Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [67]
I put together only the long shots. It became a series of glimpses of a tiny silhouette of the galloping mare, her mane and tail flying in the wind on a moonlit night. And that alone proved sufficient. Even without putting in any sound, it seemed to make you hear the pathetic whinnying of the mother horse and a mournful melody of woodwinds.
It goes without saying that in order to be a film director you must be able to direct actors on the set. A film director’s job is to take a script, make it into something concrete and fix that on film. To that end, he must give the appropriate instructions to the people handling the cameras, the lights, the tape recorders, the sets, the costumes, the props and the makeup. And he must also coach the actors in their delivery.
In order to give us experience with directing actors, Yama-san often had assistant directors take charge of second-unit shooting. Sometimes he would even shoot a scene up to a certain point and then go home, leaving the rest in our hands. If you don’t have a tremendous amount of faith in your assistant directors, you can’t do a thing like that. On the other hand, from our point of view as assistant directors, it was a heavy responsibility. If we didn’t rise to the occasion, we would lose not only Yama-san’s trust, but the confidence of the cast and crew as well. We had to do our utmost. I’m sure Yama-san was well aware of our position and was off somewhere having a drink with a grand smirk on his face. But these experiences, which were like unannounced examinations in school, provided the best possible opportunity for us to develop our directing ability.
During the filming of Horses Yama-san did indeed come to the location set-ups. But usually after spending one night there he would say, “Take care of it,” and go back to Tokyo. It was in this way that I was trained, before becoming a director, to handle the crew and to coach the actors.
Yama-san was good with actors. He didn’t have the dignified severity of directors like Ozu Yasujfro and Mizoguchi Kenji, but instead a kind of quiet cleverness. He often said, “If you as director try to drag an actor by force to where you want him, he can only get halfway there. Push him in the direction he wants to go, and make him do twice as much as he was thinking of doing.” The result is that in Yama-san’s films the actors seem to be relaxed and playing at what they are doing. A good example of this easy-going spirit was the comedian Enoken (Enomoto Ken’ichi). In Yama-san’s pictures he really runs wild, and his special qualities come out in full bloom.
Yama-san also treated actors with extreme politeness. I would sometimes forget the names of the extras—the people who had walk-on parts or played in crowd scenes—and I called them by the color of their costumes, “Say, you in the red …” or “Excuse me, the man in the blue suit.…” Yama-san would scold me: “Kurosawa, you mustn’t do that. People all have names.” Well, I knew that, but I was too busy to look up each name. Yama-san, on the other hand, would call me to look up the name of any extra he wanted to give special instructions to. I would find out the person’s name and report it to him, and only then would he make his request: “Mr. So-and-So, would you please move two or three steps to the left?” The extra, of course a complete unknown, would be overwhelmed by the personal address. This technique reveals that Yama-san was a little bit cagey, but there’s no denying it worked—he really knew how to make people give him their best.
Aside from this, there are three very important things I learned from Yama-san about actors. The first is that people do not know themselves. They can’t look objectively at their own speech and movement habits. The second is that when a movement is made consciously, it will be the consciousness rather than the movement that draws attention on the screen. The third is