Something Like an Autobiography (23 page)

There was another incident when I was assistant director for Fushimizu Shu, who had been an assistant director for Yama-san before me. We had to shoot a starry night scene, and I had clambered up to the top of the set to string together the spangles representing the stars. But the threads kept getting tangled and twisted, and finally my patience was at an end. Fushimizu himself, watching from below in
his position next to the camera, was also getting irritated. “Can’t you hurry it up a little?” he shouted.

That was it. As if I wasn’t annoyed enough already! I grabbed a silver-colored glass ball that was in the box of spangles and threw it at Fushimizu. “O.K., here’s a
shooting
star for you!” I yelled. Later he said to me, “You’re still a child. Just a short-tempered child.”

Fushimizu may have been right. Even though I have passed the age of seventy, I haven’t been able to cure my quick temper. Now I sometimes put on a fireworks display, but that’s all it is. I’m like a space satellite that flies around but doesn’t leave behind any radioactivity, so I consider that my short temper is of a rather good quality.

Another time we had to record the sound of someone being hit in the head. We tried socking all kinds of things, but the mixer didn’t find that anything was suitable. Finally I exploded and hit the microphone with my fist. The blue light signaling “O.K.” flashed on.

I have a distaste for argumentation, and I can’t stand people who spout all kinds of strung-together logic. One argumentative screenwriter used some syllogistic reasoning to prove to me that his script was right. I became annoyed and countered that, no matter how logically he defended it, what was dull was still dull, so forget it. We fought.

Once when I was in charge of the second-unit shooting we were terribly pressured. We had finished a particular take and I was dead on my feet, so I sat down to rest. The cameraman came to ask me where to set up for the next shot, and I pointed to a spot near where I was sitting. This cameraman, an argumentative follow, demanded an explanation of the theoretical basis for my decision to select that spot. I became annoyed (this seems to happen a lot, and it always gets me in trouble) and told him the theoretical basis for my selection of that particular camera position was that I was exhausted and didn’t want to move. This camerman loved to fight, so imagine my surprise when he had no reply to this reasoning.

Anyway, I used to get annoyed very easily. According to my assistant directors, when I get angry my face turns red, but the end of my nose is drained of pigmentation—an anger that would lend itself well to color film, they say. Since I have never gotten angry in front of a mirror, I don’t know if what they say is true or not. But for my assistants this is a danger signal, so it’s not likely their observations would be wrong.

Near the end of Yama-san’s
Horses
is a scene where the foal is sold at a horse auction. The young heroine, Ine (Takamine Hideko), has to buy a big bottle of saké at one of the shops set up for the auction. She
carries the bottle through the rowdy throng gathered for the auction, returning to where her family is gathered to commemorate the parting with their horse. The sound of the northern folk songs sung by the farmers standing around their horses while they drink, like the members of her own family, comes to Ine’s ears. Because it symbolizes her separation from the horse she has raised herself, it makes her unbearably sad.

The original idea for
Horses
had come from Yama-san. Listening to the radio, he happened to tune in to the live broadcast of a horse auction. Amid all the sounds of the sales he could hear the sobs of a young girl. This girl became his heroine, Ine. So this scene at the auction is the real core of the film.

To our dismay, an order came from the Army’s Equestrian Affairs Administration to cut the entire scene. It was wartime (
Horses
was released in 1941), and what we were showing was in contravention of the ban on daytime alcohol consumption. Yet this scene had been in the approved original script. A colonel assigned by the Equestrian Affairs Administration had even been present at the shooting (Colonel Mabuchi, a stubborn, implacable character with a brusque manner). The filming had been extremely difficult—we had had to dolly on a diagonal through the square where an actual auction was being held. It was no easy matter to win the cooperation of the crowd gathered for the auction, and here and there throughout the square we had to contend with mud and puddles of water. It was a matter of precision balancing to move the camera along dolly tracks laid over boards through this mess. But everything went miraculously well and we got a superb take. So what did they mean by telling us to cut it now?

I made up my mind not to give in. The Army bureaucracy at that time was so strict they wouldn’t let babies cry, and on top of that I was pitted directly against Colonel Mabuchi. The prospects looked very dim. Yama-san and the producer, Morita Nobuyoshi, were both leaning toward the inevitability of cutting the scene, but I had been given full responsibility for the editing, and I refused to budge.

To begin with, the idea of banning daytime alcohol consumption struck me as the stupidest kind of hard-line officiousness. Secondly, they might have apologized for letting us film it all and asked us politely to cut it. Instead, they just issued an order: “Cut it.” I couldn’t let them get away with that.

One evening very late, as the release date drew dangerously near, Morita came to find me in the editing room. As soon as I saw his face, I said, “I won’t cut it.” “I know,” he replied in a casual tone, “I know
when you have that expression on your face nothing anyone says will make any difference. But we can’t leave things like this. I want you to come with me to Colonel Mabuchi’s house.” “What will we do there?” “I just want it made clear whether we cut or don’t cut.” I responded, “But you know the Colonel will say ‘cut’ and I’ll say ‘I won’t cut,’ so all we’ll do is sit and glare at each other.” “Well, if that’s what happens, there’s nothing we can do about it. I still want you to come.”

