Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [96]
But on the climax scene at the end we did have a minor difference. The poor couple are in an empty concert amphitheater and in their minds they hear Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” Naturally, the movie’s sound track should have no music on it for this scene. The girl breaks the rules of filmmaking and turns to the screen audience to address them. “Please, everyone, if you feel sorry for us, please clap your hands. If you clap for us, I’m sure we’ll be able to hear the music.” The audience applauds, and the boy in the film picks up a conductor’s baton. As soon as he starts to wave it, the “Unfinished” comes in on the sound track.
My intention here was to elicit audience participation in the film by addressing them directly. When an audience goes to see a film, they are more or less participating in it anyway, insofar as they become emotionally involved in the film and forget themselves. But this phenomenon takes place within people’s hearts, and it translates into action only to the extent of, for instance, spontaneous applause. What I wanted to do with this scene in One Wonderful Sunday was transform the audience into actual participants in the plot, to make them seem to affect the outcome of the film.
In response to my idea, Uekusa offered something else. He wanted to show the concert hall, which is empty at the beginning of the scene, giving forth the sound of applause after the girl makes her appeal. Then the camera would pick out, here and there in the darkness, couples who resemble our protagonists sitting in the amphitheater, and they would be revealed as the source of the applause. This seemed like the sort of device Uekusa would fabricate, and it was not without interest, but I refused to give in on my own plan. My reason was nothing so serious as the claim Uekusa makes that he and I are fundamentally different types of human beings. It was simply that I wanted to use my own idea to conduct a directorial experiment. The experiment proved to be a failure in Japan. The Japanese audience sat stock still, and because they couldn’t bring themselves to applaud, the whole thing was a failure. But in Paris it succeeded. Because the French audience responded with wild applause, the sound of the orchestra tuning up at the tail end of the clapping gave rise to the powerful and unusual emotion I had hoped for.)
There is one more thing about this scene in One Wonderful Sunday that I can’t forget. The hero of the story who waves the conductor’s baton for the “Unfinished Symphony” was played by Numasaki Isao, an actor who was remarkably unmusical. There are many varieties of insensitivity to music, but what Numasaki had was an imperviousness to strength or delicacy and softness, to the sharp, heavy or light qualities of sound. Even the film’s musical director, Hattori Tadashi, gave up on Numasaki. But of course we couldn’t leave it at that. Hattori and I took Numasaki, who stood completely stiff and waved his hands up and down like a toy soldier, and worked with him day after day to teach him how to conduct that symphony. Now, I am so lacking in dexterity that people say I look like a chimpanzee when I’m dialing the telephone, yet in the course of teaching Numasaki, Hattori gave me a grade of being “ready to conduct the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” so you can imagine how much effort I had to put into this.
The leads in One Wonderful Sunday were Numasaki and Nakakita Chieko, both of whom were still unknowns at the time. In order to do city location shooting, all we had to do was disguise the camera; no one recognized the actors’ faces. For these hidden-camera location sequences we put the camera in a box, which was in turn wrapped in a carrying cloth that had only a hole for the lens to poke through. This could then be hand-carried.
One day we planned a location shot in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. I set the camera bundle down on the platform and waited for the train to arrive. We were going to film Nakakita stepping off of it. But as I stood there an old