Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [108]
Stray Dog
I DON’T REALLY like talking about my films. Everything I want to say is in the film itself; for me to say anything more is, as the proverb goes, like “drawing legs on a picture of a snake.” But from time to time an idea I thought I had conveyed in the film does not seem to have been generally understood. On these occasions I do feel an urge to talk about my work. Nevertheless, I try not to. If what I have said in my film is true, someone will understand.
That is the way it was with The Quiet Duel. Apparently most people did not grasp what I most fervently wished them to, but a small number did understand very well. In order to make my point more clearly, I decided to make Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949). I think the problem with The Quiet Duel was that I myself had not thoroughly digested my ideas, nor did I express them in the best possible way. Maupassant instructed aspiring writers to extend their vision into realms where no one else could see, and to keep it up until the hitherto invisible became visible to everyone. Acting on this principle, I decided to take up the problem of The Quiet Duel one more time in Stray Dog, pressing my vision to the point where everyone would see what I saw.
I first wrote the screenplay in the form of a novel. I am fond of the work of Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime. This process took me a little less than six weeks, so I figured that I’d be able to rewrite it as a screenplay in ten days or so. Far from it. It proved to be a far more difficult task than writing a scenario from scratch, and it took me close to two months.
But, as I reflect on it, it’s perfectly understandable that this should have happened. A novel and a screenplay are, after all, entirely different things. The freedom for psychological description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a screenplay without using narration. But, thanks to the unexpected travail of adapting the descriptions of the novel form to a screenplay, I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. At the same time, I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expression into the script.
For example, I understood that in novel-writing certain structural techniques can be employed to strengthen the impression of an event and narrow the focus upon it. What I learned was that in the editing process a film can gain similar strength through the use of comparable structural techniques. The story of Stray Dog begins with a young police detective on his way home from marksmanship practice at the headquarters’ range. He gets on a crowded bus, and in the unusually intense summer heat and crush of bodies his pistol is stolen. When I filmed this sequence and edited it according to the passage of chronological time, the effect was terrible. As an introduction to a drama it was slow, the focus was vague and it failed to grip the viewer.
Troubled, I went back to look at the way I had begun the novel. I had written as follows: “It was the hottest day of that entire summer.” Immediately I thought, “That’s it.” I used a shot of a dog with its tongue hanging out, panting. Then the narration begins, “It was unbearably hot that day.” After a sign on a door indicating “Police Headquarters, First Division,” I proceeded to the interior. The chief of the First Detective Division glares up from his desk. “What? Your pistol was stolen?” Before him stands the contrite young detective who is the hero of the story. This new way of editing the opening sequence gave me a very short piece of film, but it was extremely effective in drawing the viewer suddenly into the heart of the drama.
However, that first shot of the panting dog with its tongue hanging out caused me immense woes. The dog’s face appears under the title of the film