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KAGEMUSHA: FROM PAINTING TO FILM PAGEANTRY
By Peter Grilli
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In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth—he painted. Working fast and furiously, each day turning out scores of sketches and paintings, Kurosawa accumulated a unique body of work that was born as much out of despair and frustration as from a passion to create. One after another, he pulled from his mind's eye the images he visualized for the epic drama and set down on paper the scenes he ached to re-create on film.
Kurosawa began his career as a painter and had always been skilled at drawing. He decided he wanted to be an artist in his teens and later became increasingly associated with what came to be called the "Japan Proletariat Artists Group." Strongly influenced by the mannerist styles of contemporary German
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Expressionism and Soviet Realism, young Kurosawa's painting style was forthright and dramatic: human figures rendered in powerful calligraphic lines and bold primary colors. His decision in the late l°/3°s to turn from painting to film was impelled by many factors, including intensified political pressures from the Japanese militarist government against artists and liberal writers, the need to find a more stable livelihood, and the suicide of his elder brother, who had been deeply engaged in the film industry.
Unlike directors who are drawn to filmmaking by purely literary instincts, Akira Kurosawa turned to this medium to express his visual imagination as much as his narrative interests. From the outset, he was known for the care he lavished on storyboards that he drew himself. The visual richness of all his films grew systematically out of the precise sketches and detailed storyboards he prepared for them.
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Scripts were almost always written in collaboration with two or three writing partners, but Kurosawa always reserved for himself the translation of prose scenes into visual images. It was a process of linking eye and brain that had always been his favorite way of working, and indeed he knew no other. But the case of Kagemusha was different. In the past, working at his customary fast pace, Kurosawa had been able to produce a new film almost every year. During his first three decades as a director, when the work was going well, his sketches and drawings had sprung immediately into three-dimensional life in a matter of only days or weeks. But by the time of Kagemusha in the late 1970s, he was having great difficulties finding support for his projects, and the pace of filmmaking had slowed. So, for nearly four years—as he waited for funding to come through for Kagemusha—he "directed" his actors and scenes in his head and set down his mental images in complex, full-scale paintings on paper.
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A medieval samurai drama had been ie>: Kurosawa's creative mind for more than a decade. since shortly after he finished the long, difficult shoot for Red Beard in 1965- Back then it was barely more than an idea, and neither story nor concept for the film had begun to take shape. He was intrigued with the notion of multiple identities and the idea that a great historical character displayed different "faces" or even different personalities in different situations. He was also still reading Shakespeare and—having found considerable success with his adaptation of Macbeth as Throne of Blood and his rethinking of Hamlet as The Bad Sleep Well—had long been fascinated by the idea of a "Japanese" Lear. But in the late 1960s, the subject of the medieval samurai film remained inchoate, and Kurosawa found himself increasingly distracted by other projects and other problems.
The filming of Red Beard left him scarred with a reputation for tyrannical behavior and for flouting schedules and budgets that dogged him for the rest of his creative life. His harshest critics were unwilling
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to accept hiv perfectionism as adequate justification tor his demanding behavior, and frugal film studios feared the cost overruns that a Kurosawa project threatened. His ambitious attempt in 1968 to create a new production company with three other great Japanese directors—Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita—all seeking artistic autonomy, distracted him with business matters that he was neither comfortable with nor skilled at. Eventually, this resulted in the commercial failure of his 1970 film Dodes'ka-den and the impossibility of finding financial support in Japan for future films. Increasingly helpless, Kurosawa allowed himself to be drawn into the Hollywood attempt at a binational project to do a film about Pearl Harbor—the disastrous Tom! Tom! Tom! When Kurosawa pulled out of that project because of artistic disagreements with the American producers, he brought upon himself international vilification and an intensified reputation for being impossible to work with. Suffering profound depression, he attempted suicide in December 1971-
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Three \ears later. Kuros a film in Russia by Mosfilm (the Soviet national film production bureau). The experience of shooting Dersu Uzala in the severest winter conditions of Siberia brought first physical collapse and then spiritual resurgence when the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1976. But even with his reputation restored by this honor, the search for funding for his next film—the epic samurai drama he had long dreamed of—had grown more difficult than ever before. His own production company had collapsed during the long interval since Dodes'ka-den, and Toho, his customary production studio in earlier decades, was in severe financial decline and unwilling to risk the hazards of a major Kurosawa undertaking. Though the Japanese economy was otherwise booming, conservative investors were similarly nervous about the unpredictability of film production—even with an internationally acclaimed master director at the helm. So, while his agents sought production funding throughout the world, Kurosawa withdrew again into the confines of his study
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at home, unable to do anything but write and paint.
