But from the second shot my tension disappeared; everything just felt exciting, and all I wanted to do was hurry on. The second shot showed what the judo expert and his teacher saw at the top of the steps: the back of a young girl praying in front of the worship hall of the shrine. She is the daughter of Murai Hanshiro, who will be Sanshirō’s adversary in the match sponsored by the police headquarters, and she is praying for her father’s victory. But Sanshirō and his teacher don’t know who she is, and they are so impressed by this girl’s fervent prayers that they try to avoid disturbing her and go around the back way to pray and leave.
Preparing for this second shot, the actress playing the daughter (Todoroki Yukiko) asked me, “Mr. Kurosawa, do I just pray for my father’s victory?” I replied, “Yes, that’s right, but while you’re at it, you might as well pray for the success of this picture, too.”
While on the Yokohama location, one morning I got up and went to the washroom. On my way I happened to glance at the entryway, and among the men’s shoes lined up there I saw a pair of high heels. They were quite flashy-looking, so I couldn’t believe they belonged to the script girl. Miss Todoroki was commuting to the set from home, so they couldn’t be hers. Yet, aside from the script girl, there were only men in the crew and cast staying at this inn. I found this strange.
I asked the innkeeper whose shoes they were. He looked at me with a pained expression, but I guess he decided he had been caught. “Mr. Fujita [Susumu, who was playing the Sanshirō role] went out drinking last night in Yokohama and brought back a girl from a bar,” he said. “But I put her in a separate room.”
I had to admire the innkeeper’s way of putting it—it sounded more like a lawyer’s defense than a witness’s account. But I asked him to send Fujita to my room anyway. I went back and waited. Finally I heard the sound of the door sliding open, and I glanced around. Through the ever so slightly opened door, one of Fujita’s eyes was peering in at me to see what kind of mood I was in.
Later in the film there is a scene where Sanshirō goes out on the town and gets in trouble drinking and fighting. Afterward he is called in by his teacher, Yano Shogoro, for a scolding. I had Fujita do exactly what he had done with me. He complained that I was cruel to put him through two chastisements, but he had no one to blame but himself. And he was very good in that scene.
There is a point I would like to clarify here. After Sanshirō gets his scolding, he says he will show how he can die for his teacher, and he jumps into the pond in the garden. He spends the whole night in the pond clutching a post, until finally his willfulness is broken and he becomes humble. When I met with Fujita recently, he told me about a certain film director’s criticism of this scene: Lotus flowers don’t bloom at night, and when the blossoms open, they don’t make any noise.
Now, I had put a great deal of effort into showing that Sanshirō jumps into the pond in the daytime, spends the entire night in the water and doesn’t come out until it’s light again. I changed the direction of the sun’s rays, I moved the moon and I made morning mists. If after all of that it appeared to be nighttime when the flowers bloomed, too bad. I tried.
The sound of lotus blossoms opening is another matter, however. I had heard that when lotus flowers bloom they make a wonderful, clear bursting sound. So one morning I got up very early and trekked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno to listen to the lotuses open. And in the dim mists of morning I heard that noise.
But the issue of whether or not lotus flowers make noise when they open really has nothing to do with that night that Sanshirō spends in the pond. It’s a matter of esthetics, not physics. There is a famous haiku by Basho:
An old pond
A frog jumps in—
the sound of the water.
People who read it and say “Well, of course if a frog jumps into the water, there’s going to be a noise” simply have no feeling for haiku. Likewise, people who say that it’s strange for Sanshirō to hear a beautiful sound when the lotus flowers open simply have no feeling for movies. There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.
Sugata Sanshirō
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me how I felt directing my maiden work, but, as I have said, I simply enjoyed it. I went to sleep each night looking forward eagerly to the next day’s shooting, and there was absolutely nothing painful in the experience. My crew to a man gave me their utmost. My set designers and wardrobe people ignored the small size of our budget and responded with, “O.K. Leave it to us!” I was deeply touched by their insistence on making everything exactly what I wanted it to be. And all the doubts I had had about my ability to direct before I was given the opportunity vanished after the first shot was completed, like clouds and mist after a rain. The whole task was carried out with a feeling of ease.
This feeling may be a little hard to understand, so let me try to explain. When I was an assistant director, I watched very carefully how Yama-san directed, and I couldn’t help being amazed at the way his attention reached every nook and cranny of the production. Feeling that my own eyes could not see that far, I necessarily harbored doubts about my directing talent.
Once I looked at the production from the director’s viewpoint, however, I saw everything I had been unable to see as an assistant director, or even as a second-unit director. I understood the subtle difference between the positions. When you are creating your own work, it is entirely different from when you are helping with someone else’s. Moreover, when you are directing your own script, you understand the script better than anyone else possibly can. When I finally became a director, I at last understood all the implications of Yama-san’s order to write scripts first if I wanted to direct. It was because of this that, although Sugata Sanshirō was my very first film, it went exactly the way I wanted it to. Making this film seemed not like ascending a steep precipice, but more like clambering around the gentle slopes at the base of the mountain. My overall impression of it was that of a very pleasant excursion, like a picnic.
