Something Like an Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

  After I had worked as Yama-san’s chief assistant director on a number of films, he started me writing scripts. Yama-san himself had originally been a scriptwriter, and his talent in this area was unsurpassed. On one occasion the irrepressible Taniguchi Senkichi said to Yama-san’s face, “You’re a first-rate screenwriter, but as a director you’re not really so hot.” Of course this is an excellent example of Sen-chan cheek, but there is no doubt about Yama-san being a first-rate screenwriter. I can testify to his writing abilities because of his precise criticisms and revisions on the scripts I later wrote. Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

  The first script I wrote under Yama-san’s supervision was based on Fujimori Nariyoshi’s story Mizuno Jŭrozaemon. In the original there is a scene where the eponymous hero tells his comrades of the Shirat-suka band about an edict he has seen put up on a signboard in front of Edo Castle. I followed the original closely and had Mizuno go back and report to his friends what he had seen. Yama-san read this and said if this were a novel it would be fine, but for a script it was too weak. He quickly dashed off something and showed it to me. Instead of having Mizuno do something dull like talk about the edict after having read it on the signboard, Yama-san had him uproot the signboard and arrive carrying it over his shoulder. He plants it in front of his comrades and says, “Look at this!” I was awed.

  From this point on, my approach to literature changed. I made a deliberate effort to change it. I began to read carefully, asking myself what the author was trying to say and how he was trying to express it. I thought while I read, and at the same time I kept notes on the passages that struck some emotional chord in me or that I considered for some reason important. When I reread in this new way things I had read in the past, I realized how superficial my initial reading had been.

  Not just literature but all the arts, as one matures, become gradually more comprehensible in their depth and subtlety. This is of course a very commonplace notion, but for me at that time it was a revelation, and it was Yama-san who led me toward it. Before my very eyes he had taken his pen to my script in the midst of reading it and revised it as he went along. I was not only surprised at his ability, and inspired to re-educate myself, but at the same time came to understand something of the secrets of creation.

  Yama-san said: “If you want to become a film director, first write scripts.” I felt he was right, so I applied myself wholeheartedly to scriptwriting. Those who say an assistant director’s job doesn’t allow him any free time for writing are just cowards. Perhaps you can write only one page a day, but if you do it every day, at the end of the year you’ll have 365 pages of script. I began in this spirit, with a target of one page a day. There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn out two or three pages. Oddly enough, when I put my mind to writing, it came more easily than I had thought it would, and I wrote quite a few scripts.

  One of the scenarios I completed during this period was Daruma-dera no doitsujin (A German at Daruma Temple), a story based on the life of the architect Bruno Taut. On Yama-san’s recommendation, it was later accepted for publication in the film magazine Eiga hyōron. This, incidentally, led to a troublesome occurrence. Yama-san entrusted the sole copy of this script to a critic from the magazine, on the understanding that it would be printed in the next issue. This critic proceeded to go out drinking and leave the manuscript on a train. In righteous indignation Yama-san protested such behavior and demanded that the man advertise in the newspapers for its return. But no advertisement ever appeared. I naturally did not want to let this opportunity for making a reputation go by, so I set about rewriting the script. I stayed up three nights in a row racking my brain to remember what the original had been like, and when I finished, I took it myself to the plant where they printed Eiga hyoron. There I met the very man who had lost my original, but, far from attempting to apologize, he wore an expression that said, “You should be grateful that we are going to put you in print.” To explain it in as kind a way as possible, there was probably no other attitude that fellow knew how to take. At least, this is what I tried to tell myself, but, to tell you the truth, my blood was boiling. To this day, when I think of that critic, I feel nauseated with rage.

  When I reached a certain level of achievement in scriptwriting, Yama-san told me to start editing. I already knew that you can’t be a film director if you can’t edit. Film editing involves putting on the finishing touches. More than this, it is a process of breathing life into the work. I had already grasped this, so before Yama-san gave me the command, I had already been spending time in the editing room.

  Or, rather, I had been wreaking havoc in the editing room. I had been taking Yama-san’s unedited footage and cutting and splicing away. When the editor caught me, he was furious. Yama-san was a first-rate film editor, and he always cut his own films with amazing speed, so all the editor really had to do was watch him and then splice where he indicated. But I suppose he couldn’t condone the interference of an assistant director in his work. Moreover, this editor was of a terribly fastidious temperament, and he would carefully take all the scrap frames, clean them up and put them away neatly in a drawer. So naturally he couldn’t stand by and watch me merrily chopping and tossing his film around. Anyway, I don’t know how many times he nearly bit my head off. I may sound insensitive to admit it, but the fact is I did my best to ignore him and went right on cutting and splicing.

  Finally the editor gave up. I don’t know if he ran out of strength or if he was reassured by my putting everything back together the way I had found it. But at last he came to lend his tacit approval to my fumblings with film in his editing room. Later, up until his death, this man worked as chief editor on all my films.

