Cinema: A Japanese Apocalypse

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He demanded complete artistic freedom, stretched his shooting schedules, bloated his budgets. The bankers screamed, but when they threatened to cut one of his films Kurosawa icily recommended: "Cut it lengthwise." Free of financial worries. Kurosawa concentrates on creation. He works closely with his scriptwriters, finishes every film in his head before he starts to shoot—usually with three cameras at once. With his crew Kurosawa is curt; with his cast he is patient. He never scolds an actor—though once, when an actor infuriated him, he turned to a horse that was standing near by and bellowed in the poor brute's ear: "Idiot!" He tells his players what he wants in gestures and images—while making Rashomon he took Mifune to see a movie about Africa, and as a lion went gliding across the screen said quietly: "There's your killer." In the cutting room, Kurosawa works every trick of the trade to achieve an effect of compacted intensity and demonic drive. A Kurosawa film is almost always a shattering, exhausting experience. His genius is excessive; he attempts to crowd the whole of life into every frame, and if the spectator cannot take the whole of life he can go take an aspirin. Kurosawa despises the traditional Japanese esthetic of "artless simplicity." His method and his values are more Western, more active, more individual. "You must have respect for everyone, no matter how unimportant he seems to be," says a character in one of his films, "because you cannot tell who he really is, you cannot tell what tremendous importance his little life may have for the whole of humanity." In the individual Kurosawa sees all humanity, and his passion for the individual has made him both an incendiary and a firebringer, a revolutionary not in politics but of morals. "I am interested," he says simply, "in producing a better quality of man." The man he means is a man of large humanity who loves evil as well as good, who sees life drunkenly and sees it whole, who laughs with the grand laughter that accepts and brothers everything that breathes. But men cannot win to such wisdom without suffering, and in his films Kurosawa shows them what to suffer: the world as it is, themselves as they are.