After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Kurosawa was one of the 20th century’s master auteurs and perhaps my favorite director. The film was shot quickly (by Kurosawa's standards) in about nine weeks, with Kurosawa determined to show he was still capable of working quickly and efficiently within a limited budget. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. The original script had to be extensively rewritten and, because of its controversial theme and gender of its protagonist, the completed work divided critics. According to Stephen Prince, "Kurosawa's sensibility, like that of many Japanese artists, is keenly sensitive to the subtleties and beauties of season and scenery. "[160] Federico Fellini considered Kurosawa to be "the greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be". Roman Polanski considered Kurosawa to be among the three filmmakers he favored most, along with Fellini and Orson Welles, and picked Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress for praise. He was ultimately replaced, for the film's Japanese sequences, with two directors, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda. [172] A script created by the Yonki no Kai ("Club of the Four Knights") (Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa), around the time that Dodeskaden was made, finally was filmed and released (in 2000) as Dora-heita, by the only surviving founding member of the club, Kon Ichikawa. "[118] On Christmas Eve 1968, the Americans announced that Kurosawa had left the production due to "fatigue", effectively firing him. It offers online programs in digital film making, with headquarters in Anaheim and a learning center in Tokyo. While Mifune was not cast as the protagonist in Drunken Angel, his explosive performance as the gangster so dominates the drama that he shifted the focus from the title character, the alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura, who had already appeared in several Kurosawa movies. This was his only movie to include a role for an American movie star: Richard Gere, who plays a small role as the nephew of the elderly heroine. Akira Kurosawa (Japanese: 黒澤明 Kurosawa Akira; March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and producer who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. [6] Whichever members of this group happened to be working on a particular film would gather around a table, often at a hot-springs resort, where they would not be distracted by the outside world. Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars was a virtual (unauthorized) scene-by-scene remake with Toho filing a lawsuit on Kurosawa's behalf and prevailing. The picture wrapped in April 1975, with a thoroughly exhausted and homesick Kurosawa returning to Japan and his family in June. "[50], Kurosawa's is a heroic cinema, a series of dramas (mostly) concerned with the deeds and fates of larger-than-life heroes. [33] One of his grandchildren, the actor Takayuki Kato and grandson by Kazuko, became a supporting actor in two films posthumously developed from screenplays written by Kurosawa which remained unproduced during his own lifetime, Takashi Koizumi's After the Rain (1999) and Kei Kumai's The Sea is Watching (2002).[149]. example. I love the cinematography, and the excellent acting by Toshiro Mifune (also one of the star actors of the epic ‘7 samurai’ film (also by Kurosawa). [18] Kurosawa's responsibilities increased, and he worked at tasks ranging from stage construction and film development to location scouting, script polishing, rehearsals, lighting, dubbing, editing, and second-unit directing. The director himself recognized this at the time of its release, telling critic Donald Richie that a cycle of some kind had just come to an end and that his future films and production methods would be different. It had put out only one prior subtitled film in the American market, and the only previous Japanese talkie commercially released in New York had been Mikio Naruse's comedy, Wife! [25][26], Shooting of Sanshiro Sugata began on location in Yokohama in December 1942. Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. [19] In the last of Kurosawa's films as an assistant director for Yamamoto, Horse (Uma, 1941), Kurosawa took over most of the production, as his mentor was occupied with the shooting of another film. [38] He also points out that in The Lower Depths, in which Kurosawa completely avoided the use of wipes, the director cleverly manipulated people and props "in order to slide new visual images in and out of view much as a wipe cut does". Although the plan was for the four directors to create a film each, it has been suggested that the real motivation for the other three directors was to make it easier for Kurosawa to successfully complete a film, and therefore find his way back into the business. [12] (In fact, Tatsuya Nakadai agreed that the multiple cameras greatly helped his performances with the director. [48], By the time of Kagemusha, however, according to Prince, the meaning of this relationship has changed. The inspiration for this innovation came from a family tragedy. "[72] "History has given way to a perception of life as a wheel of endless suffering, ever turning, ever repeating", which is compared in many instances in the screenplay with hell. I like extremes because I find them most alive. On September 6, 1998, Kurosawa died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of 88. (Some of the arrows missed him by an inch; the actor, who admitted that he was not merely acting terrified in the film, suffered nightmares afterward. [7][10] For the 101 peasant characters in the film, he created a registry consisting of 23 families and instructed the performers playing these roles to live and work as these "families" for the duration of shooting. Joan Mellen's comments are typical of this view: "Seven Samurai is above all a homage to the samurai class at its most noble ... Samurai for Kurosawa represent the best of Japanese tradition and integrity. Its release on April 17, 1993, was greeted by an even more disappointed reaction than had been the case with his two preceding works.[144]. The 25-year-old Kurosawa joined P.C.L. Sanshiro Sugata was Akira Kurosawa's debut film, and popular and influential for its time. [128][129], Although proposals for television projects were submitted to him, he had no interest in working outside the film world. Operating the secondary "B camera" on such classics as the Seven Samurai, Saito's footage would often catch Kurosawa's eye and end up in the final cut. While fearing that he might never be able to make another film, the director nevertheless continued working on various projects, writing scripts and creating detailed illustrations, intending to leave behind a visual record of his plans in case he would never be able to film his stories. 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