  I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively. The film that Yama-san had labored painfully to shoot he would cut to pieces as if he were a total masochist. He’d always come into the editing room with a joyful look on his face and say things like, “Kurosawa, I thought it over last night, and we can cut that so-and-so scene,” or “Kurosawa, I thought it over last night and I want you to cut the first half of such-and-such a scene.” “We can cut!” “I want you to cut!” “Cut!” Yama-san in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.

  But, no matter how much work the director, the assistant director, the cameraman or the lighting technicians put into a film, the audience never knows. What is necessary is to show them something that is complete and has no excess. When you are shooting, of course, you film only what you believe is necessary. But very often you realize only after having shot it that you didn’t need it after all. You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them. In film editing, this natural inclination is the most dangerous of all attitudes. The art of the cinema has been called an art of time, but time used to no purpose cannot be called anything but wasted time. Among all the teachings of Yama-san on film editing, this was the greatest lesson.

  I didn’t intend to write a handbook of filmmaking technique here, so I’ll put an end to this discussion. But there is one more incident involving editing and Yama-san that I would like to relate. It took place during the editing of the film Uma (Horses), which I had co-scripted and which Yama-san had put entirely in my hands for cutting. There is one place in the story where a foal has been sold and the mare frantically searches for her baby. Completely crazed, she kicks down her stable door and tries to crawl under the paddock fence. I edited the sequence most dilig
ently to show her expressions and actions in a dramatic way.

  But when the edited scene was run through a projector, the feeling didn’t come through at all. The mother horse’s sorrow and panic somehow stayed flat behind the screen. Yama-san had sat with me and watched the film as I was editing it any number of times, but he never said a word. If he didn’t say, “That’s good,” I knew it meant it was no good. I was at an impasse, and in my despair I finally begged his advice. He said, “Kurosawa, this sequence isn’t drama. It’s mono-no-aware.” Mono-no-aware, “sadness at the fleeting nature of things,” like the sweet, nostalgic sorrow of watching the cherry blossoms fall—when I heard this ancient poetic term, I was suddenly struck by enlightenment as if waking from a dream. “I understand!” I exclaimed and set about completely re-editing the scene.

  I put together only the long shots. It became a series of glimpses of a tiny silhouette of the galloping mare, her mane and tail flying in the wind on a moonlit night. And that alone proved sufficient. Even without putting in any sound, it seemed to make you hear the pathetic whinnying of the mother horse and a mournful melody of woodwinds.

  It goes without saying that in order to be a film director you must be able to direct actors on the set. A film director’s job is to take a script, make it into something concrete and fix that on film. To that end, he must give the appropriate instructions to the people handling the cameras, the lights, the tape recorders, the sets, the costumes, the props and the makeup. And he must also coach the actors in their delivery.

  In order to give us experience with directing actors, Yama-san often had assistant directors take charge of second-unit shooting. Sometimes he would even shoot a scene up to a certain point and then go home, leaving the rest in our hands. If you don’t have a tremendous amount of faith in your assistant directors, you can’t do a thing like that. On the other hand, from our point of view as assistant directors, it was a heavy responsibility. If we didn’t rise to the occasion, we would lose not only Yama-san’s trust, but the confidence of the cast and crew as well. We had to do our utmost. I’m sure Yama-san was well aware of our position and was off somewhere having a drink with a grand smirk on his face. But these experiences, which were like unannounced examinations in school, provided the best possible opportunity for us to develop our directing ability.

  During the filming of Horses Yama-san did indeed come to the location set-ups. But usually after spending one night there he would say, “Take care of it,” and go back to Tokyo. It was in this way that I was trained, before becoming a director, to handle the crew and to coach the actors.

  Yama-san was good with actors. He didn’t have the dignified severity of directors like Ozu Yasujfro and Mizoguchi Kenji, but instead a kind of quiet cleverness. He often said, “If you as director try to drag an actor by force to where you want him, he can only get halfway there. Push him in the direction he wants to go, and make him do twice as much as he was thinking of doing.” The result is that in Yama-san’s films the actors seem to be relaxed and playing at what they are doing. A good example of this easy-going spirit was the comedian Enoken (Enomoto Ken’ichi). In Yama-san’s pictures he really runs wild, and his special qualities come out in full bloom.

  Yama-san also treated actors with extreme politeness. I would sometimes forget the names of the extras—the people who had walk-on parts or played in crowd scenes—and I called them by the color of their costumes, “Say, you in the red …” or “Excuse me, the man in the blue suit.…” Yama-san would scold me: “Kurosawa, you mustn’t do that. People all have names.” Well, I knew that, but I was too busy to look up each name. Yama-san, on the other hand, would call me to look up the name of any extra he wanted to give special instructions to. I would find out the person’s name and report it to him, and only then would he make his request: “Mr. So-and-So, would you please move two or three steps to the left?” The extra, of course a complete unknown, would be overwhelmed by the personal address. This technique reveals that Yama-san was a little bit cagey, but there’s no denying it worked—he really knew how to make people give him their best.

