By Andrez Bergen
Upon the 70th Anniversary cinematic release of his great masterpiece Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa – Japan’s most revered, debated and groundbreaking film director – is celebrated by a number of Japan’s leading filmmakers, artists and musicians, all of whom agree that the cinematic master’s influence still reaches far, wide and undeniably deep.
“For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason why I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting, literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.” Akira Kurosawa
In Tokyo on March 23, 1910, Akira Kurosawa was born the youngest of eight children to middle-aged, middle class former samurai stock. He lived to see his 88th birthday, made thirty films over fifty years, and helmed the most famous samurai story ever shot, while most of his other productions are nothing short of essential viewing. When you talk about Kurosawa, you really need a thesaurus to provide ample and fitting superlatives.
While all this together might lead to intimations of the idyllic (apart obviously from the number of siblings), a casual glance over the auteur’s lifetime reveals anything but. At age thirteen, Akira experienced first-hand the Great Kanto earthquake that struck Tokyo and resulted in over 100,000 deaths. “Amid the expanse of nauseating redness lay every kind of corpse imaginable,” the director once recalled of the experience. “I saw corpses charred black, half-burned corpses, corpses in gutters, corpses floating in rivers, corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at an intersection, and every manner of death possible to human beings. When I involuntarily looked away, my brother scolded me. Looking back on that excursion now, I realise that it must have been horrifying for my brother too. It had been an expedition to conquer fear.”
By the time that he had reached his thirties, three of Akira’s brothers were dead, and Japan had locked itself into the Pacific chapter of WW2, ended only by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1971, Kurosawa attempted suicide himself after being dumped from the big budget WW2-set American/Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (apparently for being too much of a perfectionist), and while he directed over twenty films in the first two decades of his career, he helmed just four more between 1965 and 1985 thanks to ill health and difficulties obtaining domestic funding.
By the mid-eighties, Kurosawa was almost blind when he shot Ran, his visually sumptuous take on Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the director’s wife of 39 years died during the production. Just how much each of these troubling factors shaped the way in which Kurosawa perceived the world around him is up for conjecture; other influences (like the seven-year Allied occupation of Japan after the war which radically reshaped Japanese society) must also have conspired in some way toward affecting the director’s personal view if his domestic dramas like Ikiru and The Bad Sleep Well are anything to go by.
Yet of all the personal fractures that dogged the director, none can account for the sense of humour that underscores even his bleakest films. And while a hundred years after his birth he’s venerated by many a foreign film fan, within his own lifetime, Akira Kurosawa already had a sizeable global cult following in filmmakers like Federico Fellini, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, John Woo, Terry Gilliam, Alex Cox, Martin Scorsese, Zhang Yimou, Jackie Chan, Peter Greenaway and Andrei Tarkovsky.
In truth, the international accolades were always there. Rashomon (1950) scored the Venice Film Festival Grand Prize and an Academy Award for Honorary Foreign Language Film, while Seven Samurai won The Silver Lion at The Venice Film Festival in 1954. Although he never won an Oscar for any of his productions, Kurosawa was nominated for Best Director for Ran in 1985, and was then treated to the Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1990. Back in Japan, by contrast, feelings about Kurosawa veer wildly from apathy and indifference to pure reverence.
“For the basic idea of movie-making, I learned the most from Akira Kurosawa,” assesses thinking man’s anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon, who helmed Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika. “Of course, I don’t have the nerve to say that I’m ‘influenced’ by him; I just learned by his example. While making my own movies, I often read Kurosawa interviews, or interviews with members of his crew about Kurosawa’s techniques. By reading these stories of a director and crew who gave their all to make great movies, I feel more motivated. There is no one like Akira Kurosawa, and nothing remotely close to the numerous masterpieces that he produced. The strength of his ‘image’ is outstanding; people can identify his work at a glance.”
