On August 15, 1945, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa prepared to take his own life.
So it was with all Japanese on that fateful day, as they waited with baited breath for news of the country’s surrender at the close of World War II. If the Emperor called for the ‘Honourable Death of the Hundred Million’, few would have hesitated before sinking their own swords into their chests. Fortunately, it was not the way things ended.
That day was not the first that Kurosawa faced death, nor would it be the last. But by the time his life came to a natural end, the great director had left the world with not just a collection of 33 films, but a range of revolutionary advances in the craft, the likes of which so few others could attest to.
Akira Kurosawa was born in 1910. His father came from a former samurai family, and was the director of the Army’s Physical Educational Institute’s junior secondary school.
Some would expect this to mean that he was oppressively strict, but the opposite was true. Kurosawa’s father encouraged him to explore western culture and traditions, resulting in him seeing his first film at age six.
Painting was his first love, thanks to the support of a progressive school teacher who helped foster his interest by teaching Kurosawa to draw.
For all his youthful promise, Kurosawa suffered through moments of depression. In his book Something Like an Autobiography, he recalls a time when he was hanging off the side of a tram on his way to school “when suddenly I decided everything in life was stupid, boring, and futile“. He let go of the tram, and only avoided serious injury or death because he was inadvertently pinned between the backpacks of two university students. “When (the tram stopped) the two students caught their breath. ‘What happened to you?’ they asked. Since I myself didn’t understand what had happened, I just bowed my head quickly…”
Another great influence for Kurosawa was his brother, Heigo. When Kurosawa was 13, the Great Kantō earthquake brought Tokyo to ruin. While surveying the destruction, Kurosawa shied away from looking at the bodies laying amongst the rubble. Heigo made him look, and accept the reality before him. A revelation dawned: “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes”. This confrontation with reality would go on to inspire some of Kurosawa’s more confronting films, including Ikiru and one of his final releases, Dreams.
When he failed to secure a place at one of the country’s top high schools, Heigo left him. He isolated himself from most of the family, but soon Kurosawa moved in with his brother, and the two became inseparable. Heigo worked as a silent film narrator, exposing Kurosawa to a varied body of movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Meanwhile, Kurosawa continued to pursue a career in painting. He was incredibly talented, and won several major awards, but disliked that most of his work was used for political purposes.
As the talkies began to arrive in cinemas, Heigo started to lose work, and Kurosawa returned home. In 1933, Heigo killed himself. Four months later, the eldest brother died, leaving Kurosawa as the only brother still living. The experience shook Kurosawa deeply, and he rarely discussed it in the decades that followed.
18 months later, the newly-established Photo Chemical Laboratories – which would later become Toho Studios – advertised for assistant directors. Though Kurosawa had never before considered a role in the industry, he submitted his application, along with the required essay on the areas in which the Japanese film industry was lacking. Kurosawa noted that the problems were fundamental and, as such, could not be changed.
He was hired in February, 1936.
Within a year he had risen from third assistant director to chief assistant director, predominantly working under director Kajiro Yamamoto. PCL’s turnaround on films was remarkably short, so Kurosawa became involved in all aspects of production, from set building to dubbing. When Yamamoto was busy working on another project, Kurosawa took over direction of Uma in 1941.
Soon enough, he realised the artistic and monetary benefits of screenwriting. He left his position as A.D. in order to produce screenplays for other directors, a habit he continued even after striking success with his own projects.
While writing stories for others, Kurosawa searched for the story that would launch his career. He noticed advertising for a judo novel, Sanshiro Sugata, purchased the book and, the day after, proposed that Toho buy the rights. After bidding against three other studios, Toho was successful, and the movie entered production in December 1942.
The completed film was considered too Western-inspired by censors – a claim that, in the midsts of WWII, was tantamount to treason – and it was only through the support of other directors that Sanshiro Sugata was released. It was a critical and commercial success.
For his next film, a propaganda piece called The Most Beautiful, Kurosawa promoted a method-acting style. His actresses were made to live in the factory where the shoot was taking place, and had to call each other by their character’s names. They weren’t happy, and elected actress Yōko Yaguchi to voice their concerns to the director. The two became close, and married in 1945.
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tails came next. Based on a nearly 500 year-old Noh play, the film was cut heavily by censors who considered it too westernised before the end of WWII, and then stopped it from being released after the end of the war for being too ‘feudal’. It eventually saw release seven years later.
