Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [1]
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