Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [81]
Since my assistant-director days I seem to have developed a peculiar relationship with the wind. Yama-san once told me to go shoot the waves at Chōshi, where I had to wait through three days of a placid sea. Then suddenly a furious gale blew up the waves to astounding swells, and I got exactly what I came for. Another time, during a location on Horses, I ran into a typhoon and had my raincoat ripped apart at the seams. During the filming of Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949) our open set was blown to smithereens by Typhoon “Kitty,” and during the Mount Fuji location shooting of Kakushi to-ride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress, 1958) we were hit by three typhoons in succession. The forests in which we had planned to film were leveled one by one, and what was to have been a ten-day location shoot ended up taking a hundred days.
But, compared to these winds, the gale that blew across the Sengokuhara plains for Sugata Sanshirō was truly a kamikaze, a “divine wind,” as far as I was concerned. There is only one thing that I now regret: Due to my lack of experience, I was unable to take full advantage of the opportunity provided by that divine wind. In the midst of the gale I thought I had shot as much as I needed, but when I got that footage into the editing room I found it far from adequate; there were many places I should have reshot or shot much more.
When you are working under difficult conditions, you experience one hour’s labor as two or three. But hard work just makes you feel you’ve put in more time than you have. Reality remains reality: An hour is only an hour. Since this experience, whenever I am working under adverse conditions and feel, through exhaustion, that what I have must be enough, I force myself to go on and produce three times as much. If I do that, I finally get what I really need. It was the bitter experience in the wind of Sugata Sanshirō that taught me this.
There are still many things I would like to say about Sugata Sanshirō. But if I wrote them all down, we’d end up with a whole book on that one film. For a director, each work he completes is like a whole lifetime. I have lived many whole lifetimes with the films I have made, and I have experienced a different life-style with each one as well. Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.
But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised. I have special affection for them all, and I would like to write about each one, but that is not possible. I have made twenty-seven films, and unless I take only two or three characters as the representatives of each film and limit my reminiscences, I’ll never get to the end.
Among the characters in Sugata Sanshirō, the one who most strongly draws my interest and affection is of course Sanshirō himself. But, looking back now, I realize that my feelings for the villain, Higaki Gennosuke, are no less strong.
I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself; in any case, it is in watching someone unformed enter the path to perfection that my fascination knows no bounds. For this reason, beginners often appear as main characters in my films, and Sugata Sanshirō is just such a one. He