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By Root 625 0

When you are creating your own work, it is entirely different from when you are helping with someone else’s. Moreover, when you are directing your own script, you understand the script better than anyone else possibly can. When I finally became a director, I at last understood all the implications of Yama-san’s order to write scripts first if I wanted to direct. It was because of this that, although Sugata Sanshirō was my very first film, it went exactly the way I wanted it to. Making this film seemed not like ascending a steep precipice, but more like clambering around the gentle slopes at the base of the mountain. My overall impression of it was that of a very pleasant excursion, like a picnic.

But there is a song in Sugata Sanshirō with lyrics that go like this:

Cheerful on the way there,

Fearful on the way home.

And so it was for me. I climbed the trail into the mountains, and it wasn’t until much later that I encountered the steep rock cliff I would have to scale. This came with the climax scene toward the end, where Sanshirō and Higaki Gennosuke battle it out on the plains of Ukyo-ga-hara. We required a field through which the wind was blowing, and I felt that without a blustering, gale-force wind this final and most crucial confrontation was unlikely to distinguish itself from the other six fight sequences in the film.

First we fashioned tall grasses to blow in the wind on the set. (The idea was to use wind machines for the effect.) But when I looked at the finished set, I felt that what we could shoot here would not only fail to be more impressive than the other fight scenes, it would look tawdry enough to ruin the whole picture. In a great flurry I rushed to consult with the production company, and managed to get permission to shoot this last scene on location. But the stipulation was that the shooting had to be completed in no more than three days.

The location selected was the Sengokuhara plain in the Hakone Mountains, a place famous for its winds. But we encountered an unusual period of calm with a thick cloud cover. For two days we sat with nothing to do, staring out of the inn windows at the murky sky. The third day, too, dawned without a whisper of the famous wind, and below the Hakone Mountains enshrouded in mists we prepared to return home.

I told my cast and crew that we would persevere at least till the end of this third day. Half feeling like giving up, and half in desperation, we began drinking beer from early morning on. About the time everyone was getting a little tipsy and starting to launch into song with complete abandon, someone looked out the window and suddenly began pointing and trying to quiet us down.

Looking outside, we saw that the cloud which had covered the outer crater of Hakone was starting to lift, and over Lake Ashinoko There seemed to be a misty dragon ascending to heaven with a swirling motion. A violent gust of wind blew in the open window and made the hanging scroll in the art alcove rattle and dance. We all looked at each other speechless, and then burst into action.

From that moment it became in every sense of the word a big action drama. Everyone grabbed a piece of the equipment we needed, shouldered or dragged it and hurried out of the inn. The location was close by—only the equivalent of two blocks’ walk—but we made our way into that violent headwind as if we were gulping it down.

On the hill where we had planned to shoot, the pampas grass should have gone to seed already, but a field of the fluffy stalks still waved like a typhoon-ripped sea. Above our heads, tatters of clouds fairly raced across the sky. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect set design.

The cast and crew worked like men possessed in the teeth of the providential wind. Whenever we finished a take that had required clouds drifting in the background, the sky cleared itself completely as if the clouds had been swept away by magic. We kept on working in the driving gale until three o’clock in the afternoon without stopping for a minute to rest.

As we finished shooting the scene exactly the