Something Like an Autobiography

I AWAITED
my first meeting with Kurosawa Akira with a great deal of curiosity and a fair amount of dread. I had heard stories about his “imperial” manner, his severe demands and difficult temper. I had heard about drinking problems, a suicide attempt, rumors of emotional disturbance in the late sixties, isolation from all but a few trusted associates and a contempt for the ways of the world. I was afraid a face-to-face encounter could do nothing but spoil the marvelous impression I had gained of him through his films.

Nevertheless I had a job to do: I was writing a book on those I considered to be Japan’s best film directors, past and present. I had promised my publisher interviews with all the living artists; I could hardly omit the best-known Japanese director in the world. I requested an interview through his then producer, Matsue Yōichi. I waited.

Six months went by, and my Fulbright year in Tokyo was drawing to a close. I was packing my bags and distributing my household goods among my friends in preparation for departure the next morning when the telphone rang. Matsue was calling to say Kurosawa and he would have coffee with me that very afternoon.

In the interim I had of course interviewed all the other subjects for the book, and all had spoken very highly of Kurosawa. In fact, the whole chapter on Kurosawa was already roughed out with the help of previous publications and these directors’ contributions, so it seemed possible that my meeting with the man himself would be nothing more than a formality. Not only Kurosawa’s fellow directors, but film-company executives, independent producers and most of the older generation of Japanese critics regarded him as a special case, someone whose eccentricities were readily excused by his stature as an artist. Even the younger generation of filmmakers credited Kurosawa, whose style they opposed as representative of “the establishment,” with bringing Japanese cinema to the attention of the world, and thus opening an international pathway for them. In short, although Kurosawa was indeed regarded as a difficult person to deal with, a large part of
this difficulty seemed to lie in the fact that he was in a class by himself, the most important member of the Japanese film community, yet one whose standards were anything but typical.

The unique and in some respects uncomfortable position Kurosawa held grew out of his unprecedented and as yet unmatched international success. His 1950 film
Rashōmon
not only opened the eyes of the world to the existence of a cinema in this remote, war-shaken country that could be universally appreciated, but launched his personal career into a course of consistent triumphs a decade and a half long.
Rashōmon
’s Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival was succeeded by countless awards for virtually every film he wrote and directed, period and contemporary dramas alike.

The twelve films that Kurosawa made between 1950 and 1965 were all box-office successes in Japan, and eventually made an impact on international commercial cinema. The Italian Sergio Leone did him the ambiguous honor of remaking
Yojimbo
as a spaghetti Western called
A Fistful of Dollars
, while Hollywood itself remade two of his period films as Westerns:
Rashōmon
as
The Outrage
and
Seven Samurai
as
The Magnificent Seven
. No other Japanese director has ever received such homage from the West.

But after the success of
Red Beard
, released in 1965, Kurosawa’s steady rise came to an abrupt halt, and his career seemed to suddenly collapse. Hollywood’s discovery of his talent had led to a contract with 20th Century-Fox to direct the Japanese half of an ambitious bilateral vision of the Pacific war called
Tora! Tora! Tora!
It was not long before terrible communication problems developed over the budget, the schedule and, most important for Kurosawa, “final cut,” or the right to approve the editing of his own work. Amid accusations that he was carrying perfectionism to the point of insanity, he left the project.

To anyone who reads
Something Like an Autobiography
, Kurosawa’s insistence on artistic control will come as no surprise; throughout his career his position on this point has been almost absolute. But in this case it seriously jeopardized his future as a filmmaker. He was unable to obtain financing for further projects until three fellow directors joined with him to produce
Dodes’kaden
, released in 1970, which he made, he says, “partly to prove I wasn’t insane.” It cost less than one million dollars and was shot in twenty-eight days, but it still lost money at the box office, the first time a Kurosawa film had ever done so.

