Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [94]
No Regrets for Our Youth was born in the midst of these great upheavals. I felt peculiarly deep emotions about this film, the first to be made in the post-war atmosphere of freedom. The locations we used in the old capital of Kyoto—the grassy hills, the flower-lined side streets, the brooks reflecting the sun’s rays—are all employed in the most trivial films today, but at that time they had special meaning for us. For me it was as if my heart could dance, as if I had grown wings and could fly among the clouds.
During the war we had had to be very careful about shooting such scenery. Under wartime conditions we had not been able to portray the fullness of youth in the movies. As the censors viewed things, love was indecent and the fresh, keen sensibilities of youth were a psychological state of “British-American” weakness. Being young in those times consisted of suppressing the sound of one’s breathing in the jail cell that was called the “home front.”
But in order for Japan’s post-war youth to regain its life breath, it would have to endure yet more hard times. These would be the subject of my next film.
One Wonderful Sunday
WHEN THE GROUP of ten stars left to form Shin Toho, we who remained behind at Toho were left without a single name actor or actress to put in our films. The two studios accidentally distinguished themselves clearly through their differing approaches—the director system for the older organization and the star system for the new one—and these emerged as rallying points. The result was in fact a civil war with brother turning against brother.
Shin Toho began by announcing a schedule of productions featuring a dazzling roster of stars. At Toho all of the contract directors, screenwriters and producers responded by gathering for a conference at a hot-spring inn on the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo. The atmosphere of this conference had all the fervor of generals planning their strategy the night before a big battle. It was a most pompous affair, the result of which was a schedule of new releases to be publicized with the directors’ names. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Yamamoto Kajirō, Naruse Mikio and Toyoda Shiro were each to direct a segment of a film called Yotsu no koi no monogatari (Four Love Stories). Gosho Heinosuke was to make Ima hitotabi no (One Time Now) and Yamamoto Satsuo was to codirect Senso to heiwa (War and Peace) with Kamei Fumio, while I was to make Subarashiki nichiyobi (One Wonderful Sunday) and Taniguchi Senkichi was to direct his first film, Ginrei no hate (To the End of the Silver Mountains). My responsibilities included not only writing the script for my own film, One Wonderful Sunday, but also writing one segment of Four Love Stories as well as the screenplay for Sen-chan’s Silver Mountains.
I began by meeting with Uekusa Keinosuke to discuss the overall structure of One Wonderful Sunday, and then left the details in his hands. Taniguchi Senkichi and I stayed on at the hot-spring inn after everyone else went back to Tokyo, to work on the scenario for Silver Mountains, which we intended to finish there. I decided I could dash off the script for one of the Four Love Stories in a few days after Silver Mountains was done and before I went back to work with Uekusa on the final draft of One Wonderful Sunday.
As it turned out, I actually accomplished all that I set out to do on this insane schedule, and the three scripts got written on time. But if I hadn’t had as an impetus the pressure of the competition with Shin Toho’s star system and my desire to react against it, I never could have done it. First of all, the only ideas we had to go on for the Silver Mountains script were that it should be a manly sort of action film and, since Sen-chan was a mountain man, we should use an alpine location.
Sen-chan and I sat for three