Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [101]
The jury was thrown into an uproar. “It’s anti-democratic, it’s monopoly by directors!” someone shouted. But all of the production people on the jury raised their hands in approval of my suggestion, and even some labor-union representatives nodded their assent. Finally Yama-san, who was head of the jury, said that as a movie director he would take responsibility for his opinion of the quality and potential of the young actor in question. With Yama-san’s pronouncement the young man squeaked through. He was, of course, Mifune Toshiro.
After joining the company, Mifune appeared in Sen-chan’s To the End of the Silver Mountains as the roughest and most violent of the three bank robbers who were the villains of the story. He played with amazing energy. Right after that he had the role of a gangster boss in Yama-san’s New Age of Fools, and here he played with an opposite kind of cruel refinement. I became deeply fascinated by the acting abilities Mifune showed in these two films, and decided I wanted him to play the lead in Drunken Angel. I realize that many people think I discovered Mifune and taught him how to act. That is not the case. As can be seen from the sequence of events I have just described, it was Yama-san who discovered the raw material that was Mifune Toshiro. From that raw material it was Sen-chan and Yama-san who fashioned the actor Mifune Toshiro. All I did was see what they had done, take Mifune’s acting talent and show it off to its fullest in Drunken Angel.
Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.
I know it sounds as if I am overpraising Mifune, but everything I am saying is true. If pressed to find a defect in him as an actor, I could say his voice is a little rough, and when it’s recorded through a microphone it has a tendency to become difficult to understand. Anyway, I’m a person who is rarely impressed by actors, but in the case of Mifune I was completely overwhelmed.
And yet a film director can rejoice over a marvelous asset only to have it turn into a terrible burden. If I let Mifune in his role of the gangster become too attractive, the balance with his adversary, the doctor, played by Shimura Takashi, would be destroyed. If this should occur, the result would be a distortion of the film’s overall structure. Yet to suppress Mifune’s attractiveness at the blossoming point of his career because of the need for balance in the structure of my film would be a waste. And in fact Mifune’s attraction was something his innate and powerful personal qualities pushed unwittingly to the fore; there was no way to prevent him from emerging as too attractive on the screen other than keeping him off the screen. I was caught in a real dilemma. Mifune’s attractiveness gave me joy and pain at the same time.
Drunken Angel came to life in the midst of these contradictions. My dilemma did indeed warp the structure of the drama, and the theme of the film became somewhat indistinct. But as a result of my battle with the wonderful qualities called Mifune, the whole job became for me a liberation from something resembling a spiritual prison. Suddenly I found myself on the outside.
The drunken-doctor performance Shimura gave was a superb 90 percent, but because his adversary, Mifune, turned in 120 percent, I had to feel a