Today, no matter how moving a scene is, no matter how stunning the actors’ performances are, I can watch with total calm collectedness. But there is something a little bit sad about this ability. The reason we could do a scene like the climax of The Quiet Duel and get so excited and involved in what we were doing is because Mifune, Sengoku and I were all young. If we were told to do that scene over again today, we couldn’t. It is the recognition of this fact that makes The Quiet Duel a picture for which I feel a great nostalgia.
Also, because this was my first picture filmed outside of Toho, it felt like a second maiden work. This, too, adds to the nostalgia I have for it. After my defeat in the Toho strike and my tumbling arrival at Daiei, the crew for this film treated me very warmly.
The Daiei studios in Tokyo are located on the Koshu Kaido Road in Chōfu City, on the outskirts of the metropolis. The Tamagawa River flows nearby, and along its banks were inns and eating establishments with a seasoned, countrified atmosphere. The studio itself retained the old flavor of people who made the “flickers,” and its inhabitants were stubborn but generous.
Everywhere at that time, at every shoot for every studio, no matter how much the atmosphere of one studio differed from the next, the people working on the set were all inveterate movie lovers. So for me, working with a Daiei crew for the first time presented no discomfort whatsoever, and the filming proceeded smoothly throughout. But, looking at my Daiei crew, I couldn’t help worrying about my Toho crew who had lost their jobs in the strike.
A Salmon’s Old Stories
LIKE A SALMON, I can’t forget the place where I was born. I left Toho at the age of thirty-nine and spent the next three years moving from Daiei to Shin Toho to Shochiku. But at forty-two I returned to Toho and ever since have been going in and out of that studio where I began.
No matter where I am, the place where I received my training remains in a corner of my heart, and in everything I do I can’t help thinking about the currents of the river called Toho studios. What I think about the most, to this very day, are the assistant directors who lost their jobs in the strike. They were men with great potential, but because the strike so closely resembled warfare, their names were put down on the list of personnel cuts and they were scattered to the winds. The Japanese film world undoubtedly lost several great directors.
In later years when I returned to Toho and prepared to start filming there again, one of the executives came to see me. He lamented the fact that “Today’s assistant directors don’t have the ambition that A.D.’s in the old days did.” I replied, “You were the ones who threw the old A.D.’s out,” and he looked at me with a doleful expression and said, “I wonder if they would have mended their ways.” My voice rose uncontrollably. “You must be joking. You’re the ones who should mend your ways.”
It was actually at that point, with the firing of those young assistant directors, that the Japanese film industry began its decline. If young people are not trained and fed in to replenish the reservoir of high spirits, the natural aging process inevitably leads to a loss of strength. This is true in any enterprise. I don’t know if the older people stayed on in the movie industry because young people weren’t trained, or if young people weren’t trained because the older ones were staying on. In any event, no one took the responsibility for training young people.
Not only has this training been neglected, but the movie industry in Japan shows no inclination to introduce new filmmaking technology. Today everyone talks about the twilight of motion pictures as if it were a worldwide phenomenon. Why, then, are American movies entering a new age of prosperity?
The backbone of American film is the organization called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is built on the fundamental recognition of the fact that the art of motion pictures is intimately bound up with science.
In order to do battle with the new entertainment power of television, motion pictures must employ arms that will ensure a victory. I don’t believe that the movie industry can hope to maintain its special appeal in the face of television technology unless it modernizes its old equipment. Television and motion pictures may look very much alike, but they are basically different. Those who see television as the enemy of the motion-picture industry are merely suffering from a superficial understanding of movies. The film industry has been the hare, caught napping, while the television tortoise walked on by.
Worse yet, in Japan the industry has begun imitating television, producing films that are like television movies. Few people are eccentric enough to enjoy paying a high ticket price to go to see a television movie in a movie theater.
I have digressed again, but it is difficult for a film director who is like a salmon. When the river he was born and raised in becomes polluted, he can’t climb back upstream to lay his eggs—he has trouble making his films. He ends up by complaining.
One such salmon, seeing no other way, made a long journey to climb a Soviet river and give birth to some caviar. This is how my 1975 film Dersu Uzala came about. Nor do I think this is such a bad thing. But the most natural thing for a Japanese salmon to do is to lay its eggs in a Japanese river.
Stray Dog
I DON’T REALLY like talking about my films. Everything I want to say is in the film itself; for me to say anything more is, as the proverb goes, like “drawing legs on a picture of a snake.” But from time to time an idea I thought I had conveyed in the film does not seem to have been generally understood. On these occasions I do feel an urge to talk about my work. Nevertheless, I try not to. If what I have said in my film is true, someone will understand.
That is the way it was with The Quiet Duel. Apparently most people did not grasp what I most fervently wished them to, but a small number did understand very well. In order to make my point more clearly, I decided to make Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949). I think the problem with The Quiet Duel was that I myself had not thoroughly digested my ideas, nor did I express them in the best possible way. Maupassant instructed aspiring writers to extend their vision into realms where no one else could see, and to keep it up until the hitherto invisible became visible to everyone. Acting on this principle, I decided to take up the problem of The Quiet Duel one more time in Stray Dog, pressing my vision to the point where everyone would see what I saw.
