Akira Kurosawa(1910-1998)
- Writer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale
paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant
director, eventually making his directorial debut with
Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a
few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him
greater creative freedom.
Drunken Angel (1948) was the first film he made without extensive studio
interference, and marked his first collaboration with
Toshirô Mifune. In the coming decades,
the two would make 16 movies together, and Mifune became as closely
associated with Kurosawa's films as was
John Wayne with the films of
Kurosawa's idol, John Ford. After
working in a wide range of genres, Kurosawa made his international
breakthrough film Rashomon (1950) in
1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first
revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West. The next few
years saw the low-key, touching
Ikiru (1952) (Living), the epic
Seven Samurai (1954),
the barbaric, riveting Shakespeare adaptation
Throne of Blood (1957), and a fun pair of
samurai comedies Yojimbo (1961) and
Sanjuro (1962). After a
lean period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, Kurosawa
attempted suicide. He survived, and made a small, personal, low-budget
picture with Dodes'ka-den (1970), a
larger-scale Russian co-production
Dersu Uzala (1975) and, with the help
of admirers Francis Ford Coppola
and George Lucas, the samurai tale
Kagemusha (1980), which Kurosawa
described as a dry run for Ran (1985), an
epic adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear." He continued to work into
his eighties with the more personal
Dreams (1990),
Rhapsody in August (1991)
and Madadayo (1993). Kurosawa's films
have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan,
where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors
(William Shakespeare,
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Maxim Gorky and
Evan Hunter) with suspicion - but he's
revered by American and European film-makers, who remade
Rashomon (1950) as
The Outrage (1964),
Seven Samurai (1954),
as
The Magnificent Seven (1960),
Yojimbo (1961), as
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
and
The Hidden Fortress (1958),
as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).