But there is a song in Sugata Sanshirō with lyrics that go like this:
Cheerful on the way there,
Fearful on the way home.
And so it was for me. I climbed the trail into the mountains, and it wasn’t until much later that I encountered the steep rock cliff I would have to scale. This came with the climax scene toward the end, where Sanshirō and Higaki Gennosuke battle it out on the plains of Ukyo-ga-hara. We required a field through which the wind was blowing, and I felt that without a blustering, gale-force wind this final and most crucial confrontation was unlikely to distinguish itself from the other six fight sequences in the film.
First we fashioned tall grasses to blow in the wind on the set. (The idea was to use wind machines for the effect.) But when I looked at the finished set, I felt that what we could shoot here would not only fail to be more impressive than the other fight scenes, it would look tawdry enough to ruin the whole picture. In a great flurry I rushed to consult with the production company, and managed to get permission to shoot this last scene on location. But the stipulation was that the shooting had to be completed in no more than three days.
The location selected was the Sengokuhara plain in the Hakone Mountains, a place famous for its winds. But we encountered an unusual period of calm with a thick cloud cover. For two days we sat with nothing to do, staring out of the inn windows at the murky sky. The third day, too, dawned without a whisper of the famous wind, and below the Hakone Mountains enshrouded in mists we prepared to return home.
I told my cast and crew that we would persevere at least till the end of this third day. Half feeling like giving up, and half in desperation, we began drinking beer from early morning on. About the time everyone was getting a little tipsy and starting to launch into song with complete abandon, someone looked out the window and suddenly began
pointing and trying to quiet us down.
Looking outside, we saw that the cloud which had covered the outer crater of Hakone was starting to lift, and over Lake Ashinoko There seemed to be a misty dragon ascending to heaven with a swirling motion. A violent gust of wind blew in the open window and made the hanging scroll in the art alcove rattle and dance. We all looked at each other speechless, and then burst into action.
From that moment it became in every sense of the word a big action drama. Everyone grabbed a piece of the equipment we needed, shouldered or dragged it and hurried out of the inn. The location was close by—only the equivalent of two blocks’ walk—but we made our way into that violent headwind as if we were gulping it down.
On the hill where we had planned to shoot, the pampas grass should have gone to seed already, but a field of the fluffy stalks still waved like a typhoon-ripped sea. Above our heads, tatters of clouds fairly raced across the sky. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect set design.
The cast and crew worked like men possessed in the teeth of the providential wind. Whenever we finished a take that had required clouds drifting in the background, the sky cleared itself completely as if the clouds had been swept away by magic. We kept on working in the driving gale until three o’clock in the afternoon without stopping for a minute to rest.
As we finished shooting the scene exactly the way it was written in the script, in the distance we saw some people wearing headbands toiling up the grass-covered hill carrying something across their shoulders. As they drew closer, we saw that it was the maids from the inn, their hair wrapped in headbands against the ferocity of the wind. They were carrying a huge kettle of hot miso soup for us. This was the most delicious soup I have ever tasted; I drank at least ten bowls of it.
Since my assistant-director days I seem to have developed a peculiar relationship with the wind. Yama-san once told me to go shoot the waves at Chōshi, where I had to wait through three days of a placid sea. Then suddenly a furious gale blew up the waves to astounding swells, and I got exactly what I came for. Another time, during a location on Horses, I ran into a typhoon and had my raincoat ripped apart at the seams. During the filming of Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949) our open set was blown to smithereens by Typhoon “Kitty,” and during the Mount Fuji location shooting of Kakushi to-ride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress, 1958) we were hit by three typhoons in succession. The forests in which we had planned to film were leveled one by one, and what was to have been a ten-day location shoot ended up taking a hundred days.
But, compared to these winds, the gale that blew across the Sengokuhara plains for Sugata Sanshirō was truly a kamikaze, a “divine wind,” as far as I was concerned. There is only one thing that I now regret: Due to my lack of experience, I was unable to take full advantage of the opportunity provided by that divine wind. In the midst of the gale I thought I had shot as much as I needed, but when I got that footage into the editing room I found it far from adequate; there were many places I should have reshot or shot much more.
When you are working under difficult conditions, you experience one hour’s labor as two or three. But hard work just makes you feel you’ve put in more time than you have. Reality remains reality: An hour is only an hour. Since this experience, whenever I am working under adverse conditions and feel, through exhaustion, that what I have must be enough, I force myself to go on and produce three times as much. If I do that, I finally get what I really need. It was the bitter experience in the wind of Sugata Sanshirō that taught me this.
There are still many things I would like to say about Sugata Sanshirō. But if I wrote them all down, we’d end up with a whole book on that one film. For a director, each work he completes is like a whole lifetime. I have lived many whole lifetimes with the films I have made, and I have experienced a different life-style with each one as well. Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.