This discouragement and ill health—an undiagnosed gallstone
condition—were the apparent causes of a suicide attempt in 1971. Recovery came only with successful medical treatment and surgery and—in 1973—an offer from the Soviet Union to direct a project of his own choosing, financed by Mosfilm.
Dersu Uzala
, a Russian story he had been attracted to since the time he was an assistant director, was the result. It required two years of filming in Siberia and gained the 1976 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Despite the acclaim, Kurosawa’s projects continued to meet opposition. It was difficult for outsiders to understand why Japan’s foremost director was not working. The basic reason was that the Japanese film industry had entered a decline in the late 1960’s and the budget for a Kurosawa film was no longer affordable. I did not know it at the time, but I would be meeting Kurosawa at a moment when two of his scripts in succession had been turned down because of their high production cost, and when he was about to start work on yet a third.

For that third script to become a finished film would require the intervention of Kurosawa’s American admirers Francis Ford Coppola, of
The Godfather
and
Apocalypse Now
fame, and George Lucas, the writer-director of
Star Wars
and
American Graffiti
, who persuaded 20th Century-Fox to negotiate for the purchase of the international distribution rights. An understandably wary Kurosawa finally agreed, and
Kagemusha
, the 1980 Cannes International Film Festival Golden Palm winner, became the first Japanese film ever to be released worldwide by an American company. There have been no regrets.

The retelling of these incidents from a third-party latecomer’s viewpoint may help to suggest some of the stubbornness and perfectionism of the man who will talk in the following pages about his life up to the point where
Rashōmon
emerged to startle the world. By adhering strictly to the principle of authorship of his films and refusing to compromise on either artistry or energy, Kurosawa has managed to survive both the venom and the equally destructive glamour of the movie business.

Kurosawa Akira has written, by his own admission, only a partial autobiography. If he were to tell the whole story about many people who have been associated with him, some who still are and some who have passed on, a certain amount of embarrassment and resentment would be the inevitable result. Kurosawa, as these pages and all of his films will show, has the capacity for—or perhaps the fault of—telling more truth than most of us. In the film industry especially, it is both refreshing and unnerving to come across such a person.

However, I believe Kurosawa’s reluctance to continue his autobiography beyond 1950 stems not only from the maxim “If you can’t say anything nice …” These events and people truly
are
too close in the past. Kurosawa has not yet retired from filmmaking, and to complete one’s autobiography must be to complete all statements about one’s life. My suspicion is that he will never catch up with himself and the urgency he feels to express himself in his primary medium, that of the film. He has, in fact, admitted that he hopes to end his life in the midst of his work, by collapsing on the set.

Kurosawa in his own preface to this book expresses the fear that anything he has to say about himself will end up being about movies. Of course there are many anecdotes about the making of particular films here, and much more about his movie-making methods and attitudes in general. Yet the autobiography of Kurosawa Akira is not exclusively about movies.

In large part, this work affords a first-person glimpse of an era and place very little known to us in the West. Kurosawa was a boy in Taishō Japan (1912–1926), when country life was still robust but peaceful with a nineteenth-century kind of slowness. City culture was beginning to absorb the ideas of the whole outside world—Symbolism, avant-gardism, the Russian revolution, new democracy, Dada, new technology. Kurosawa experienced both city and country life, and grew up in a household that combined the most modern with the most traditional philosophies. His autobiography, much of which is devoted to this growing-up period, thus provides a sweeping yet personal portrait of pre-war Japan.

The personal experience of an artist in wartime, with all the frustrations of thought control and censorship, also emerges as a strong theme. The fact that his directing career could begin only after Japan had entered the Pacific War lends special poignancy to his struggles with the censors. The self-chastisement of the artist in his seventies looking back on the burning desire of youth to create has moved me more than once in the course of this translation. And some descriptive passages, notably those on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, were so disturbing I had to stop and come back to them another day.

It has been a great privilege to engage in this endeavor; to work with Mr. Kurosawa himself and his producer/script girl/archivist Miss Teruyo Nogami; with the support of the Japan Society of New York and its Education and Communications Director, Peter Grilli; and with the understanding, precision and guidance of Charles Elliott as editor at Alfred A. Knopf. But it all came about from that first
meeting over coffee in 1977, which set the tone for my relationship with Mr. Kurosawa.