More from Kurosawa
More salient passages from Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography:
On editing:
I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively. […]
Yama-San in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.
But, no matter how much work the director, the assistant director, the cameraman or the lighting technicians put into a film, the audience never knows. What is necessary is to show them something that is complete and has no excess. When you are shooting, of course, you film only what you believe is necessary. But very often you realize only after having shot it that you didn’t need it after all. You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them. In film editing, this natural inclination is the most dangerous of all attitudes.
I’m fascinated by how this language echoes that of great product creators like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc., which I suppose reinforces the idea that making an excellent, evocative product that someone can repeatedly use is akin to creating a great work of art.
On work ethic:
In the middle of the night I woke up. When I turned over, I saw light coming through the cracks around the door of Yama-san’s room. I got up and very softly walked over and peeked in. I saw Yama-san seated on top of his bed with his back to the door. He was reading.
He was poring over the manuscript of my Sugata Sanshiro screenplay. He was going through it very carefully page by page, sometimes turning back the pages and rereading. In that concentrated silhouette there should have been some sign of the exhaustion of the day’s shooting and the evening’s drinking. Not a trace. The barracks occupants had all gone to sleep; there wasn’t a sound anywhere, except for the pages turning. I wanted to say, “You have to get up early in the morning— it’s all right, you don’t have to do this for me, please go to sleep.” But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to speak. His seriousness was intimidating. I sat down and waited with my back erect for him to finish reading. I will never forget that view of Yama-san’s back and the sound of those pages turning.
I was thirty-two years old. At last I had climbed to the base of the peak I had to scale, and I stood gazing up at my mountain.
Simple, clean, refreshing: reading Kurosawa write about his life is like drinking a cool bottle of Oi Ocha on a warm day.