“I love Kurosawa’s movies,” enthuses Kon’s fellow film director Noboru Iguchi, the man behind the action/FX features The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha. “My favourite is Dodesukaden,” he says, referring to the 1970 yarn about quirky characters residing in a garbage dump. “I like stories about weak people, and this is the best of these,” Iguchi explains. “The script, the performances, the music…everything is fantastic. It’s sweet, and that sad last scene makes me tear up whenever I see the movie. I also admire The Bad Sleep Well for the maturity of the partnership between Kurosawa and [actor] Toshiro Mifune. Mifune looks tough and gorgeous, but he’s also very sensitive; Mifune was the actor that Kurosawa could easily paint with any colours, like starting out with a blank canvas.”
Another Mifune fan is Shusuke Kaneko, the director involved in the recent Death Note franchise, as well as a trilogy of famous monster movies in the nineties. “My favourite Kurosawa movies are Drunken Angel, Ikiru, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Sanjuro and High And Low,” he says, nominating classic films in which Mifune was the nominal star. “Kurosawa had a good relationship with Toshiro Mifune because he was such a great actor – I’ve heard tales that he was like a wild animal, and that a caged lion was Mifune’s reference point for his breathtaking performance in Rashomon.” Not everybody’s a Kurosawa fan, however, and Mifune himself has these days been largely forgotten in favour of his occasionally riotous rock star/actress daughter Mika.
Despite the overseas acclaim for Ran in 1985, the movie was not submitted as Japan’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Kurosawa’s stunning Japanese Civil War period reinterpretation of King Lear was even skipped over in the nomination process in his own country for Best Picture at the Awards Of The Japanese Academy. The local winner was instead the comparatively forgettable Hanaichimonme (Gray Sunset) – also Japan’s official submission to the 58th Academy Awards in place of Ran – and the film was knocked back before Oscar shortlisting even commenced.
On its seventieth anniversary, Seven Samurai (1954) – the masterpiece that kick-started the ensemble buddy movie fad and pioneered the use of slow-motion in action sequences – is often cited as the greatest slice of Japanese cinema ever produced, and rates in the Top 100 movies of all-time list at the website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? “Seven Samurai is my favourite movie,” reports Takashi Watanabe, a successful DJ and producer known as DJ Warp. “It’s an absolute classic for any film lover, and it changed the face of Japanese cinema because of the realism and Kurosawa’s perfectionist touch.”
Then Watanabe selects another must-see. “I also loved Toshiro Mifune’s performance and the complicated story in Rashomon.” The sixty-year-old Rashomon, also on the very same poll at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (“as voted by 2,041 critics, filmmakers, reviewers, scholars and other likely film types”), is itself an innovative stand-alone. “This is the Akira Kurosawa movie that I find particularly interesting,” muses musician Yukari Katsuki, responsible for the soundtracks for the anime series xxxHolic and The Tale Of Genji. “Rashomon works so well because of the way in which it devises a recollection of one event from plural viewpoints.”
It’s for Seven Samurai, however, that Kurosawa’s legacy continues to be most enduring. Over on the Combustible Celluloid website, My Brilliant Career director Gillian Armstrong corralled that movie into her 10 best-ever list, Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) slipped Seven Samurai in at #8, while John Boorman (Deliverance) and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns slotted it into the top position in their own charts.
None of Kurosawa’s productions were ever intended to be major commercial fodder. Instead of obsessing over box office returns, the director focused on meticulous, time-consuming perfectionism. It was Kurosawa, an occasional painter, who once quipped that one should be able to take any single frame from a film and hang it on the wall as art. He also wore a preoccupation with the weather on his sleeve, ostensibly to heighten moods. Stray Dog is set amidst Tokyo’s summer humidity, while snowfall and frigid conditions highlight The Idiot. “The elegance of each scene is so beautifully constructed and staged,” says anime director and character designer Naoyoshi Shiotani (Tokyo Marble Chocolate, Oblivion Island), who also nominates Kurosawa as his all-time favourite moviemaker. “Then there’s the mesmerising charm of his characters, from whom a rich expressiveness almost oozes out from the screen. You can watch a Kurosawa movie over and over again and always be amazed at his thoroughness, discovering new details that you never noticed before.”
