70 Fun Facts About Akira Kurosawa

In what year was Akira Kurosawa born?

Akira Kurosawa was born on 23 March 1910 in the Ōimachi district of Tokyo, the eighth and youngest child of Isamu Kurosawa, a former army officer.

How many feature films did Kurosawa direct across his six-decade career?

Kurosawa directed 30 feature films, from Sanshiro Sugata (1943) to Madadayo (1993); he also wrote screenplays for other directors, which paid better than assistant directing.

What was Kurosawa's 1943 directorial debut, a judo story adapted from a Tsuneo Tomita novel?

Sanshiro Sugata (1943), adapted from Tsuneo Tomita's judo novel, was Kurosawa's first film as director; he read the novel in one sitting and had Toho secure the rights ahead of rival studios.

Which famous director's intervention got Kurosawa's debut past Japan's wartime censors?

Yasujirō Ozu, sitting on the wartime censorship panel, spoke up for Sanshiro Sugata and got it approved; a 1944 re-release nonetheless cut about 17 minutes, footage that is now lost.

Which unknown actor did Kurosawa cast in Drunken Angel (1948), beginning a 16-film partnership?

Toshiro Mifune's explosive turn as a tubercular yakuza stole the film from its nominal hero, the alcoholic doctor; the two men went on to 15 more films together.

Which prize did Rashomon unexpectedly win at the 1951 Venice Film Festival?

Rashomon took the Golden Lion, Venice's top prize, in 1951; Kurosawa did not even know Daiei had entered the film in the festival.

Who got Rashomon entered at Venice without Kurosawa's knowledge?

Giuliana Stramigioli had seen and admired the film and talked Daiei into submitting it.

Rashomon's murder-from-four-viewpoints plot comes from which writer's short story 'In a Grove'?

The title and the gate framing story come from a different Akutagawa story altogether.

What taboo did Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa break while shooting Rashomon in the forest?

Robert Altman said he copied the sun shots into his own work the day after first seeing the film.

Under what structure do the woodcutter, the monk and the commoner shelter from the rain in Rashomon?

The Rashōmon was the great southern gate of Heian-era Kyoto, so a ruined city gate gives the film its name; the set was built at Daiei's Kyoto studio.

Ikiru (1952) was inspired by a novella by which Russian author?

Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich inspired Ikiru, in which Tokyo bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, dying of stomach cancer, pushes a children's playground through city hall.

Which member of Kurosawa's regular troupe plays the dying bureaucrat Watanabe in Ikiru?

Takashi Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe; he had already been the alcoholic doctor in Drunken Angel (1948) and would lead the samurai as Kambei in Seven Samurai (1954).

In Ikiru's famous final image, Watanabe sits on a swing in the snow singing which song?

'Gondola no Uta' (1915), a song urging maidens to love before youth fades, is first sung by Watanabe in a nightclub, silencing the room; it returns on the swing as pure release.

How many days of shooting did Seven Samurai require, spread across almost a year?

Seven Samurai needed 148 days of shooting spread across almost a year, against a three-month schedule; it ran about three times over budget, the most expensive Japanese film made up to that time.

Where did Kurosawa take his two co-writers for 45 days to write Seven Samurai?

Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni spent 45 days sequestered at a secluded inn in Atami writing the script; the three had just written Ikiru together.

Where did Seven Samurai place in the critics' section of the 2022 Sight & Sound greatest-films poll?

Seven Samurai placed 20th in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll; Japanese critics polled by Kinema Junpo had earlier voted it the best Japanese film ever made.

Throne of Blood (1957) transplants which Shakespeare play to feudal Japan?

Macbeth's Lady was Isuzu Yamada, whom Kurosawa told to treat the play as a Japanese classic rather than a European one.

How was Washizu's death scene, in which his own men turn on him, staged in Throne of Blood?

Mifune reportedly waved his arms to signal the direction he'd move next so the archers could avoid him.

The stylised acting in Throne of Blood draws heavily on which traditional Japanese theatre?

Isuzu Yamada's near-motionless Lady Asaji is modelled on a Noh mask.