I first wrote the screenplay in the form of a novel. I am fond of the work of Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime. This process took me a little less than six weeks, so I figured that I’d be able to rewrite it as a screenplay in ten days or so. Far from it. It proved to be a far more difficult task than writing a scenario from scratch, and it took me close to two months.
But, as I reflect on it, it’s perfectly understandable that this should have happened. A novel and a screenplay are, after all, entirely different things. The freedom for psychological description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a screenplay without using narration. But, thanks to the unexpected travail of adapting the descriptions of the novel form to a screenplay, I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. At the same time, I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expression into the script.
For example, I understood that in novel-writing certain structural techniques can be employed to strengthen the impression of an event and narrow the focus upon it. What I learned was that in the editing process a film can gain similar strength through the use of comparable structural techniques. The story of Stray Dog begins with a young police detective on his way home from marksmanship practice at the headquarters’ range. He gets on a crowded bus, and in the unusually intense summer heat and crush of bodies his pistol is stolen. When I filmed this sequence and edited it according to the passage of chronological time, the effect was terrible. As an introduction to a drama it was slow, the focus was vague and it failed to grip the viewer.
Troubled, I went back to look at the way I had begun the novel. I had written as follows: “It was t
he hottest day of that entire summer.” Immediately I thought, “That’s it.” I used a shot of a dog with its tongue hanging out, panting. Then the narration begins, “It was unbearably hot that day.” After a sign on a door indicating “Police Headquarters, First Division,” I proceeded to the interior. The chief of the First Detective Division glares up from his desk. “What? Your pistol was stolen?” Before him stands the contrite young detective who is the hero of the story. This new way of editing the opening sequence gave me a very short piece of film, but it was extremely effective in drawing the viewer suddenly into the heart of the drama.
However, that first shot of the panting dog with its tongue hanging out caused me immense woes. The dog’s face appears under the title of the film to create the impression of heat. But I received an unprovoked complaint—or, rather, accusation—from an American woman who had watched the filming. She represented the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and claimed that I had had a healthy dog injected with rabies. This was a patently false charge. The dog was a stray that we had obtained from the pound, where it was about to be put away. The people in charge of props had given it affectionate care. It was a mutt, but it had a very gentle face, so we used makeup to give it a more ferocious appearance, and a man on a bicycle exercised it to make it pant. When its tongue started to hang out, we filmed it. But, no matter how carefully we explained all this, the American S.P.C.A. lady refused to believe it. Because the Japanese were barbarians, injecting a dog with rabies was just the sort of thing we would do, and she had no time for the truth. Even Yama-san came by to confirm that I was a dog-lover and would never do such a thing, but the American lady insisted that she was going to take me to court.
At this point I lost all patience. I was ready to tell her that the cruelty to animals came from her side. People are animals, too, and if we are subjected to things like this, we need a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans. My colleagues did their best to calm me down. In the end, I was forced to write a deposition, and I never at any other moment experienced a stronger sense of regret over Japan’s losing the war.
With the exception of this one unfortunate incident, the making of Stray Dog was most enjoyable. It was underwritten by the Film Art Association and Shin Toho, so I was able to work once again with crew members who had been separated from me by the Toho strike. From our days together back at P.C.L., I got back my sound recordist Yanoguchi Fumio and my lighting technician Ishii Chōshichiro, and for cameraman I got back Nakai Asakazu, who has worked with me more often than anyone else. For the music I had Hayasaka as composer again, and as chief assistant director a close friend since P.C.L. days, Honda Inoshiro. The art director was Matsuyama Shu, but his assistant was the man who has since been art director on all of my films, Muraki Yoshiro.
On top of this, we used the Oizumi studio. The furor of the strike had not yet totally died down, and it might have been difficult for me to use the Shin Toho studios, so we ended up at the old place. At that time it was virtually deserted. On the grounds there was a small apartment-house kind of building, so we all moved in there and used it as a dormitory. We worked without respite or distractions.
It was midsummer when we filmed Stray Dog. When the day’s work ended around five o’clock, the sun was still beating down. Even after we finished supper it was still light outside. Right after the war, even if you went into the center of town (from Oizumi that meant going to the Ikebukuro district), there was not much to do. We ended up killing time waiting for dark and the hour to return to the dormitory. More often than not someone would say, “Why don’t we do a little more work?” We ended up spending a great many evenings on the set.
Stray Dog is made up of many short scenes in many different settings, so the little sound stage we used was cleared and redecorated with lightning speed. On fast days we shot five or six different scenes on it. As soon as the set was ready, we’d shoot and be done again, so the art department had no choice but to build and decorate sets while we slept. The art director, Matsuyama Shu, had three other films to supervise besides mine, so he just drew plans of what he wanted and hardly ever came to the set. The ones who really slaved to put it all together were his assistant Muraki and a female assistant.