For electronic musician Toshiyuki Yasuda, it’s the complete interaction of the sound, visuals and cast that makes the Akira Kurosawa experience complete. “I loved Ran for the music,” he says, “and Stray Dog for the performance of Toshiro Mifune. Toru Takemitsu’s score for Ran is superb. There was much discord between Takemitsu and Kurosawa – Kurosawa wanted Gustav Mahler-like music, but Takemitsu, who possessed so much originality, was angry with that. The manner in which sound and music are combined ended up being extraordinary. There’s a bloody battle scene accompanied only with taciturn sounds. When I first saw the scene, it dawned on me that you can’t hear anything if you’re in the midst of a horrible battle. How did Kurosawa know that? I just have to admire him for his strong imagination.”
The music in Kurosawa movies is stand-alone stuff that captures the imagination in completely new ways. “I remember a man strumming a guitar in vital moments of Drunken Angel,” recalls DJ/producer Kana Masaki. “It reminded me of the zither in The Third Man, though Kurosawa couldn’t have known that since the films were made around the same time. The soundtracks by Fumio Hayasaka were always amazing.”
In other respects, Kurosawa himself admitted to the influence of a disparate group of gaijin that included John Ford, Frank Capra and William Shakespeare. To differing degrees of success, Kurosawa has had his movies remade in return by foreigners like John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven), Sergio Leone (A Fistful Of Dollars), Walter Hill (Last Man Standing), Martin Ritt (The Outrage), and Roger Corman (Battle Beyond The Stars). Rashomon even earned itself a quip on The Simpsons – a better indication than any of the overseas appreciation that’s often more glowing than its brethren in Japan. After all, “Japan does not understand very well that one of its proudest cultural achievements is in film,” Kurosawa himself once concluded.
Life after death, however, is part of any good Japanese Buddhist’s belief system, and their fancy seems to hold true for Akira Kurosawa himself despite his demise almost twelve years ago. It shouldn’t be any surprise then that in 2007 he popped up at a Japanese railway station – looking quite peppy for a gent nine years dead – as he directed a horde of samurai on horseback, while at the same time exhorting a bleary-eyed off-duty salary-man to drink canned coffee for breakfast. At least that was the message asserted in that year’s Wonda commercial for “Morning Shot” from soft drink brand Asahi.
Coffee breaks, track racing and CG resurrections aside, Kurosawa’s surviving body of work has undergone a latent popularity resurge in his homeland over the past decade since he passed away – via reconstitution rather than rescreenings. In 2001-02, Studio Pierrot and director Hayato Date (of Naruto anime fame) reinterpreted Yojimbo (1961) as an uneven animated series titled Bodyguard Of The Wind. Two years later, Seven Samurai came under the microscope. Studio Gonzo reworked the 1954 masterpiece (with a far better eye than Pierrot) into the sci-fi anime romp Samurai 7, while Osaka-based gaming company Dimps released the PlayStation 2 game Seven Samurai 20XX with character designs by iconic French comic artist Moebius and a score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (The Last Emperor). Regrettably, the game’s limp audience reception and some devastating reviews led Wired.com to name it one of the worst movie adaptations ever made.
In December 2007, a live-action revamp of Kurosawa’s revered samurai flick Sanjuro (the 1962 sequel to Yojimbo) was repackaged as Tsubaki Sanjuro, whereby it smote some screens and most critical sensibilities across Japan. Directed by Yoshimitsu Morita (he previously made the lightweight 24 Hour Playboy), the film’s star was a relatively wooden Yuji Oda (Bayside Shakedown) in the sardonic Toshiro Mifune role.