Over time, the images for Kagemusha grew more complex—and darker. The original fable about a great warlord impersonated by a boorish ruffian gradually took on epic proportions as an allegory about human folly and ambition. The paintings that had begun as simple sketches came to be populated with huge armies of foot soldiers surging into battle against cavalries of mounted warriors and phalanxes of riflemen. As Kurosawa's spirits darkened with the passage of time and his increasing doubts that the film would ever get made, so too did his palette, and the psychological attributes of his characters.
Thanks eventually to the support of two of Kurosawa's most celebrated admirers, American directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Kagemusha did finally go into production early in 1979- The filming was beset with delays and difficulties (all of which received disproportionate attention from the insatiable Japanese media, hungry to document another
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Kurosawa failure;, but in the end the crv vision of Akira Kurosawa prevailed. The paintings and drawings he had agonized over for nearly half a decade found their true life in a film whose epic grandeur harkened back to the masterpieces of Eisenstein and—in the view of many film critics and historians—even transcended them.
In Kagemusha, the energy of a passionate young artist and the genius of a mature master seem to reunite. The film is as much the triumph of the painter that Kurosawa had been as a youth as of the masterful playwright he had become. It also marks the beginning of the final chapter of his astonishing career as a director. Ran, Dreams, and the other works of his late years benefit from the intensely painterly approach to filmmaking he adopted in his long, painstaking preparations for Kagemusha.
Peter Grilli is the president of The Japan Society of Boston and an expert on Japanese society and culture, with a special interest in Japanese film. He was raised in Japan, came to know Akira Kurosawa, and wrote often about the director during the last two decades of his life.
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TALKING WITH THE DIRECTOR
The following interview with Akira Kurosawa was conducted by Japanese film expert Tony Rayns shortly after the release of Kagemusha. It originally appeared in Sight and Sound, Summer 1981.
(Japanese names throughout are in their traditional form, with the surname first.)
Tony Rayns: [Kagemusha] tells three related but distinct stories: those of Takeda Shingen, of the kagemusha, and of the Takeda clan. One could imagine any one of them being the basis for a film in itself. How did you resolve the film's structure?
Akira Kurosawa: At the beginning, something very ambiguous comes into my mind as an idea; I let it mature by itself, and it goes into several specific directions. Then I go away somewhere to immerse myself in writing the scenario. It's less a matter of working within a defined structure than
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ot letting myself be moved bv the characters 1 ve chosen to work with. I always try to start with the first scene. I myself don't know what direction it will take from there; I leave everything to the natural development of the characters. Even if my collaborator suggests that we should do something specific the next day, it never works out as foreseen. The spontaneous development of the characters is the most interesting part of the writing process for me.
In the case of Kagemusha, I was working on an adaptation of King Lear (which production costs have so far prevented me from turning into a film), and I was researching the Sengoku Jidai period (the clan wars of the late sixteenth century). I grew very interested in the Battle of Nagashino, which remains a question mark in history. No one has satisfactorily explained why all the taisho of the Takeda clan should have died, while not one taisho of the Oda or Tokugawa clans did. I started to consider ways of tackling this interesting question. It occurred to me that Takeda Shingen was known to have used many kagemusha [doubles], and I thought
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roaching the historical enigma through the eves ot one such kagemusha 1 might keep the subject to manageable proportions. Once I'd hit on the idea of making the kagemusha a petty thief, I had to consider how this man could become so immersed in the character of Shingen that he would actually "become" him. I decided that it must be because of the strength of Shingen's own character. Then I reflected that the taisho who died in battle must also have been charmed or enchanted by Shingen. In effect, they committed suicide at Nagashino—they martyred themselves for Shingen. They must have been in love with him, if you will.
