Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“[The three assistant directors on Rashomon] found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation:

‘Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.’”

-Akira Kurosawa, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography

Masayuki Mori & Machiko Kyō in Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa) (via)

Marge: C’mon, Homer, Japan will be fun. You liked Rashomon.

Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

-The Simpsons, Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo

Akira Kurosawa standing before a projected image of his favorite leading man, Toshiro Mifune (1963, photo by Brian Bake)

“During youth the desire for self-expression is so overpowering that most people end up by losing all grasp on their real selves.”

-Kurosawa, in his 1982 memoir Something Like an Autobiography 

Takashi Shimura as Watanabe, the bureaucrat doomed to die from cancer, in Ikiru (1952, dir. Akira Kurosawa) 

“Occasionally I think of my death … then I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath; while living a life like this, how could I leave it? There is, I feel, so much more for me to do — I keep feeling I have lived so little yet. Then I become thoughtful, but not sad. It was from such a feeling that Ikiru arose.”

-Kurosawa, quoted in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews

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Akira Kurosawa sets up the shot of Toshiro Mifune’s death in Throne of Blood (1957) (via)

“In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp all these things.”

-Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography 

Isuzu Yamada as Asaji/Lady Macbeth in Throne of Blood (1957, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“Out, damn’d spot! out, I say! What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

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Dersu Uzala (1975, dir. Akira Kurosawa) (via)

Throne of Blood (1957, dir. Akira Kurosawa) (via)

Akira Kurosawa with Martin Scorsese, who is getting made up for his turn as Vincent Van Gogh in Kurosawa’s Dreams (via)