Akira Kurosawa

• 1. Introduction

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  Akira Kurosawa directed 30 feature films across six decades, and yet the moment that first made the world notice him came about almost by accident. In 1951, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival went to a Japanese film that even its own studio had entered only reluctantly, after a foreign representative had quietly championed it behind the scenes. That film was Rashomon. The Japanese industry, which had been entirely absent from Western screens, suddenly found itself at the center of international cinema. What kind of filmmaker pulls off something like that? And how does a man who once wanted to be a painter, whose brother was a silent-film narrator, who spent his early career writing scripts for other directors, become one of the most imitated directors in history? The answers reach back to Tokyo in 1910, to a great earthquake, to a judo novel bought on its publication day, and to an actor named Toshiro Mifune, whose first screen audition almost ended his career before it started.

• 2. Earthquakes and Brothers

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  Kurosawa was born on the 23rd of March, 1910, the eighth and youngest child of a moderately wealthy family. His father, Isamu, descended from a samurai family in Akita Prefecture and ran the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school. Unusual for the era, Isamu believed cinema had educational value and encouraged his children to see films; Kurosawa saw his first at age six.

  The formative weight of Kurosawa's childhood rested heavily on his older brother Heigo, four years his senior. After the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Heigo took the 13-year-old Kurosawa through the ruins and forbade him to look away from the dead. Commentators have read this moment as foundational to the director's lifelong willingness to look at unpleasant truths directly in his work.

  Heigo became a benshi, a live narrator for silent films showing at Tokyo theaters. Kurosawa, who was then pursuing painting, moved in with him. Under his brother's guidance, he attended theater and circus performances, exhibited paintings, and worked with the left-wing Proletarian Artists' League. He eventually abandoned painting, partly from financial failure and partly from a conviction that the proletarian movement amounted to little more than putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas.

  In July 1933, with the rise of talking pictures having already eroded the profession of the benshi, Heigo took his own life. The chapter of Kurosawa's memoir Something Like an Autobiography that describes his brother's death was written nearly fifty years after the event. He titled it "A Story I Don't Want to Tell". Four months later, his eldest brother also died, leaving the 23-year-old Kurosawa as the sole surviving brother among three sisters.

• 3. The Apprentice Years

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  In 1935, the new film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P.C.L. (the company that would later become the major studio Toho), advertised for assistant directors. Kurosawa had shown no prior professional interest in film, but he submitted the required essay, which asked applicants to identify the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese cinema. His response was half-mocking: if the deficiencies were truly fundamental, there was no way to correct them. The examiner Kajiro Yamamoto liked this answer enough to insist the studio hire him.

  Kurosawa joined P.C.L. in February 1936. Of the 24 films he worked on as an assistant director, 17 were under Yamamoto, many of them comedies featuring the popular actor Ken'ichi Enomoto. Yamamoto promoted him directly from third assistant director to chief assistant director after just one year, and Kurosawa's responsibilities expanded to cover everything from stage construction to location scouting, lighting, dubbing, editing, and second-unit directing.

  Yamamoto also advised him that a good director needed to master screenwriting. Kurosawa quickly realized that script fees far exceeded an assistant director's pay. He began writing screenplays for other directors, a sideline that would last well into the 1960s, long after he was already famous. His script for Satsuo Yamamoto's A Triumph of Wings dates from 1942, the same period when he was searching for his own debut subject.

  The story that caught his attention was a judo novel by Tsuneo Tomita called Sanshiro Sugata, published in late 1942. Kurosawa bought it on the day it appeared, read it in one sitting, and immediately asked Toho to secure the film rights. He was right to move fast: within days, three other major studios had also made offers. Toho prevailed, and Kurosawa began pre-production on what would become his directorial debut.

• 4. Mifune and Early Mastery

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  Sanshiro Sugata premiered on the 25th of March, 1943, only after the intervention of director Yasujiro Ozu saved it from censors who had deemed it objectionably "British-American". Kurosawa had just turned 33. The film was both a critical and commercial success, though the censorship office later cut 18 minutes of footage, much of which is now considered lost.

  The actor Toshiro Mifune arrived in Kurosawa's orbit not through Drunken Angel, the film for which they are often associated, but a year earlier, through Snow Trail (1947), which Kurosawa scripted. At the audition, the young man's intensity impressed Kurosawa but alienated most of the other judges. Kurosawa and his mentor Yamamoto intervened directly to persuade Toho to sign him.

  Drunken Angel, released in Tokyo in April 1948, is considered the director's first major work. It was the first film in which Kurosawa felt he could express himself freely, despite the script having gone through rewrites required by American occupation censors. Mifune played the gangster, not the protagonist; the title character was the alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura. Yet Mifune's performance so dominated the drama that it shifted the film's entire center of gravity. Kurosawa chose not to restrain him, comparing the effect Mifune had on Japanese audiences to the effect Marlon Brando would have on American audiences a few years later. Kinema Junpo critics named it the best film of its year.

  The two men would collaborate on 16 films total, until the partnership ended with Red Beard in 1965 for reasons that were never adequately explained. Actor Yu Fujiki, who worked alongside them, observed of their closeness on set: "Mr. Kurosawa's heart was in Mr. Mifune's body." Donald Richie described their rapport as a unique symbiosis.

• 5. Rashomon and the Open Door

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  Shooting on Rashomon began on the 7th of July, 1950, after extensive location work in the primeval forest of Nara, and wrapped on the 17th of August. Post-production lasted only a week, hampered by a studio fire. The finished film premiered at Tokyo's Imperial Theatre on the 25th of August. Critics were puzzled; many found its structure incomprehensible. It was a moderate financial success but not a sensation.