Hence, the three stories, or three strands of one story, evolved by themselves. It was never an intentional design.
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in the histories. But it was possible to get some impressions from his contemporaries' reactions to him, which are recorded. For example, Tokugawa leyasu has great respect for him: he wrote that he considered Shingen's taisho to be his equal in rank. Oda Nobunaga criticized Shingen a lot, but he must have respected him, too, because he gave one of his relatives in marriage to Shingen's son, Katsuyori. I'm sure that Nobunaga considered Shingen his most eminent rival. Also, it was possible to draw some conclusions from the motto that Shingen raised on his battle standards: "Swift as the wind, as silent as the forest, as sweeping as fire, as immovable as the mountain." He took the words from the Chinese military strategist Sun Zi, which is interesting in itself.
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TR: How much is known about the actual character of Shingen?
AK: It wasn't possible to get a very specific imag the way he looked and behaved is not recorded
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TR: You portray both leyasu and Nobunaga as much younger men than Shingen, which gives the film the general sense that something ends when Shingen dies,
and something new begins with the victors___Is that
why you cast new actors as the other clan leaders?
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AK: Historically. Shingen was about fifty-two, Xobunaga was about forty, and leyasu was in his thirties. There are several historical versions of Shingen's death: the one I used in the film has him shot by a sniper, while others have him dying of tuberculosis or some other disease. I thought it would be more interesting to have him die in good health. Had Shingen lived and captured control of Kyoto (and hence Japan), Japanese history would assuredly have been very different. Once Nobunaga ruled the country, he was assassinated, and it was only then that Japan came into the hands of the Tokugawa family. It was a fateful moment in Japanese history. It is clear that Nobunaga was a genius, a much more "modern" man than the average Japanese of that time. According to the missionaries, Nobunaga knew that the earth was round and was well informed about the world situation. He was also an active importer of new objects and ideas from abroad. That was the sort of personality that defeated the Takeda clan. Of course, we cannot be sure that Nobunaga would have continued like that if Shingen had lived on—
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I cannot sav that I deliberately set out to ll
the transition from the older world to the newer. but since I was interested in the personalities of Nobunaga and leyasu (or at least in leyasu in his youth), I gave them some emphasis in the film. They stood in contrast to Shingen's son, Katsuyori. I chose the actors to play Nobunaga and leyasu partly because their faces resembled the descriptions we have of the actual historical persons, and partly to create a fresh image of the characters. Had I used stars in those roles, I think they would have created an obstruction for the audience. It would have been different if I'd shown only Nobunaga or leyasu as the central character in a film, but since their appearances in Kagemusha are relatively few and brief, I used new faces to create an immediate strong impression. Furthermore, Ryu Daisuke and Yui Masayuki were very talented actors!
TR: Katsu Shintaro (best known for his role as the blind swordsman Zatoichi)
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n^inallv scheduled to plav Shingen. Did your conception of the character change when you cast Nakadai Tatsuya?
AK: I had a fixed image of Shingen. Katsu Shintaro didn't understand what I wanted, there was an "incident," and he left the production. So it was not a case of the character changing with the casting, but of Nakadai giving me what I wanted. When I direct a film, I need to have actors who can follow my directions.
TR: Turning away from Kagemusha for the moment, can you describe the Japanese film industry's apprenticeship system as you experienced it in the thirties?
