Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [4]
Not long ago I gave up trying to refuse, however. I think my capitulation derives from the fact that recently I read the autobiography of the French film director Jean Renoir. I once had the occasion to meet him, and even to be invited to dinner with him, over which we talked of many things. The impression I had of him from this encounter was that he was not at all the type of person to sit down and write his autobiography. So for me to hear that he had ventured to do so was like having an explosion go off under me.
In the foreword to that book Jean Renoir writes the following:
Many of my friends have urged me to write my autobiography.… It is no longer enough for them to know that an artist has freely expressed himself with the help of a camera and a microphone. They want to know who the artist is.
and further,
The truth is that this individual of whom we are so proud is composed of such diverse elements as the boy he made friends with at nursery school, the hero of the first tale he ever read, even the dog belonging to his cousin Eugène. We do not exist through ourselves alone but through the environment that shaped us.… I have sought to recall those persons and events which I believe have played a part in making me what I am.*
My own decision to write the present chapters, which in a slightly different form were first published in the Japanese magazine Shŭkan Yomiuri, was prompted by these words, and by the terrific impression Jean Renoir left on me when I met him—the feeling that I would like to grow old in the same way he did.
There is one more person I feel I would like to resemble as I grow old: the late American film director John Ford. I am also moved by my regret that Ford did not leave us his autobiography. Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick. But if many people are saying they want to know what sort of person I am, it is probably my duty to write something for them. I have no confidence that what I write will be read with interest, and I must explain that I have chosen (for reasons I will discuss later) to bring my account to a close in 1950, the year in which I made Rashōmon. But I have undertaken this series with the feeling that I must not be afraid of shaming myself, and that I should try telling myself the things I am always telling my juniors.
In the course of writing this thing resembling an autobiography, I have on several occasions sat “knees to knees” with a number of people and talked frankly to refresh my memory. They are: Uekusa Keinosuke (novelist, scriptwriter, playwright, friend from grammar-school days); Honda Inoshiro (film director, friend from our assistant-director days); Muraki Yoshiro (art director, frequent member of my crew); Yanoguchi Fumio (sound recordist, a cherry tree of the same bloom as I at P.C.L., the pre-war predecessor of the Toho Film Company); Sato Masaru (music director, pupil of the late composer Hayasaka Fumio, a frequent collaborator of mine); Fujita Susumu (actor, star of my maiden work, Sugata Sanshirō); Kayama Yŭzō (actor, one of many I put through severe training); Kawakita Kashiko (vice president of Tōhō-Tōwa Films, a lady who has aided me greatly abroad and who knows much about me and the reputation of my work in foreign countries); Audie Bock (American scholar of Japanese cinema, a person who when it comes to my films knows more about me than I do about myself); Hashimoto Shinobu (film producer, scriptwriter, collaborator with me on the scripts of Rashōmon, Ikiru and Seven Samurai); Ide Masato (scriptwriter upon whom I have relied as collaborator for my recent films, my adversary in golf and shogi chess); Matsue Yōichi (producer, Tokyo University graduate, graduate of the Italian Cinecittà film school, a man whose activities