Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [64]
Yama-san was a good talker, too, and I learned a tremendous amount from him over alcohol. He was a man of varied interests, and he was especially knowledgeable about food, enough to be called a real gourmet. I learned much from him about international cuisine. “People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories. Since he liked eating so much, I accumulated quite a bit of study in this area.
He was also very well acquainted with antiques, especially antique utensils. He loved folk art as well, and it was from him that I gained the beginnings of an appreciation for these things. Then, due to my background as a painter, I went on to pursue them even more deeply than Yama-san.
Yama-san had a game he played with us assistant directors on the train when we had time to kill on the way to location shooting. We would decide on a very straightforward theme and each of us had to write a short story on it. This served as study for screenwriting and directing, but it was in itself an interesting game. For example, Yama-san wrote one like this on the theme “heat”: The setting is the second floor of a sukiyaki restaurant. The blistering afternoon sun of summer beats in through the closed windows and shōji screens. In the tiny room a solitary man concentrates all his energy on seducing one of the waitresses, without even bothering to wipe the perspiration that streams off his body. About that time the sukiyaki boils up, starts to make searing and bubbling noises and fills the whole room with the smell of beef.
This short story, I feel, leaves out nothing in a full elaboration of the theme, and the image of the sweating man is so vivid you can see it before your eyes. All the assistant directors took their hats off to Yama-san at once.
A Long Story: Part II
WHEN YAMA-SAN AND I were working together, we drank together when the day was over, and he often asked me to his house for dinner. After completing a film he was always already under pressure to start the next one, and he would include me in the consultations on it. I remember one time, when we had finished Tōjurō’s Love, how after all our terribly hard work the reviews weren’t favorable. Disappointed, Yama-san and I started drinking in the morning. I’ll never forget the bitter feeling of sitting there silently with him in the morning sun in a Yokohama bar overlooking the port, just watching the ships in the harbor as we lifted our glasses.
After I had worked as Yama-san’s chief assistant director on a number of films, he started me writing scripts. Yama-san himself had originally been a scriptwriter, and his talent in this area was unsurpassed. On one occasion the irrepressible Taniguchi Senkichi said to Yama-san’s face, “You’re a first-rate screenwriter, but as a director you’re not really so hot.” Of course this is an excellent example of Sen-chan cheek, but there is no doubt about Yama-san being a first-rate screenwriter. I can testify to his writing abilities because of his precise criticisms and revisions on the scripts I later wrote. Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.
The first script I wrote under Yama-san’s supervision was based on Fujimori Nariyoshi’s story Mizuno Jŭrozaemon. In the original there is a scene where the eponymous hero tells his comrades of the Shirat-suka band about an edict he has seen put up on a signboard in front of Edo Castle. I followed the original closely and had Mizuno go back and report to his friends what he had seen. Yama-san read this and said if this were a