AK: People sometimes speak of "apprenticeship" as a characteristic of the Japanese film system, and there may be some directors who experienced their training as such, but in my case it was emphatically not so. In the thirties, I did work as assistant to
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do whatever I wanted. Our relationship was less that of a teacher and pupil than that of elder and younger brothers. Yamamoto's greatness was that he tried to accept all sorts of talents. At that time, the PGL company itself was very small [Kurosawa gestured toward the Toho Studio buildings outside the window]—only two buildings over there, and very little ground space. The company's policy was to regard assistant directors as cadets—a kind of elite-to-be. Assistants were supposed to involve themselves in every stage of production; then they would be promoted to chief assistant, whereupon they were supposed to learn leadership, how to guide a team in one direction. A chief assistant had to do every imaginable kind of job, including that of producer.
There were two pillars in Yamamoto's training policy: scenario writing and editing. He considered that a good director must be a scenario writer, too, and let me write a lot—scenarios were my main source of income. He also let me do a lot of editing;
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in the later part of his career. I edited almost all of his films. That was immensely helpful to me.
When I worked as Yamamoto's chief assistant, I was especially impressed by his ability to direct actors—the way he'd tell them that such-and-such was right or wrong. I hardly noticed details of performance myself at the time and began to think I lacked the capability or talent to become a director. Yamamoto reassured me. He pointed out that he'd written out the scenario himself and thus had a mental image of the whole thing—he could see it all clearly before he started. He said it was natural that I, as chief assistant, shouldn't notice such matters. I wasn't convinced at the time, but when I began directing myself, I found myself standing beside the camera saying things like, "Very good, go ahead" and so on. I suddenly realized that everything was very clear to me too.
TR: You entered the film industry in a climate of militarism, and you began directing when Japan
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was actually at war. Do you think your career would have developed differently if the national situation had been different?
AK: During the war years, I was mainly writing scenarios. I presented a lot of them to the company, but internal censorship was very strong, and many of my ideas were ruled out. It made me very angry, and I tried to put up a strong resistance. It was a long time before I succeeded in shooting Judo Saga (Sugata Sanshiro). I didn't enjoy those struggles at the time, but, looking back, I see that they were a good preparation for later struggles against the company's money-men.
There was no freedom of expression during the war. All I could do was read books and write scenarios, without having any real outlet for my own feelings. Dersu Uzalawas one of the ideas that came to me then. Like other ideas, it underwent a process of fermentation and maturing, rather like alcohol. Those ideas exploded once the war was over. Looking back, they were happy days.
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TR: And were there problems with the U.S. censors after the war?
AK: The first American-appointed censor who came to supervise the company after the war was a very mean-spirited leftist. I was working on The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail and he didn't report properly to the Occupation Forces, and so they took it that I was shooting something dubious. The finished film was banned from public showing because it was considered "feudalistic." But the next inspector was a more moderate man: he looked at the film and couldn't understand why it had been suppressed. Finally, it was shown.
TR: What effect did these pressures have on the films made at the time?
AK: This sounds paradoxical, but in one important way the military faction did play a role in advancing Japanese film during the war years. Before the war, the themes,
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settings, and subjects of films were very limited. With the advent of the strong army and navy, the authorities wanted us to go into new areas—for example, they wanted us to make a film in the shipyards, which nobody had done before. But the trouble with the military was that they wanted to restrict expression: they only wanted films that would support their cause. However, the fact that we begin to dare to move into new areas was good for the overall development of films in Japan.
TR: Were there Japanese films that you remembered from your youth when you began directing?
AK: I saw hardly any Japanese films when I was very young. It was only when I started training to become a director that I saw a lot of Japanese films, first silents, then sound films. There were many fresh and interesting Japanese films in those days, and I learned a lot from them. But I was also very intrigued by the work of important foreign directors like King Vidor,
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Rouben Mamoulian, and William Wyler; their films became an important basis of support for my life afterward. And I absorbed a lot from the French avant-garde and the German Expressionists.
TR: How easy was it to reconcile your tastes for certain non-Japanese culture with a traditional Japanese upbringing?
