Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [79]
Later in the film there is a scene where Sanshirō goes out on the town and gets in trouble drinking and fighting. Afterward he is called in by his teacher, Yano Shogoro, for a scolding. I had Fujita do exactly what he had done with me. He complained that I was cruel to put him through two chastisements, but he had no one to blame but himself. And he was very good in that scene.
There is a point I would like to clarify here. After Sanshirō gets his scolding, he says he will show how he can die for his teacher, and he jumps into the pond in the garden. He spends the whole night in the pond clutching a post, until finally his willfulness is broken and he becomes humble. When I met with Fujita recently, he told me about a certain film director’s criticism of this scene: Lotus flowers don’t bloom at night, and when the blossoms open, they don’t make any noise.
Now, I had put a great deal of effort into showing that Sanshirō jumps into the pond in the daytime, spends the entire night in the water and doesn’t come out until it’s light again. I changed the direction of the sun’s rays, I moved the moon and I made morning mists. If after all of that it appeared to be nighttime when the flowers bloomed, too bad. I tried.
The sound of lotus blossoms opening is another matter, however. I had heard that when lotus flowers bloom they make a wonderful, clear bursting sound. So one morning I got up very early and trekked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno to listen to the lotuses open. And in the dim mists of morning I heard that noise.
But the issue of whether or not lotus flowers make noise when they open really has nothing to do with that night that Sanshirō spends in the pond. It’s a matter of esthetics, not physics. There is a famous haiku by Basho:
An old pond
A frog jumps in—
the sound of the water.
People who read it and say “Well, of course if a frog jumps into the water, there’s going to be a noise” simply have no feeling for haiku. Likewise, people who say that it’s strange for Sanshirō to hear a beautiful sound when the lotus flowers open simply have no feeling for movies. There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.
Sugata Sanshirō
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me how I felt directing my maiden work, but, as I have said, I simply enjoyed it. I went to sleep each night looking forward eagerly to the next day’s shooting, and there was absolutely nothing painful in the experience. My crew to a man gave me their utmost. My set designers and wardrobe people ignored the small size of our budget and responded with, “O.K. Leave it to us!” I was deeply touched by their insistence on making everything exactly what I wanted it to be. And all the doubts I had had about my ability to direct before I was given the opportunity vanished after the first shot was completed, like clouds and mist after a rain. The whole task was carried out with a feeling of ease.
This feeling may be a little hard to understand, so let me try to explain. When I was an assistant director, I watched very carefully how Yama-san directed, and I couldn’t help being amazed at the way his attention reached every nook and cranny of the production. Feeling that my own eyes could not see that far, I necessarily harbored doubts about my directing talent.
Once I looked at the production from the director’s viewpoint, however, I saw everything I had been unable to see as an assistant director, or even as a second-unit director. I understood the subtle difference between the positions.