But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised. I have special affection for them all, and I would like to write about each one, but that is not possible. I have made twenty-seven films, and unless I take only two or three characters as the representatives of each film and limit my reminiscences, I’ll never get to the end.
Among the characters in Sugata Sanshirō, the one who most strongly draws my interest and affection is of course Sanshirō himself. But, looking back now, I realize that my feelings for the villain, Higaki Gennosuke, are no less strong.
I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself; in any case, it is in watching someone unformed enter the path to perfection that my fascination knows no bounds. For this reason, beginners often appear as main characters in my films, and Sugata Sanshirō is just such a one. He is unformed, but he is made of superior material.
Now, when I say I like unformed people; I don’t mean I’m interested in someone who even if polished will not become a jewel. Sanshirō is material that gleams brighter and brighter the more he is polished, so in the course of the film I wanted to polish him as vigorously as I possibly could.
Higaki Gennosuke, though, is also the type of material that would become a shiny jewel if polished correctly, but people are subject to what is called destiny. This destiny lies not so much in their environment or their position in life as within their individual personality as it adapts to that environment and that position. For all the straightforward and flexible people there are who do not let their environment and position get the better of them, there are just as many proud and uncompromising people who end up being destroyed by their surroundings and status. Sugata Sanshirō represents the first group, while Higaki Gennosuke is a member of the second.
Personally, I feel that my own temperament is like Sanshirō’s, but I am strangely attracted by Higaki’s character. For this reason I portrayed Higaki’s demise with a great deal of affection. Then in Zoku Sugata Sanshirō (Sugata Sanshirō, Part II, 1945) I followed Higaki’s two brothers with close scrutiny in the same way.
The critical response to my maiden work, Sugata Sanshirō, was, on the whole, positive. In particular the general public, perhaps because they were starved for entertainment during the war, reacted to my film with feverish warmth. The Army’s strongest opinion seemed to be that my film had no more value than ice cream or a sweet cake, but the Navy’s Information Section announced that this was all right for a movie, that a movie’s entertainment value was important.
Next, although it will make me angry and be bad for my health again, I will tell you what the censors in the Ministry of the Interior said about my film. At that time the Ministry took a director’s first film as the subject of a directing test. As soon as Sugata Sanshirō was finished, it was submitted to the Interior Ministry and I had to go in for my examination. The examiners were, of course, the censors. Along with them were several already established film directors who made up the board of examiners. For my test these were to include Yama-san, Ozu Yasujirō and Tasaka Tomotaka, but Yama-san had other business and couldn’t appear. He called me to him to assure me that everything would be all right because Ozu would be there, however, and off I went like a stubborn dog to my battle with the stubborn monkey censors.
That day I walked the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior in a deep melancholy. Then I noticed two young office boys tussling in the hallway. One of them yelled, “Yama arashi!” (“Mountain storm!”) and, using Sanshirō’s special technique, threw the other to the floor. So I knew the screening of Sugata Sanshirō was over. But I was still made to wait for three hours. During that time the boy who had imitated Sanshirō bro
ught me a cup of tea wearing a compassionate expression on his face, but that was all.
When the test finally began, it was horrible. In a room with a long table, the censors were all lined up on one side. Down at the very end were Ozu and Tasaka, and next to them an office boy. All of them, including the office boy, were drinking coffee. I was instructed to sit in the single chair on the other side that faced them all. It was really like being on trial. Naturally, no coffee appeared for me. It seems I had committed the heinous crime called Sugata Sanshirō.
The point of the censors’ argument was that almost everything in the film was “British-American.” They seemed to find the little incident of the “love scene” between Sanshirō and his rival’s daughter on the shrine stairs—the censors called this a “love scene,” but all the two did was meet each other for the first time there—to be particularly “British-American,” and they harped as if they had discovered some great oracular truth. If I listened attentively, I would fly into a rage, so I did my best to look out the window and think of other things.
But I reached the limits of my endurance with their spitefulness. I felt the color of my face changing, and there was nothing I could do about it. “Bastards! Go to hell! Eat this chair!” Thinking such thoughts, I rose involuntarily to my feet, but as I did so, Ozu stood up simultaneously and began to speak: “If a hundred points is a perfect score, Sugata Sanshirō gets one hundred twenty! Congratulations, Kurosawa!” Ignoring the unhappy censors, Ozu strode over to me, whispered the name of a Ginza restaurant in my ear and said, “Let’s go there and celebrate.”
Later Ozu and Yama-san arrived at the restaurant, where I was already waiting. As if to calm me down, Ozu praised Sugata Sanshirō with all his might. But I was not so easy to console, and I sat there thinking how much better I would have felt if I had taken that defendant’s chair and hit the censors over the head with it. Even today the thing I am most grateful to Ozu for is that he prevented me from doing just that.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 18