AK: It was a requirement at a certain level of society to learn about Western culture and civilization. I believe, though, that foreign people make too much of this. I also studied the Japanese classics, ancient music, and Noh theater—I've perhaps studied classical Japanese more than most people in my country. But nobody makes any mention of all that. I think I was able to harmonize the two strands without any contradiction.
TR: Perhaps people don't mention your classical education because they take it for granted from your films__
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Ak.: Japanese traditional culture was promoted verv strongly during the war, and so there were more opportunities then for me to be exposed to the traditional arts, from theater to painting. During those war years, when directors weren't really allowed to say anything, we used to get together to construct haiku poems to relieve our frustration. It's funny to look back at it, but in fact that was very helpful, too. After the war, when we were free to do anything, I sat down one day to write haiku again and found that I couldn't. Haiku can only be constructed through concentrated effort, and it was a great help to me to learn this the hard way. I think that the only way to make a successful film is to apply the same kind of very concentrated interest in one thing.
TR: Did the success of Rashomon at Venice affect your position at home?
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AK: It made a tremendous difference. After Rashomon, I shot Scandal and then The Idiot. The
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latter was so badly received bv the critics (some of whom are still writing today) that I had a lot of difficulties. I was scheduled to make a film for the Daiei company, but they cancelled it because of the reception that greeted The Idiot. Since I was living close to the Tama River at the time, I thought I wouldn't do much of anything except go fishing. So I went fishing one day, and my line broke. In our culture, that seems like a bad omen—I thought one bad thing would follow another. I cycled back home, and my wife came out to greet me, saying, "Congratulations." I was in no mood to be congratulated for anything. Then she explained about Rashomons prize at Venice. The film had been entered in the festival without my knowledge. After its win, all the companies came rushing to me, asking me to make films for them. Had I not won the prize, I would have been forced to remain silent for a considerable time. Thanks to Rashomon, I was able to go on to make Ikiru.
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TR: After that, was it your deliberate policy to alternate jidai-geki and gendai-geki (period and contemporary subjects)?
AK: Nothing I do is "intentional" in that sense. Everything comes very naturally. If I make a heavy, serious film, then afterward I want to make something light, which anyone can enjoy. For example, after The Lower Depths, I made The Hidden Fortress. It's almost a biological need on my part. Whatever film I make is what I want to do at that moment.
TR: What prompted your partnership with Kinoshita, Kobayashi, and Ichikawa in the Yonki-no-kai company?
AK: We wanted to form a group to become the "nucleus" of Japanese film. We wanted to make films without having to fight for them at every step. We set out quite idealistically, thinking that
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if we added D'Artagnan to the Three Musketeers. we'd have Four Musketeers (Yonki-no-kai). We thought it was a way to rescue Japanese cinema. The association foundered on the fact that we all have strong individual personalities. As you know, the only film the company produced was Dodes'ka-den.
TR: Why did it take yon ten years to make another film in Japan after the failure of Yonki-no-kai?
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I~\ . \\ hat would make them travel to the cinema and pay money at the box office? A very good film. Making real films seems to me the only way to win the battle with TV. The film industry has become too defensive. It's time to take the offensive.
TR: How would you compare your ambitions for Yonki-no-kai with the efforts of young directors today, who work for organizations like the ATG?
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AK: The main reasons were financial. The Japanese companies all became fairly inactive, and none of them would allow me to make the films I wanted to make. I don't believe this decline is attributable to TV; I think there is a fundamental difference between TV and the cinema. It takes a certain amount of confidence to produce films for the cinema, "film-films," as it were. What the Japanese companies are producing are copies of TV. I don't find it surprising that audiences prefer to stay at home and watch these things on
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AK: In our case, it wasn't so much that we faced enemies as that we wanted to make good films. Unless we made good films, we wouldn't be able to wage a war. The young directors today are working like that because they have no alternative. More favorable conditions should exist for them. The requirements given to young directors in the independent sector are too similar to those given by the established companies. Budgets are too limited, and the organizations are essentially profit motivated. It's bad for young people to
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have to work in such adverse conditions.