The following year, Kurosawa’s most frequent studio Toho reshot and then unveiled a new millennium remix of his 1958 epic The Hidden Fortress – the movie that George Lucas has admitted made such a huge impression on the shooting script for Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. While the original Kurosawa title literally translates as “The Three Villains Of The Hidden Fortress”, any mention of villainy and/or camouflaged bunkers were eschewed in the title of the lacklustre 2008 incarnation, which opted instead for The Last Princess. “With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece,” Kurosawa, who also co-wrote the story for The Hidden Fortress, once said. “With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film.”
Next, Samurai Fiction director Hiroyuki Nakano conjured up a gaudy reinterpretation of Seven Samurai for a pachinko slot-machine game, and then Mark Schilling reported in Variety Magazine that some celluloid entity calling itself Rashomon 2010 would take the director’s classic tale and reboot it in the contemporary US; luckily we’ve heard not a peep since. On the other side of the Pacific, Variety more promisingly reported in October 2008 that Mike Nichols (Closer) was set to direct a remake of Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High And Low for Miramax Films, while Bob and Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company had already informed the Associated Press that they were investing in a remake of Seven Samurai – talked up as a military romp in contemporary Thailand with George Clooney attached. None of these projects got off the ground.
While Martin Scorsese – whom Kurosawa saw fit to cast as famed artist Vincent Van Gogh in his 1990 film Dreams – at one stage talked up remaking the 62-year-old Drunken Angel, and Irish director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) attempted a rejig of the 1952 drama Ikiru for DreamWorks, it was Oliver Hermanus who actually got there in 2022 with his Bill Nighy-starring adaptation Living, which was penned by no less a figure than acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. “The role was written for Bill,” Oliver Hermanus told FilmInk. “Kazuo Ishiguro had the brainwave at a dinner party. He was like, ‘Oh, somebody should really make a British version of Ikiru and Bill Nighy should play the lead role.’ I think a producer overheard him and forced him to do it.”
The film is certainly a popular one amongst Kurosawa fans. “My favourite Kurosawa film is Ikiru,” says Yasuko Onuki from Tokyo based all-girl noise group Melt-Banana. “I’ve seen several of his films, and this one was very simple compared with the others – but it stays in my head the most, and this film made me feel that Kurosawa truly was a good film director. The main actor, Takashi Shimura, was fantastic.”
A no-nonsense leader, Akira Kurosawa was appropriately nicknamed “Tenno”, or The Emperor. “Unless you know every aspect and phase of the film production process, you can’t be a movie director,” he once said. “A movie director is like a frontline commanding officer. He needs a thorough knowledge of every branch of the service, and if he doesn’t command each division, he cannot command the whole. A film director has to convince a great number of people to follow him and work with him. I often say, although I am certainly not a militarist, that if you compare the production unit to an army, the script is the battle flag and the director is the commander of the frontline. From the moment production begins to the moment it ends, there is no telling what will happen. The director must be able to respond to any situation, and he must have the leadership ability to make the whole unit go along with his responses.”
So long after his passing, it’s debatable whether Akira Kurosawa – one of the truly towering figures in not just Japanese but world cinema – would be pleased with the debate and fascination that has continued to swirl around him in the ten-plus years since his death. He was, however, a true poet of the human spirit, and a genuine master of the cinematic medium – two feats which will forever inspire passionate discourse. “When I start on a film, I always have a number of ideas about my project,” Akira Kurosawa once said of his creative process. “Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to nurture it and make it grow that I write my script. It is in directing the film that my tree blossoms and bears fruit.”
It is that fruit which the director sees as his true legacy. “I believe that what pertains only to myself is not interesting enough to record and leave behind me,” Akira Kurosawa once said. “More important is my conviction that if I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take ‘myself’, subtract ‘movies’, and the result is zero.”
The Seven Samurai 70th Anniversary 4k Restoration is in cinemas now.