Kurosawa’s breakthrough came with his eighth production, Drunken Angel. Not only was it the first film that the director felt was released in line with his original vision, but introduced audiences to actor Toshiro Mifune, an explosive identity with no formal training but plenty of passion and charisma. He would star in all but one of Kurosawa’s sixteen following films.
Kurosawa wasn’t afraid to take risks. While many backfired, those that were successful made a tremendous impact on cinema worldwide.
Rashomon was an ambitious project. It’s intercut, conflicting storylines initially left Japanese audiences confused, though it was a moderate success. It wasn’t until Giuliana Stramigioli, a Japan-based representative of an Italian filmmaking company, saw the film and coerced the distributors to submit it to Venice Film Festival. It won the top prize, the Golden Lion, surprising the distributors, Kurosawa, and the international cinema world, which had little if any knowledge of Japan’s film industry prior to the film. Rashomon’s story structure would inspire an entirely new way of unravelling plots that is still used today (you can see a full list of where the ‘Rashomon effect’ has been utilised here).
Back home, many considered Kurosawa’s success a fluke. Whatever the case, Japanese film was suddenly in vogue. They wanted more, especially more Kurosawa, whose way of telling stories and composing frames (the latter inspired by his experience as a painter), were inciting a new generation of movie makers.
The director followed Rashomon with The Idiot, based on the Dostoyevsky novel, and Ikiru, a sobering tale of a public servant looking to make a difference in the world after a terminal medical diagnosis.
What came next was, arguably, Kurosawa’s largest contribution to cinema: Seven Samurai. Production was plagued with issues, and lasted a year. It was shut down twice after going over budget, but Kurosawa spent his off-time fishing, knowing that Toho would eventually allow production to resume. The resulting film is generally considered the best Japanese film ever made, and one of the best made in the entire world. Its story of reluctant heroes soon became a staple, especially in Hollywood, where the Western genre was enjoying peak popularity.
Seven Samurai was followed by range of films that did well, but didn’t capture audiences like Kurosawa’s period pieces. He rectified this with The Hidden Fortress in 1958 – a film that would go on to inspire George Lucas’s Star Wars – and Yojimbo, the graphic tale of a master samurai that borrowed from Western films.
Not long afterwards, Kurosawa’s relationship with Mifune began to dissolve. For reasons unexplained, the two never worked together after 1965’s Red Beard, but they silently reconciled at filmmaker Ishirō Honda’s’ funeral in 1993 by sharing a hug.
When Kurosawa’s contract with Toho came to an end in 1966, he expanded his horizons. His attempts to work outside Japan were eagerly accepted, but projects began to unravel. His pre-production process on Tora! Tora! Tora! lead American producers to brand Kurosawa as mentally ill before removing him from the film. He clashed with his longtime screenwriting collaborator, Ryuzo Kikushima, and never worked with him again. Everything was falling apart. The Japanese film industry started to believe Kurosawa would never make a film again.
Eventually, Kurosawa started to believe that as well and, in 1971, attempted to commit suicide. Fortunately, he survived, and his health recovered quickly.
After a quiet year with his family, Kurosawa accepted an offer from Soviet film studio Mosfilm to make a new movie. Dersu Uzala went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
It was followed shortly after by two epics: Kagemusha, and Ran. Produced with American funding, the films were only made possible by the support Kurosawa received from George Lucas (who had released Star Wars only a year earlier), and Francis Ford Coppola. Ran went on to be considered one of the director’s best works, thanks in part to the lush colour palette that new technology allowed for.
Kurosawa ended his career with a range of more personal films. Dreams was a collection of shorts inspired by dreams Kurosawa had experienced through his lifetime, while Rhapsody in August was a contemplative reflection on the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.
These films never received the acclaim Kurosawa had experienced earlier in his career, but still he persisted.
In 1995, he slipped and broke his back. He was confined to a wheelchair, and unable to direct another film. His dream of dying while working on a production was not to be realised.
His health deteriorated, and on September 6, 1998, Akira Kurosawa died at his home.
His legacy is extensive. From A Fistful of Dollars to Reservoir Dogs, his films have been remade, his stories retold, in many amazing ways. The structures he defined have now become the norm for cinema, but nothing can compare to the experience a film like Rashomon or Seven Samurai for the first time.