  Aside from this, there are three very important things I learned from Yama-san about actors. The first is that people do not know themselves. They can’t look objectively at their own speech and movement habits. The second is that when a movement is made consciously, it will be the consciousness rather than the movement that draws attention on the screen. The third is that when you explain to an actor what he should do, you must also make him understand why he should do it that way—that is, what the internal motivations in the role and the action are.

  No matter how much paper I had, I could never finish writing down everything I learned from Yama-san. I will have to wrap it up with one last item: what he taught me about motion-picture sound. He himself approached sound with an attitude of discretion, employing a delicate sensibility in the use of both natural sound and music. Therefore, he was most to be feared during the process of dubbing—recording the sound track on the edited film, the last step in completion of a film. My pet theory—that cinematic strength derives from the multiplier effect of sound and visual image being brought together—was born from the experience of Yama-san’s dubbing work.

  For us assistant directors, the dubbing process was particularly painful. Shooting was over and we were all exhausted, but usually we had the release date hanging over our heads. Since we generally had no leeway at all, our sleepless nights continued, and because the work of putting in the sound demanded such delicacy and refinement, our nerves were worn to a frazzle by the time we finished.

  Yet on the other hand there were rewards. Frequently we had the natural sound recorded as the film was shot, and sometimes adding another kind of sound on top of this would create unexpected new effects. So the dubbing process came to have its own special attractions and pleasures. Depending on how the sound is put in, the visual image may strike the viewer in many different ways. Such effects the director calculates, but assistant directors rarely have the opportunity to set foot in this territory. In most instances, the results took us assistant directors by surprise. Yama-san seemed to enjoy surprising us, so he took care not to let us know what he was doing. Then he would gleefully surprise us with an extraordinary combination of sound effects and music. The sound powerfully altered the visual image to create a whole new impression, and at these moments we forgot all our pain and exhaustion in the excitement of it.

  It was still the very beginning of the sound-film era in Japan. I don’t believe many other directors had thought about the relationship between sound and image so deeply as to realize that they were mutual multipliers. I think Yama-san wanted to teach me what he knew, because he had me do the dubbing on Tōjurō’s Love.

  When he looked at my handiwork in the private screening room, he instructed me to do it all over again. This was a shock for me. It was as if I were disgraced in public. To redo it would take enormous time and effort, and I could hardly face the people who assisted on dubbing. On top of all this, I still didn’t understand exactly what was wrong with what I had done. I went through it reel by reel, over and over again, searching for what I thought might be the bad places. Finally I found them, redubbed them and presented the film to Yama-san again. When the screening was over, all he said was “O.K.” At that moment I hated him. “Makes me do everything and then says whatever he wants,” I thought. But the feeling lasted only a brief instant.

  At the party celebrating completion of Tōjurō’s Love, Mrs. Yamamoto came and spoke to me. “My husband was very happy. He said Kurosawa can write scripts, handle the directing, do the editing and now the dubbing—he’ll be all right.” My eyes suddenly got very hot. Yama-san was the best kind of teacher. Yama-san, I promise you I’ll try a little harder, a little longer. This is the memorial speech I offer up to Yama-san.

  Congenital Defects

  I AM SHORT-TEMPERED and obstinate. These defects are still pronounced, and when I was an assistant director they gave ri
se to some very serious problems. I recall one occasion when we were particularly pressed for time on the shooting of a film. For more than a week we had not had a full half-hour for lunch, and what made it worse was that we had to make do with the box lunches the company provided. These box lunches consisted of riceballs and giant radish pickles.

  More than a week of riceballs and radish pickles is unbearable. The crew began to complain, so I went to the company administrative offices and requested a little consideration. “At least wrap the riceballs in dried seaweed,” I begged. The production office agreed to my request, so I returned to the set and announced to the crew that the next day the box lunches would contain something different. The grumbling ceased.

  However, the box lunches the next day consisted of riceballs and radish pickles. One of the enraged crew picked up his lunch and threw it at me. I very nearly flew into a rage myself at that, but I controlled myself, picked up the lunch I had been hit with and set out for the production office. We were shooting on an open set a good ten-minute walk from the studio buildings. As I walked, I kept saying to myself, “Don’t fly off the handle, you mustn’t fly off the handle.…” But the longer I walked, the shorter my fuse got, and by the time I reached the door of the production office I was just a few seconds from exploding. When I stood before the chief of the production office, it happened. In a flash the production chief got the box lunch right in the face and was covered with sticky grains of rice.

  There was another incident when I was assistant director for Fushimizu Shu, who had been an assistant director for Yama-san before me. We had to shoot a starry night scene, and I had clambered up to the top of the set to string together the spangles representing the stars. But the threads kept getting tangled and twisted, and finally my patience was at an end. Fushimizu himself, watching from below in his position next to the camera, was also getting irritated. “Can’t you hurry it up a little?” he shouted.