Something Like An Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

For me to try to analyze and explain Japanese society from that point of view was therefore impossible. I simply felt the vague dissatisfactions and dislikes that Japanese society encouraged, and in order to contend with these feelings, I had joined the most radical movement I could find. Looking back on it now, my behavior seems terribly frivolous and reckless.

To put it more precisely, I used the fact that I could not contact them as an excuse to extricate myself from this painful illegal political movement. It was not a case of the leftist movement’s fever dying down; it was a case of my own leftist fever not having been a very serious one.

I had seen my brother’s name in the Cinema Palace newspaper advertisements. If I climbed back up the winding path on the hill I had just come down, I would be at his home. As I have been writing this, a poem by Nakamura Kusadato suddenly comes to mind: Coming down the winding trail, The springtime voice of the crying calf.

In one such rented attic room was a young man who made his living selling fish. Every morning he would get up before the crack of dawn and carry his tin box to the riverbank, where he bought his goods. He worked furiously for an entire month, and then at the end of the month he put on his finest clothes and went out to buy a prostitute—as if that made it all worthwhile.

I had no idea what role these popular arts of storytelling and singing would play in my future; I just enjoyed them without thinking about it.

This is probably true of human life everywhere—a light exterior hides a dark underside.

Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.

My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human beings lived past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, so he had no intention of doing so.

So when my mother expressed her concern to me, I laughed it away, saying, “People who talk about dying don’t die.”

The relative who had said “What are you doing?” when I was paralyzed at the sight of my brother’s corpse had not been able to intimidate me, but I could not forgive myself for what I had said to my mother. And how terrible the results had been for my brother. What a fool I am!

Uekusa Keinosuke has also said my personality is like that of a sunflower, so there must be some truth to the allegation that I am more sanguine than my brother was. But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.

I became impatient with my own aimlessness.

In other words, I did not—and still don’t—have a completely personal, distinctive, way of looking at things.

To develop a personal vision isn’t easy. But when I was a young man, this insufficiency caused me not only dissatisfaction but uneasiness. I felt I had to fashion my own way of seeing, and I became more impatient. Every exhibition I went to seemed to prove to me that every painter in Japan had his own personal style and his own personal vision. I became more and more irritated with myself.

And that’s just how it is. During youth the desire for self-expression is so overpowering that most people end up by losing all grasp on their real selves. I was no exception. I strained to perform technical tours de force as I painted, and the resulting pictures revealed my distaste for myself. Gradually I lost confidence in my abilities, and the act of painting itself became painful for me.

The result of spending my time on a kind of painting for which I felt no enthusiasm at all was a further, more irrevocable loss of my real desire to paint.

Since I had been doing nothing but follow my brother’s lead, his suicide sent me spinning like a top. I believe this was a very dangerous turning point in my life.

Through all of this my father did not let me loose to spin on my own. He just kept telling me, as I became more and more panicky, “Don’t panic. There’s nothing to get excited about.” He told me if I would just wait calmly, my road in life would open up to me of its own accord. I don’t know exactly what kind of viewpoint led him to tell me such things; perhaps he was speaking from his own experience of life. As it turned out, his words proved amazingly accurate.

I don’t remember the precise contents of my essay, but I had thoroughly savored and consumed foreign films under my brother’s tutelage, and as a movie fan I found many things in Japanese cinema that did not satisfy me. I undoubtedly gave vent to all my accumulated criticisms and had a fine time doing so.

It was chance that led me to walk along the road to P.C.L. and, in so doing, the road to becoming a film director, yet somehow everything that I had done prior to that seemed to point to it as an inevitability.

I can’t help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.

When I stood behind Yama-san in his director’s chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same feeling—“I’ve made it at last.” The work he was doing was the kind that I really wanted to do. I was standing in the mountain pass, and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single straight road.

A movie director is like a front-line 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.

His attitude was that in order to train his assistant directors it was worth sacrificing his own pictures. At least, that seems to me the only possible interpretation.

Yet the same Yama-san who educated us in this exceptional manner made the following claim in a magazine once: “All I ever taught Kurosawa was how to drink.” How is it possible to express one’s gratitude to someone so selfless?

“People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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...

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.

The Most Beautiful is not a major picture, but it is the one dearest to me.

It seems the entertainment sections of Japan’s film-production companies haven’t heard the proverb about the fish under the willow tree that hangs over the stream—the fact that you hooked one there once doesn’t mean you always will.

The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet.

It seems that, no matter what is happening to me in my personal life, I am always thinking about my work without even knowing it. This phenomenon resembles some kind of karma.

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.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.