Something Like An Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

When the youngest of my older sisters saw him in his bloodied condition, I clearly recall her suddenly bursting out, “Let me die in his place!” It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason.

This was supposedly a Korean code indication that the well water had been poisoned. I was flabbergasted. The truth was that the strange notation was a scribble I myself had written. Seeing adults behaving like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.

“If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.”

I rushed to untie the sash that bound the girl to the post. But she glared at me with furious eyes. “What do you think you’re doing? No one asked for your help!” I stared at her in surprise. “If I’m not tied up when she comes back, she’ll torture me again.” I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. Even if she was untied, she couldn’t escape from the environment that bound her to that post. For her, other people’s sympathy was of no value at all. Pity was only a source of more trouble. “Hurry and tie me up again,” she said with so much ferocity I thought she might bite me. I did as she told me. It served me right.

For us there was no respite, and I often had the same recurrent thought. I imagined a huge room that had mattresses spread over the entire floor. My fondest desire was to dive into the middle of that floor and sleep. But even in this condition we’d put saliva in our eyes to help us see a little more clearly and carry on. We put our last ounce of strength into the hope of making the movie a little bit better.

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.

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.

Seven years later, when I was location scouting in the same area for my first film, Sugata Sanshirō, I met the maid who had brought me those cakes every day. She failed to recognize me. Apparently in the course of seven years I had changed completely, at least to her eyes. How could the Kurosawa who wolfed down six bean cakes a day and the Kurosawa who now sat there drinking saké like a fish be the same person? I later noticed her staring at me through a slightly opened door, as if she were observing the movements of some kind of monster.

As a matter of fact, I did develop a case of incipient gastric ulcers from drinking too much. So I went on a mountain-climbing expedition with Taniguchi Senkichi. After spending the whole day clambering around the peaks, I was so sleepy in the evening I could drink hardly any saké at all, so I got well right away. Once cured, I started writing another script in order to drink again.

Toward the end of the war I even made a pact with some of my friends: If it came to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million and every Japanese would have to commit suicide, we vowed to meet in front of the Ministry of the Interior and assassinate the censors before we took our own lives.

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.

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.

The truth of the matter is, I am sure, that the severity of the work I put them through was one of the primary causes of their decision to give up acting. But they really did their best for me, this group of actresses. The Most Beautiful is not a major picture, but it is the one dearest to me.

What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me. Since that time I have observed many different kinds of people—swindlers, people who have killed or died for money, plagiarists—and they all look like normal people, so I am confused. In fact, more than “normal,” these people have very nice faces and say very nice things, so I am all the more confused.

All my pent-up anger broke loose against this fellow: “If a meaningless person says something is meaningless, that’s probably proof that it isn’t meaningless; and if a boring person says something is boring, that’s probably proof that it’s interesting.” The young censor’s face went through changes from blue to red to yellow, covering all three primary colors.

Under wartime conditions we had not been able to portray the fullness of youth in the movies. As the censors viewed things, love was indecent and the fresh, keen sensibilities of youth were a psychological state of “British-American” weakness.

I am not a special person. I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted. I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That’s all there is to me.

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express.

But for the management there was nothing painful or even irritating about these experiences. They never recognized that movies are made by a cooperative work force that is created by a union of individual human talents. They never recognized how much effort was required to bring about that union. So they were able to destroy with total equanimity everything we had worked to build.

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.

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.

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.

This was the impetus for Skyandaru (Scandal, 1950). Of course, today all my fears have come true, and no one thinks anything of scandal sheets. In other words, Scandal proved to be as ineffectual a weapon against slander as a praying mantis against a hatchet.

This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

And yet I am in no position to criticize that company president. I have come this far in writing something resembling an autobiography, but I doubt that I have managed to achieve real honesty about myself in its pages. I suspect that I have left out my uglier traits and more or less beautified the rest. In any case, I find myself incapable of continuing to put pen to paper in good faith.

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.

But when he knows where the camera is, the actor invariably, without knowing it, turns one-third to halfway in its direction. With multiple moving cameras, however, the actor has no time to figure out which one is shooting him.

I AM OFTEN ASKED why I don’t pass on to young people what I have accomplished over the years. Actually, I would like very much to do so. Ninety-nine percent of those who worked as my assistant directors have now become directors in their own right. But I don’t think any of them took the trouble to learn the most important things.