  The film reached Venice through the persistence of Giuliana Stramigioli, a Japan-based representative of an Italian film company, who had admired the picture and quietly persuaded Daiei to submit it. On the 10th of September, 1951, Rashomon was awarded the Golden Lion, the festival's highest prize, shocking not only Daiei but an international film world that was largely unaware Japan had a cinematic tradition at all.

  RKO purchased the American distribution rights, a considerable gamble. The company had released only one previous subtitled film in the American market, and the only prior Japanese talkie to reach New York commercially had been Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like a Rose! in 1937, which flopped. Rashomon earned $35,000 in its first three weeks at a single New York theater, described at the time as an almost unheard-of sum. Even the newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan praised it.

  The downstream effect was structural: the film's success created a sustained appetite in America and the West for Japanese movies throughout the 1950s, displacing the prior enthusiasm for Italian neorealism. Kenji Mizoguchi and, somewhat later, Yasujiro Ozu found Western audiences for the first time as a direct result. Satyajit Ray, who first saw Rashomon in Calcutta in 1952, later described seeing it three times on consecutive days, writing: "I wondered each time if there was another film anywhere which gave such sustained and dazzling proof of a director's command over every aspect of film making."

• 6. Seven Samurai and the Epic Form

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  In December 1952, Kurosawa took his two Ikiru screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, to a forty-five-day secluded stay at an inn to draft the screenplay for Seven Samurai. The story was simple: a poor farming village in feudal Japan hires a group of samurai to defend it against bandits. What followed was anything but simple in the making.

  Three months of pre-production, a month of rehearsals, and then 148 days of shooting spread over nearly a year, interrupted by financing difficulties and Kurosawa's own health problems. The film finally opened in April 1954, half a year behind schedule and roughly three times over budget, making it the most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time. By Hollywood standards, the source notes, it was still a modestly budgeted production.

  The investment paid. The film became a substantial hit, quickly earned back its costs, and gave Toho a product it could market internationally. In 1999, a poll of Japanese film critics voted it the best Japanese film ever made. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, it placed 20th among all films from all countries in the critics' poll, and tied at 14th in the directors' poll, appearing in the Top Ten lists of 48 critics and 22 directors.

  Kurosawa followed Seven Samurai almost immediately with I Live in Fear, a film about nuclear dread conceived in the anxious atmosphere of 1954, when radioactive rainstorms were falling on Japan following nuclear tests in the Pacific. A few days before shooting ended, his composer Fumio Hayasaka died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. Hayasaka's student, Masaru Sato, completed the score and would go on to score all of Kurosawa's next eight films. I Live in Fear became the first Kurosawa film to lose money during its original theatrical run.

• 7. Collapse and Comeback

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  After the international triumph of Kagemusha at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, it was easy to forget how close Kurosawa had come to never directing again. The Tora! Tora! Tora! disaster of 1968-1969 had been catastrophic. He had spent years on a project about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor for 20th Century Fox, only to be fired on Christmas Eve 1968, with the studio attributing his departure to "fatigue". A neuropsychologist's report, forwarded to Darryl Zanuck and Richard Zanuck at Fox, described a diagnosis of neurasthenia and cited disturbed sleep, anxiety, and "manic excitement". Kurosawa had not contributed a single foot of filmed footage to the final picture. He had his name removed from the credits. His longtime screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima became estranged from him permanently.

  Dodesukaden (1970), his first film in color, lost money. His one foray into television, Song of the Horse, a documentary about thoroughbred racehorses, is notable as the only film in his catalogue that credits an editor other than himself. On the 22nd of December, 1971, Kurosawa attempted suicide. He survived.

  The Soviets gave him a way back. In early 1973, Mosfilm approached him, and Kurosawa proposed adapting Dersu Uzala, the autobiography of Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. He had wanted to make the film since the 1930s. Shooting began in May 1974 in Siberia. The film won the Golden Prize at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

  The revival was completed by an unlikely alliance. George Lucas, who had drawn on Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, met with Kurosawa in San Francisco in July 1978 and discovered that one of cinema's most celebrated directors could not get financing. Lucas leveraged his influence over 20th Century Fox, the studio that had fired Kurosawa a decade earlier, to produce Kagemusha, and recruited Francis Ford Coppola as co-producer. The original lead actor, Shintaro Katsu, was fired during production after insisting on videotaping his own performance against the director's wishes; Tatsuya Nakadai replaced him.

• 8. Legacy in Other Hands

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  When Kurosawa accepted the Academy Honorary Award in 1990, he said in his speech: "I'm a little worried because I don't feel that I understand cinema yet." He was 79. At the time, Bob Thomas of The Daily Spectrum noted that Kurosawa was "considered by many critics as the greatest living filmmaker."

  His final film as director was Madadayo in 1993, a film about a professor declaring he is not yet ready to die, a theme increasingly relevant for its 81-year-old creator. In 1995, while finishing the screenplay After the Rain, he slipped and broke the base of his spine. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. On the 6th of September, 1998, he died of a stroke in Tokyo's Setagaya ward, at the age of 88.

  The testimony of other filmmakers speaks to the depth of his influence. Federico Fellini called Kurosawa "the greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be". Sidney Lumet called him the "Beethoven of movie directors". Ingmar Bergman described his own film The Virgin Spring as "a lousy imitation of Kurosawa". Andrei Tarkovsky named Seven Samurai as one of his ten favorite films. Robert Altman, upon first seeing Rashomon, was so struck by a sequence of frames of the sun that he began shooting similar sequences in his own work the next day.

  Unfinished screenplays written by Kurosawa continued to reach audiences after his death. Takashi Koizumi directed After the Rain in 1999, and Kei Kumai directed The Sea Is Watching in 2002. His grandson, Takayuki Kato, appeared in both films. The AK100 project, launched in 2008 in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his birth, aimed to bring his work to the next generation of audiences worldwide.