The Lower Depths (1957) adapts a play by which Russian writer, relocated to Edo-period Japan?

Maxim Gorky's 1902 play The Lower Depths was relocated to an Edo-period tenement; Kurosawa shot it on just two confined sets to stress how trapped the characters are.

Kurosawa relocated Dostoevsky's The Idiot from Russia to which part of Japan?

Kurosawa set The Idiot (1951) in snowbound Sapporo, Hokkaido; Shochiku cut his 265-minute version to 166 minutes, and the full cut no longer exists.

Which 1977 blockbuster did George Lucas say was heavily influenced by The Hidden Fortress?

George Lucas acknowledged Star Wars (1977) borrowed from The Hidden Fortress: two squabbling peasants escorting a princess through enemy lines became the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO with Princess Leia.

What are the names of the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress?

Tahei and Matashichi, the greedy, quarrelling peasants, are played by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, both veterans of Seven Samurai.

What does the wandering rōnin in Yojimbo look at when he invents his surname?

Kuwabatake means mulberry field; Sanjuro means 'thirty years old', which he admits is a rough guess.

Which Sergio Leone film was a virtual scene-by-scene remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, prompting a successful Toho lawsuit?

Kurosawa reportedly wrote to Leone that A Fistful of Dollars was 'a very fine film, but it is my film'; Toho's suit was settled with Kurosawa receiving 15% of the worldwide gross.

High and Low (1963) was adapted from King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel written under which pseudonym?

Ed McBain was the pen name Evan Hunter used for his 87th Precinct novels; King's Ransom (1959) became a film Kurosawa intended as a condemnation of kidnapping, a crime he considered among the worst.

What is the single splash of colour in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low?

The plume of pink smoke rises from an incinerator chimney where the kidnapper burns the ransom briefcases, which police had treated to give off coloured smoke; it betrays his location.

Which of his films did Kurosawa make in 1965 as his last collaboration with Mifune?

Red Beard (1965) was the 16th and last Kurosawa–Mifune film; the shoot ran nearly two years and left everyone exhausted, and why the two never worked together again was never fully explained.

Which 1970 Pearl Harbor epic did Kurosawa leave after three weeks, effectively fired by the studio?

Kurosawa was to direct the Japanese half of Tora! Tora! Tora! but was removed in December 1968 after about three weeks of shooting; Fox had him examined by doctors, who reported nervous exhaustion.

Which director was originally slated for the American half of Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor film, before Richard Fleischer?

David Lean was the director Kurosawa believed would handle the American half; Fox replaced him with Richard Fleischer, and Kurosawa's four-hour script for his own segment was capped at 90 minutes.

Which 1970 film was Kurosawa's first in colour?

Dodesukaden (1970), shot quickly and cheaply to prove he could still work fast, was Kurosawa's first colour film; it lost money and his Club of the Four Knights production company dissolved.

Which Kurosawa film shot in Siberia for Mosfilm won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar?

Dersu Uzala (1975), shot in Siberia for Mosfilm from Vladimir Arsenyev's memoir of a Nanai (Goldi) hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as the Soviet entry.

Which two American filmmakers got Fox to back Kagemusha and are its executive producers?

George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola persuaded 20th Century Fox to advance money for Kagemusha's foreign rights, completing its financing; Fox was the studio that had removed Kurosawa from Tora! Tora! Tora! a decade earlier.

Kagemusha shared the 1980 Palme d'Or with which American film?

All That Jazz, Bob Fosse's autobiographical musical, shared the 1980 Palme d'Or with Kagemusha, an odd pair on the Cannes podium.

Which dying warlord does the petty thief impersonate in Kagemusha?

The real Takeda Shingen died in 1573 while besieging Noda Castle, and his death was reportedly kept secret for three years on his own orders.

Which actor was fired from the lead of Kagemusha for insisting on videotaping his own performance?

Shintaro Katsu, famous as the blind swordsman Zatoichi, was dismissed on the first day of shooting after bringing his own video crew; Tatsuya Nakadai took over and then led Ran too.