But 1 also feel there s a problem about the attitude of some of the young directors. They feel that they have to make a more "abrasive" type of film in order to attract audiences, or they make films motivated only by their own personal interests. I don't think those are the ways to attract audiences. On the other hand, the only thing that all film directors have in common with the film companies is a concern for the size of the audience. In other words, although it may not be our intention to make a lot of money from our films, we do want to make films that will be seen by as many people as possible.
TR: For the record, can you outline how Kagemusha was eventually financed?
AK: I was in America for the Oscar ceremonies when I met George Lucas and Francis Coppola. They approached me and said that they'd learned a
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)m my films. Lucas, in particular, said that he would like to assist me in any way he could. At the time, I was trying to negotiate terms for the Kagemusha project with Toho, and we had reached a virtual standstill. Since it was the first time I had met them, I couldn't tell them that I was lacking money for a project. But someone must have mentioned my problem to them, because they went to Twentieth Century Fox and persuaded Alan Ladd Jr. to invest in the film in return for the rights outside Japan. The amount that Toho was willing to put up was not adequate to make the film, and Fox came forward with the balance.
The Japanese film industry has always projected profits on the basis of domestic box-office grosses alone. I believe that we should also be taking account of the world market. Since Kagemusha is the first instance of a foreign company investing in a Japanese production, I've been willing to tour around Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco with the film, promoting it.
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stepping-stone for the rescue of Japanese cinema from this disastrous lack of confidence in the abilities of film directors to attract an audience.
TR: What do you see as the international possibilities for Japanese film?
AK: I believe that film is one of the best ways to help foreign countries understand Japan, and vice versa. I don't think Japan is very well understood as yet—a TV series like Shogun wouldn't be made if it were. I'm sure there will be more instances of coproductions with other countries. I think it's important to establish a kind of global film culture. Marx wanted workers to unite! That's the kind of
effort we film directors should be making__
Basically, the present situation is chaotic, and nobody knows what direction the Japanese film industry will take. Non-film companies are proving increasingly ready to invest in film production.
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-pend a great deal ot money on advertising, and they must feel that getting their brand name up there on a cinema screen at the front of a feature is worthwhile. But the attitude of the established companies remains terribly passive. If they really don't believe in the power or the profitability of films, then I think they should withdraw from the film industry entirely.
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419949999999999999999999999�
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
By Donald Richie
Best known as one of the leading Western authorities on Japanese film, Donald Richie has also been a keen observer of Japanese people and their culture. During the more than fifty years he has lived in Japan, he has written often of his encounters with friends, colleagues, and celebrities. Many of these reflections appear in his book Public People, Private People: Portraits of Some Japanese, including the following two intimate glimpses of Japanese cinema's largest personalities—who clashed on the set o^Kagemusha.
Aki ra Ku ro s.awa
One day in winter, 1948, when I was twenty-four, my friend, the late composer Fumio Hayasaka, took me to the Toho Studios to watch the shooting of a film for which he was doing the score.
On an elaborate open set of postwar streets, ruins, shops—so detailed it looked hardly different from the neighborhood outside the
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studio—a good-looking young man in a white suit and slicked-back hair was being directed by a tall, middle-aged man wearing a floppy hat.
During a break, Hayasaka introduced me. After our halting conversation, they went back to work. I spoke no Japanese then, and they, except for Hayasaka, no English. I watched and wondered who they were and what the film was about.
The young man in the white suit was Toshiro Mifune; the tall man in the hat was Kurosawa, directing the young actor for the first time; and the film was Drunken Angel.
Then there was a spring day in 1954> and I had just emerged from the first screening of the full Seven Samurai. Never had I seen a film like it—my ears were still ringing, my eyes still watering. People gathered, talking, as they do when the film is a success. Several clustered around a tall
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[loppy hat. the same man I had met six years before. So, though I could now speak some Japanese, I did not go and congratulate him as the others were doing. Instead, I stared, admired.
In late autumn, 1956, Joseph Anderson and I were in Izu, at one of the open sets for Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. It was known that we were doing a book on the Japanese film and would probably be writing this picture up for the press. Toho was most cooperative.
