Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [83]
But I reached the limits of my endurance with their spitefulness. I felt the color of my face changing, and there was nothing I could do about it. “Bastards! Go to hell! Eat this chair!” Thinking such thoughts, I rose involuntarily to my feet, but as I did so, Ozu stood up simultaneously and began to speak: “If a hundred points is a perfect score, Sugata Sanshirō gets one hundred twenty! Congratulations, Kurosawa!” Ignoring the unhappy censors, Ozu strode over to me, whispered the name of a Ginza restaurant in my ear and said, “Let’s go there and celebrate.”
Later Ozu and Yama-san arrived at the restaurant, where I was already waiting. As if to calm me down, Ozu praised Sugata Sanshirō with all his might. But I was not so easy to console, and I sat there thinking how much better I would have felt if I had taken that defendant’s chair and hit the censors over the head with it. Even today the thing I am most grateful to Ozu for is that he prevented me from doing just that.
The Most Beautiful
I THINK THE easiest way to talk about myself from the time I became a film director is by following my filmography and going through my life film by film. Sugata Sanshirō was released in 1943; I was thirty-three years old. The Most Beautiful was released in 1944; I was thirty-four. But a picture is usually released the year after the actual filming, so, for example, The Most Beautiful was a film I started shooting in 1943.
Before I began work on The Most Beautiful, I had a request from the Information Section of the Navy. They called me to see if I wouldn’t make a big action picture using Zero fighter planes. I understand that American pilots called Zero fighters “Black Monsters” and seemed to be terrified by them, so probably what the Navy had in mind was a propaganda film to fan the Japanese war spirit. I said I would think about it. But it was already evident that Japan was going to lose the war, and the Navy’s ability to carry on was reaching the bottom. They really couldn’t have spared any Zero fighters to make a movie with, and I never heard anything more about the project.
The Most Beautiful was the project that replaced the Zero film. It deals with a volunteer corps of teenage girl workers. The setting is a military-lens factory belonging to the Nippon Kogaku company in the town of Hiratsuka, and the girls are engaged in the manufacture of precision lenses.
When I received this project to direct, I decided I wanted to try doing it in semi-documentary style. I began with the task of ridding the young actresses of everything they had physically and emotionally acquired that smacked of theatricality. The odor of makeup, the snobbery, the affectations of the stage, that special self-consciousness that only actors have—all of this had to go. I wanted to return them to their original status of ordinary young girls.
So I began with running practice, and went from there to volleyball. Then I had them form a fife-and-drum corps, practice marching and playing and finally parade through the streets. The actresses didn’t seem to object to the running and the volleyball, but the very thought of doing something so attention-getting as marching through the streets in a fife-and-drum corps affronted them. I had to deal with a strong resistance to this request.
But with repetition they became accustomed even to parading. Their makeup lost its artificiality, and at first glance, and even at a harder second look, they appeared to be in all respects a healthy, active group of ordinary young girls. I then took this group and put them in the Nippon Kogaku company dormitory. I sent several of them to each section of the factory, and they began leading the same life as the actual workers, on the same daily schedule.
Reflecting upon my actions now, I must conclude that I was a terribly rough director to work for. It is really quite amazing how they all did without question what I told them to do. But then, in the mood that prevailed during wartime, everyone