One evening I went to see how construction was going on the open set at one of our locations. Against the sunset sky I saw two silhouettes on top of the wooded hill. Muraki and the girl assistant were sitting exhausted, totally silent. I was about to yell my thanks to them for their effort, but suddenly I noticed something profoundly serious about their demeanor, and I withdrew. The camera and lighting technicians who had come with me to the open set gave me a strange look and started to speak. I stopped them with a wave of my hand, looked up at the two silhouettes on the wooded hill and said softly, “Looks like they’re going to get married, doesn’t it?”
My prediction came true, and when the picture was finished Muraki and the girl got married. Mrs. Muraki, whose first name is Shinobu, also became a first-rate art director. I had never been an official go-between for a wedding before, but apparently these two were brought together by the terribly hard work I gave them on Stray Dog, so I suppose that without knowing it I had been their matchmaker.
From this little anecdote I think you can guess what the overall mood was during the filming of Stray Dog. The harmonious picnic-like air was most unusual.
I had Honda do mainly second-unit shooting. Every day I told him what I wanted and he would go out into the ruins of post-war Tokyo to film it. There are few men as honest and reliable as Honda. He faithfully brought back exactly the footage I requested, so almost everything he shot was used in the final cut of the film. I’m often told that I captured the atmosphere of post-war Japan very well in Stray Dog, and, if so, I owe a great deal of that success to Honda.
The leads in this film were once again Mifune and Shimura Takashi, and most of the rest of the cast, too, were old friends, so the work proceeded in an almost familial atmosphere. The only problem was Awaji Keiko, a dancer I dragged in from the Shochiku revue stage. This ingenue was spoiled enough to be a full measure of trouble. She was only sixteen years old, had never acted before, and all she really wanted to do was dance. She would fret and fuss no matter what she was asked to do, and in places where she was supposed to cry she would burst out laughing out of pure contrariness.
As time went by and the crew befriended her, it seems Awaji began to find the work more and more interesting. Unfortunately, by that time her job was finished. We all gathered at the studio gate to see her off. Already sitting in the car, she burst into tears. Then she said, “I couldn’t cry when I was supposed to, and now look at me.”
No shooting ever went as smoothly for me as Stray Dog. Even the weather seemed to cooperate. There was a scene when we needed an evening shower. We got out the fire truck and prepared for the rolling of the camera. I had them start the hoses and called for action and camera, and just at that instant a terrific real rainstorm began. We got a great scene.
Another time we were working on an interior set, but we needed a rainstorm outside the windows. Again the heavens obliged, and we were even able to record just the thunder we needed simultaneously.
However, when we had a great deal left to shoot on an open set, a typhoon approached. I was forced to revise many of my plans. We rushed the shooting through with one ear glued to the radio for the storm reports. Second by second the typhoon bore down on us, and the set took on a battleground atmosphere. We wound up the shooting the very evening the storm was scheduled to hit full force. Sure enough, when we went out to look at our open set that night, we found the whole street smashed to bits by the high winds. Gazing out over the rubble of what we had been filming a few hours before gave me a peculiarly clean, rewarding feeling.
At any rate, the filming of Stray Dog went remarkably well, and we finished ahead of schedule. The excellent pace of the shooting and the good feeling of the crew working together can be sensed in the completed film.
I remember how it was on Saturday nights when we boarded a bus to go home for a day off after a full week’s hard work. Everyone was happy. At the time I was living in Komae, far out of the city near the Tamagawa River, so toward the end of the ride I was always left alone. The solitary last rider on the cavernous empty bus, I always felt more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy at being reunited with my family.
Now the pleasure in the work we experienced on Stray Dog seems like a distant dream. The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.
Scandal
AFTER THE PACIFIC WAR a great deal of noise began to be made about freedom of speech, and almost immediately abuses and loss of self-control ensued. A certain kind of magazine took up flattering the readers’ curiosity and provoking scandals with shamelessly vulgar articles. One day when I was on the train to work I saw an advertisement for one of these magazines, and I was shocked. “Who Stole X’s Virginity?” was in big headlines. The piece was written in a style that looked favorable to X, but in reality it was aimed at turning her into a plaything. Behind the boldness of this kind of writing style I could see something else: The cold calculation that X, whose livelihood as an entertainer depended upon her popularity, would not be able to take any strong action to refute the article.
I did not know X personally. I knew only her name and profession, but when I saw the sensationalistic way this headline article was presented, I couldn’t help thinking about how helpless she must feel. Outraged, I reacted as if the thing had been written about me, and I couldn’t remain silent. Such slander cannot be permitted. This was not freedom of expression, I felt, it was violence against a person on the part of those who possess the weapon of publicity. I felt that this new tendency had to be stamped out before it could spread. Someone had to come out and fight back against this violence, I thought; there was no time for crying oneself to sleep.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 24