Work was running far behind schedule, Kurosawa having refused to use a completed set because it had been constructed with nails and the long-distance lenses he was using might show the anachronistic nailheads. Both Joe and I were thrilled by this unwillingness to compromise.
The present set represented the provincial palace of Lord Washizu, the Macbeth character, and Duncan's approach was being filmed: soldiers, banners, horses, a stuffed boar slung from poles—an entire procession. When an
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lit gave the signal, it moved forward under the late autumn afternoon sun.
Above us, on a platform, were Kurosawa and his cameraman. We had spoken with the director earlier, and he had told us his plans for the scene. Now we were watching him do it. The entire afternoon was spent stopping and starting the distant procession. Sections of it were being filmed with the long-distance lenses, then refilmed, then filmed once again.
Half a year later, when we saw the finished picture in the screening room, not one of these shots was in it. I asked him why. The scenes were nice enough, he said, but not really necessary. Besides, they interrupted the flow of the picture. Both Joe and I marveled.
Then again, in late summer 1958, I was at one of the open sets for The Hidden Fortress, near Mount Fuji. After a long day's shooting, Mifune was in the bath. I was sharing it with him. It had been a difficult day, the same scene shot over and over again.
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1 had noticed that, during this scene, Kurosawa's ballpoint pen stopped working. Instead of throwing it away and getting another, he had spent all that afternoon, between takes, trying to make this particular pen work.
Mifune was sunk up to his neck in the hot water. He had been in the offending scene. I mentioned the ballpoint pen. Yes, he said, I know what you mean. I felt just like that pen.. .but did you notice? He finally got it to work.
It was a cold winter day in I°/64> on the studio set for Red Beard. The picture was overbudget and long over production schedule. Not a happy time, and Mifune, with other contractual obligations, was still in full beard and unable to fulfill any of them.
By now it was known that I was writing a book on Kurosawa. This being so, I could approach him whenever he was free. He was sitting in a canvas chair, wearing a white cap and dark glasses, now that his eyes were giving him trouble. He looked dejected.
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In order to have something to say, I told him that he really didn't look so different from the first time I had met him. Yes, he remembered the occasion, way back in the days of Throne of Blood, with Mr. Anderson.
No, I said: Back in the days of Drunken Angel, with the now long dead Mr. Hayasaka.
He looked at me and frowned. On the Kurosawa set, a mistake gets first a frown.
I don't remember that.
I observed that there was no reason he should but that it had happened. He then set to work remembering. Nothing came of it, but I remembered the nails in the abandoned castle, the ballpoint pen that would not work, the unhappily bearded Mifune. We were problems—all of us—problems to be solved.
In 1978, a summer day, I was at the Toho Studios at Seijo. No film was being made, but Kurosawa was there because that was where he had an office. He was now in his office, working.
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The work consisted oi drawing and painting. He had no money for his film, notorious as he was for going overbudget, overschedule, over the wishes, the commands, of producers and production companies—all so that he could create the perfect, uncompromised film.
In order to keep firmly in mind the film he next wanted to make, he was now doing it by hand. There was picture after picture of samurai, of battles, of horses. His large craftsman's hands were painting one scene after another, the movements swift and sure. He always knew just what he was going to do. The entire film was in his head, emerging through his fingers. Since he had no money, he would make the picture on paper. What other director, I wondered, would do this, would care this much and would be this immune to despair?
What was the name of this impossible film, I wondered aloud. Well, I was told, they were thinking of calling it Kagemusha.
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h was two years later, March 23, 1980— Kurosawa's seventieth birthday, and a party at a Chinese restaurant near Seijo: his family, his children, grandchildren, staff, a few friends. And presents, lots of presents. But the best part of all was that the money had been found. Thanks to profits from Star Wars, Kagemusha would become a reality.
Watching him, I thought back to the thirty-eight-year-old director on the set of Drunken Angel. The intervening years had not made much difference. Now he wore caps instead of floppy hats; now he wore dark glasses.