Just as I predicted, all Colonel Mabuchi and I did was sit and glare menacingly at each other. On our arrival Morita had said, “Kurosawa here says he won’t cut that scene under any circumstances. He’s the kind of fellow who won’t do something that doesn’t make sense. I leave him to you.” Then he looked down and proceeded to drink the saké that the Colonel’s wife had served us. He said nothing more. I, too, once I had said my piece to the Colonel, fell silent and stared at my cup as I drank. The Colonel’s wife came back from time to time, served more saké and looked at the three of us worriedly.

I don’t know how long this silence went on, but all the bottles for serving saké in the household of this hard-drinking colonel were used up. Mrs. Mabuchi had to come and collect the bottles that we had lined up in front of us in order to heat more, so it must have been quite a while. At the end of this long while Colonel Mabuchi suddenly moved aside the tray that was in front of him and put both hands to the floor to bow in front of me. “I’m sorry. Please cut it,” he said. At that I said, “All right, I will.” It was all over, and from that point our liquor became most enjoyable. By the time Morita and I left, the sun was high in the sky.

YAMA-SAN WORRIED
about this hot temper and obstinacy of mine. So whenever I went to work for other directors he would call me to him and make me swear a solemn oath that I would in no circumstances lose my temper or behave stubbornly. In fact my experiences assisting other directors are extremely few: twice I worked for Takizawa Eisuke and once each for Fushimizu Shu and Naruse Mikio.

Among these experiences outside the Yamamoto group the thing
that impressed me the most was Naruse’s work method. He possessed something that can only be called expertise. I assisted him on a lost film called
Nadare
(
Avalanche
, 1938), based on a story by Osaragi Jiro. I believe the material was not fully satisfactory to the director, but there was much that I was able to glean from this job.

Naruse’s method consists of building one very brief shot on top of another, but when you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow is so magnificent that the splices are invisible. This flow of short shots that looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath. The sureness of his hand in this was without comparison.

During the shooting Naruse was also sure. There was absolutely no waste in anything he did, and even the time for meals was duly allocated. My only complaint was that he did everything himself, leaving his assistant directors to sit around idle.

One day on the set I had nothing to do, as usual. So I went behind a backdrop that had clouds painted on it and found a huge velvet curtain that was used for backgrounds in night scenes. It was conveniently folded, so I lay down on it and promptly went to sleep. The next thing I knew, one of the assistant lighting technicians was prodding me awake. “Run!” he said. “Naruse’s mad.” In a panic I fled through a ventilation hole in the back of the stage. As I scrambled, I heard the lighting assistant yell, “He’s behind the clouds!” When I came nonchalantly through the front entrance to the stage, Naruse was coming out. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he replied, “Somebody’s snoring on the stage. My day’s ruined, so I’m going home.” To my great shame, I was unable to admit that I had been the culprit. In fact, I didn’t bring myself to tell Naruse the truth until ten years had passed. He thought it was very funny.

As for Takizawa, I can’t forget the location in the Hakone Mountains where we shot
Sengoku gunto den (The Saga of the Vagabonds
, 1937). I was third assistant director on this picture, and I hadn’t learned to drink liquor yet. So when we got back to the inn at night, the maid would give me tea and my two sweet bean cakes, plus Takizawa’s and the chief assistant director’s rations of cakes as well. Every day I was eating six sweet bean cakes, so I guess I must have been pretty cute.

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.

The original idea for
The Saga of the Vagabonds
came from the film director Yamanaka Sadao. The screenplay was written by Miyoshi Juro, a playwright, but here and there Yamanaka’s brilliance shone through it. (I later wrote my own script based on Yamanaka’s original, and this was filmed by Sugie Toshio in 1960.) We were on location in the Hakone Mountains at the coldest time of the year, in February. A bitter wind blew across these plains at the foot of a pure-white Mount Fuji all day long, and our hands and faces became cracked and wrinkled like silk crepe. We left for the location while it was still dark outside, and when we arrived there the sun was just beginning to strike the summit of the mountain, turning it a rosy pink. I’ll never forget the landscape I gazed at every day on the way to the location before starting the shooting, again during break periods and yet again on the way back to the inn. It’s disrespectful of me to say this about Takizawa, but the landscape impressed me far more deeply than what we were filming.

In the morning as we rode along in our car in the wan light of predawn, we could see the old farmhouses on both sides of the road. Farmers dressed as extras, wearing their hair in topknots, clad in armor and carrying swords, would emerge from these houses, throw open the huge doors and lead out their horses. It was as if we had really been transported back into the sixteenth century. They would mount and ride along behind our car. Rolling along past massive cryptomeria and pine trees, I felt that these, too, were part of that ancient era.

When we arrived at the location, the extras led their horses off into the forest and tethered them to trees while they built a huge bonfire. The farmers gathered around the fire, and in the dim forest their armor caught gleams of light from the roaring red fire. It made me feel that I had stumbled on a band of mountain samurai in the woods.

While they waited for shooting to begin, the people and horses all stood still with their backs to the north wind. The standing warriors would shudder in a wave, their topknots rising on end along with their horses’ manes and tails. And clouds skittered across the sky. The scene portrayed exactly the feeling conveyed in the mountain-samurai title song from the movie.