Ran (1985) is partly based on which Shakespeare tragedy?

King Lear supplied the frame of an old ruler dividing his domain among his children; the idea began with the legend of a 16th-century daimyō's three loyal sons, and Kurosawa wondered what would happen if they were not loyal.

Which real Japanese daimyō, famous for three loyal sons, inspired the story of Ran?

Mōri Motonari (1497–1571) is credited with the parable of the three arrows: one snaps easily, three together do not; Kurosawa imagined the sons as disloyal instead.

Ran won its only Academy Award in which category?

Costume Design, for Emi Wada's hundreds of hand-made costumes that took years to produce, was Ran's only win from four Oscar nominations, which included Kurosawa's only Best Director nod.

Which American director campaigned to get Kurosawa a Best Director Oscar nomination for Ran?

Sidney Lumet, who called Kurosawa the 'Beethoven of movie directors', rallied Academy members to secure the nomination; Sydney Pollack won that year for Out of Africa.

Which filmmaker plays Vincent van Gogh in the 'Crows' segment of Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)?

Martin Scorsese, then in the middle of making Goodfellas, plays Van Gogh in the 'Crows' segment; Kurosawa had asked him in a personal letter.

Which director convinced Warner Bros. to buy the international rights to Dreams so it could be financed?

Steven Spielberg persuaded Warner Bros. to buy the international rights, which got Dreams financed; it was also the first screenplay Kurosawa had written entirely alone in over forty years.

Which Hollywood star has a small role in Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August (1991)?

Richard Gere plays Clark, the Hawaiian-born Japanese-American nephew who visits his elderly aunt, a Nagasaki atomic-bomb survivor, in Rhapsody in August.

What was Kurosawa's final film, released in 1993, about a professor's yearly birthday parties?

Madadayo means 'Not yet': at each birthday party the students ask Professor Uchida 'Are you ready?' and he shouts back that he is not ready to die yet.

In his 1990 honorary Oscar speech, what did Kurosawa say he was 'a little worried' about?

He was 80 and considered by many the greatest living filmmaker at the time.

What job did Kurosawa's beloved older brother Heigo hold in late-1920s Tokyo?

Heigo was a benshi, a silent-film narrator, and led a narrators' strike when talkies put them out of work; he took his own life in 1933, a loss Kurosawa titled 'A Story I Don't Want to Tell'.

Which director became Kurosawa's mentor after championing his hiring as an assistant director in 1936?

Kajirō Yamamoto took Kurosawa on at P.C.L. (later Toho), promoted him from third to chief assistant within a year, and told him a director must first master screenwriting.

Which editing transition became Kurosawa's visual signature in his mature work?

George Lucas borrowed it wholesale for the scene changes in his 1977 space saga.

On the set of which 1944 propaganda film did Kurosawa meet his future wife, actress Yōko Yaguchi?

On The Most Beautiful (1944), about women in an optics factory, Yōko Yaguchi was chosen by the other actresses to present their complaints to him; the arguing brought them together and they married in 1945.

Which composer, Kurosawa's close friend, died of tuberculosis during the making of I Live in Fear (1955)?

Fumio Hayasaka, who had scored Rashomon and Seven Samurai, died of tuberculosis in 1955; his student Masaru Sato finished I Live in Fear and scored the next eight Kurosawa films.

Which friend of Kurosawa shot the war-torn Tokyo black-market footage in Stray Dog (1949)?

Ishirō Honda, Kurosawa's friend from their assistant-director days and later director of Godzilla (1954), shot the nearly wordless eight-minute sequence of Mifune's detective combing Tokyo's black markets.

Which of these directors joined Kurosawa in the 1969 'Club of the Four Knights' production company?

Kon Ichikawa joined Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi in the Club of the Four Knights (Yonki no Kai); the plan was mostly to help Kurosawa get back to work, and Dodesukaden was its only film.

Which product did Kurosawa advertise in a series of 1976 Japanese television commercials?

Kurosawa appeared in a series of Suntory whisky commercials in 1976; the famously hard-drinking director otherwise shunned television, apart from Song of the Horse (1970), a documentary about racehorses.