Those big, strong hands were delicately opening birthday presents, the fingers precise but very firm with unwilling knots. I thought of the will that had created those films. Kurosawa turned, smiled, and with one large hand carefully smoothed the hair of a favorite grandson.
I thought, too, of that now long gone ballpoint pen, coaxed until it forgot it was broken, until it began again to write.
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Shintaro Katsu
Katsu, backed up by his entourage, makes a
big entrance. He strikes a Zatoichi pose, hands
stretched out, eyeballs turned up until just the
whites show—the blind swordsman himself. Then
his eyes slide back into place, he gives his snorting
laugh and cuffs his sidekicks into the room.
All smiles tonight. Kurosawa has chosen him to play the lead in Kagemusha. This is a role he very much wants. He wants to be a big international star, not just a little Japanese one. He has often been to Las Vegas, so he knows. It is really a big American star that he wants to be.
Sitting down, his buddies around him, he keeps the table in stitches. Las Vegas girl asked him if he liked it French fashion. He had no idea. She demonstrated. It tickled. He wanted to say so. English inadequate. So he said: I no like chewing gum.
Buddies collapse, general laughter. Another funny Las Vegas story. While they were making love, she or another asked if he was ready. Given typical Japanese confusion over /s and rs, he heard
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wrong. I no lady, he said with indignation: I gentleman. Contingent howls its appreciation, several beat the table with the flats of their hands.
Katsu, small, fat, moustached, funny when he has a good director, looks around as though surprised at these reactions, then shrugs good-naturedly: boys will be boys, says the shrug. Parodying an American gang boss—OK, OK, fellas, just cool it—he adds in Japanese: And now we're going to drunk to Kagemusha, whatever that means (with his impish little grin, a trademark, cute little kid acting tough).
The first day of shooting on the Kagemusha set arrived. Katsu, veteran of dozens of pictures, was ready. So were his cohorts. He even had his own television crew to capture his performance. This Kurosawa objected to.
But I've got to have a record of my daily performance, Katsu is supposed to have said. Otherwise I won't know how I'm doing, how good I am.
Kurosawa apparently informed him that he was the director, he would tell his actor how he was doing, how good he was. On further objections
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irom Katsu, Kurosawa pointed out that he was using multiple cameras and that the TV crew would be in the scene.
Hey, you guys, go hide behind that pillar, the actor is supposed to have yelled, before turning to the director with: There, see? Invisible.
Kurosawa said later: If he was going to be this difficult on the first day of shooting, I could just imagine him on the last. Accordingly, he said no, the TV crew would have to go. Katsu said no, they would have to stay. Then, depending on which side tells the story, Kurosawa said, You're fired, or Katsu said, I quit.
Another party, another entrance. This one subdued. The entourage is now composed of Toei studio toughs, since Katsu is making yet another gangster film with them. Very subdued now—no Zatoichi imitations. He takes a back table, plays with his chopsticks. The boys hover around him protectively—their wounded leader.
I look at him—fat, funny, and, I now see, lost. He is a little kid all right, but one with what his beloved
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.Americans might call authority problems. No, no, he said to the press, being big about the whole thing:
He's an artist, you see. Me, I'm just an actor__But
also at the time just an unruly and disappointed little boy seeing how far he could push papa.
Or maybe it was different. Maybe being a big American star was too much for him. What if he tried as hard as he could and then didn't make it? What then? What if he was a. failure? Then, maybe better not to try. Maybe just back out.
Or, perhaps, neither. Maybe not much thought involved. Just interested in a good time, just someone trying to do his best. A little laugh, a little drink, a little puff. And a few pals—his own "rat pack," with himself as old brown eyes.
Now Katsu is balancing one chopstick on top of the other. A few of the gang are snickering. He himself is quietly smiling, gray hair glinting handsomely in the subdued light—the kind these places call "lighting." Soon he will give his famous laugh. Maybe even do his Zatoichi imitation.
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