950 to early 1960, Kurosawa directed approximately one film a year, including Ikiru, and the widely renowned Seven Samurai.

His brilliant work has by no means gone unrecognized, with Kurosawa accepting the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990, and being posthumously dubbed as Asian of the Century, cited as “one of the five people who contributed most to the betterment of Asia in the past 100 years.”

Born on the 23^rd of March to a moderately wealthy family, Akira was the youngest of eight children. His father, Isamu, who was a member of a former samurai family, promoted physical exercise and was open to western traditions, accepting that motion pictures could indeed be educationally viable. In fact, unlike many fathers at the time, Isamu actively encouraged his children to watch films. allowing Akira to watch his first film at age six (can you imagine?).

A major childhood influence for Kurosawa came in the form of his older brother Heigo. Heigo took Akira to view the devastating aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. He did not allow Akira to look away from the human and animal carcasses scattered across the city, rather, he encouraged Akira to face his fears by confronting them directly. It is said that this experience would later influence Kurosawa’s career, as he was seldom hesitant to confront unpleasant matters in his daily work. Heigo too became a filmmaker, and together with Akira, they became inseparable.

Of course, by now you are probably wondering, so what made this man so amazing? What exactly was it that set him apart from the common fodder of movie making? Firstly, unlike so many other directors, Kurosawa was completely hands-on . He was passionately involved in every aspect of his films; he made sure that his movies came out as he first envisioned them. He was not in it to make money,  he was in it to create something beautiful. You may also be thinking that this style of directing sounds familiar, well I’ll give you a hint.

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

That’s right.

Star Wars.

George Lucas too practiced this hands-on directing approach, and it’s a good thing he did, or Star Wars would never have made it to theatres.

Kurosawa was heavily focused on the writing aspect of film-making, that is to say, the script. He constantly emphasized that screenplay was the absolute foundation to a successful film, and that even mediocre directors can make passable films out of a good script. He also noted how it was impossible to make a good film out of a bad script. Special effects are good and all, but movie making should be an art, not a mindless festival of explosions (I’m looking at you Transformers 2).

Akira collaborated with a rotating group of five screenwriters. They would gather around a table at some location that was fairly isolated from society so as not to be distracted by the outside world. Together, they would each work on the exact same pages of the script. Kurosawa would then choose the best-written version from each of the different drafts. This served to regulate the influence of each screen-writer, and of course, to produce the best quality film possible.

He also produced extensive documents outside the script itself, containing information pertinent to the characters. In the case of Seven Samurai, he went so far as to write six notebooks containing detailed biographies of each of the fictional samurai, their family trees, how they wore their sandals, and even what they ate. This level of involvement was previously unheard of in traditional film-making

When it came to shooting the film itself, Kurosawa used drastically different cinematic techniques. He used long lenses and multiple cameras to help the the performance of the actors. By recording the actors at a distance, they were often unaware of the camera’s position, and as such, the acting seemed much more natural and far less rigid. Indeed it seems that trickery is no stranger to the movie making scene, though, upon seeing the results first hand, the actors agreed that the technique worked wonders.

For all his films, Akira firmly insisted that all sets be authentic, that  even includes the arrows that were being shot at the actors. Some of the actors even claimed to have  had nightmares after the shooting of some films; at times the arrows missed them by less than an inch. On another occasion, Kurosawa had need for aged teacups, but of course, paint would not satisfy Kurosawa’s need for authenticity. He ordered his crew to pour fifty years’ worth of tea into some cups so that they would appear aged and worn.

Kurosawa was nothing short of a genius when it came to editing his films, he carried in his had all the information about every shot he filmed. If he was ever handed a wrong piece of film, he would immediately be able to identify and rectify the error.  His partners sometimes compared his ability to that of a computer, it was almost unnatural. Unlike the Hollywood tactics of today, Kurosawa edited the film daily, bit by bit, during production. This was particularly useful when he started to use multiple camera angles, for the large amount of film would become unmanageable if left to compound over time. This also allowed for the film to be released almost immediately after the filming is over, sometimes as early as four days after.

The soundtrack is given the utmost attention during the process of film-making. In the late 1940s, he started to employ music that would  serve to counterpoint the emotional content of a scene, rather than to just reinforce it.  The idea came to him as he wandered the streets of Tokyo mourning his fathers death. “The Cucko Waltz” started to play from a window and it left Kurosawa in agony, he wanted the cheery music to go away. He later used that same song in Drunken Angel as an ironic accompaniment to a scene portraying death.

It is incredibly difficult to sum up what makes Akira Kurosawa such an amazing director in such a limited space. It is essentially the same as trying to compact half a century worth of cinematic style and development into a few short pages. But perhaps next time you see The Magnificent Seven, you will realize that it is based off Seven Samurai, and maybe next time you see Star Wars, you will know that it too was based off the works of Akira Kurosawa. Tora Tora Tora, A Fistful of Dollars, The Hidden Fortress, the list goes on, and so too does his legacy.