Kurosawa's leading man Mifune was born in which country?

China's Qingdao, then Japanese-occupied Seitō in Shandong, was his birthplace; his father ran a photography business there and Mifune didn't set foot in Japan until adulthood.

Which Swedish director called his own film The Virgin Spring a 'lousy imitation of Kurosawa'?

Ingmar Bergman wrote in Images: My Life in Film that The Virgin Spring (1960) was a 'lousy imitation of Kurosawa', adding that he admired Japanese cinema so much then that he was 'almost a samurai myself'.

Kurosawa's abandoned English-language project was finally filmed in 1985 by Konchalovsky under what title?

Runaway Train (1985), directed by Andrei Konchalovsky from Kurosawa's 1966 script, had been planned as an Embassy Pictures thriller and Kurosawa's first colour film; the language barrier and scheduling sank it.

How old was Kurosawa when he died of a stroke in Tokyo in 1998?

Kurosawa was 88 when he died of a stroke at home in Setagaya, Tokyo, on 6 September 1998; a 1995 fall that broke the base of his spine had left him in a wheelchair.

Before entering the film industry, what career did the young Kurosawa pursue?

He exhibited with the Proletarian Artists' League but never made a living from his art, and later drew his own storyboards.

Which director made The Magnificent Seven (1960), the Western remake of Seven Samurai?

John Sturges directed The Magnificent Seven (1960), with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson among the gunfighters defending a Mexican village from Eli Wallach's Calvera.

Which 1962 Kurosawa film is a sequel to Yojimbo, reworked from a Shūgorō Yamamoto novel?

Sanjuro (1962) began as an adaptation of Shūgorō Yamamoto's Hibi Heian; after Yojimbo's success Toho had Kurosawa rework it around Mifune's rōnin.

In Stray Dog (1949), what is stolen from rookie detective Murakami on a crowded bus?

Murakami's Colt pistol is pickpocketed on a packed bus during a Tokyo heatwave, and the film follows his hunt for it, a precursor of the police procedural and buddy-cop genres.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a critique of corporate corruption, draws on which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet is the loose model: Mifune plays Nishi, who marries into a corrupt corporation to avenge his father's death; it was the first film from Kurosawa's own production company.

Which 1996 Walter Hill film starring Bruce Willis relocated Kurosawa's Yojimbo to a Prohibition-era Texas town?

Last Man Standing was a commercial disappointment, grossing $47 million against a $67 million budget.

Who composed the score for Ran (1985)?

Tōru Takemitsu composed Ran's score; Kurosawa asked for music in the spirit of Mahler, and the assault on the third castle plays to Takemitsu's elegy with all sound effects silenced.

Kurosawa's father Isamu came from a samurai family in which Japanese prefecture?

Isamu Kurosawa descended from an Akita samurai family and ran a school attached to the Army Physical Education Institute; Kurosawa's mother Shima came from an Osaka merchant family.

In December of which year did Kurosawa attempt suicide, unable to fund new work, before recovering to make Dersu Uzala?

On December 22, 1971 he slit his wrists and throat multiple times; he recovered quickly and went on to make Dersu Uzala for the Soviet studio Mosfilm.

What profession did Kurosawa's daughter Kazuko take up?

Kazuko Kurosawa became a costume designer, working on her father's Rhapsody in August and Madadayo and on many later Japanese films; his son Hisao produced some of his last projects.

Rashomon received an honorary foreign-language film Oscar at which edition of the Academy Awards?

The 24th Academy Awards, held in March 1952, gave Rashomon an honorary award as the outstanding foreign-language film of 1951, five years before a competitive category existed.

Which film was Kurosawa's first shot in anamorphic widescreen?

The Hidden Fortress (1958) was Kurosawa's first film in anamorphic TohoScope widescreen; he used the format again on Yojimbo, Sanjuro and High and Low.

In which Japanese city is High and Low (1963) set?

High and Low is set in Yokohama: Gondo's hilltop house overlooks the port city, and the kidnapper, living in the sweltering slums below, resents the view from above.