My Philosophy on Film

Akira Kurosawa, was the Japanese director, who opened the door on Japanese cinema to the rest of the world.  Before his films received critical acclaim worldwide, one of the greatest film industries in the world was widely unknown to the outside world.  He inspired numerous films and filmmakers, and it’s safe to say that movies would not be the same without his influence.  He also happens to be one of my favorite filmmakers, largely because his philosophy of what films can and should be so closely matches my own.  So when I decided I wanted to give my audience (small as it may be) an idea of what I look for in a film, I thought I’d take the opportunity to use Kurosawa and his films as an example.

One of this great director’s defining characteristics is his focus on the script.  Like myself he sees the script as the most important part, “With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”  I think for Kurosawa this idea spawns from his absolute love of literature.  From an early age he was absorbing literature of all sorts, and it certainly shaped his career.

He was constantly inspired by existing literature in the scripts that he wrote.  In films like Throne of Blood and Ran, he took Shakespeare and adapted it to Japanese culture.  While both are clear adaptations of Macbeth and King Lear respectively, he instructed his actors to model their facial expressions after the masks of Japanese Noh theater.  And he set the films in the world of Samurai.  What results is a completely unique interpretation of Shakespeare that somehow enhances your understanding of the classic plays.  

At this point I’m just going to post some Kurosawa quotes as they match so perfectly with what I think makes for good writing.

“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. You must also see the great films. You must read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.”

“I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.”

His goal was honesty in his characters and he put hours of work into developing the characters beyond anything he might need for the film just so that they would be more honest.  He learned that collaboration with other writers was another great way to create an honest character because it allowed him to separate his personal feelings for the characters from the direction that character would really act or react.  These methods were on full display when he and three other writers spent a month in seclusion at a hot spring resort writing the script for Seven Samurai.  They came away with an enormous script and Kurosawa personally had 6 notebooks of information just on the characters.  He then insisted that the actors playing the farmers live and work as the families they were supposed to be in the film.

His dedication to honesty in his characters and his stories is a defining feature of his career and one that I think makes for excellent cinema and excellent writing in general.  There was a devastating earthquake in Japan when he was just 13 and his older brother took him to see the devastation.  Young Akira wanted to look away from the devastation as it was graphic and brutal, but his brother wouldn’t allow it.  It clearly had an impact as he later said, “Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes.”  To me, this honesty and open-mindedness is essential in filmmaking.  You have to be open to any and all ideas, because you may have to write a character where an idea you find offensive or uncomfortable is a key element in who they are and what they do.

I have a Kurosawa quote on the top of my blog as to me it perfectly encapsulates my overall feelings about film.  This is the longer version of that quote, “For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”  No filmmaker more encapsulates this idea than Kurosawa.  He was trained as an artist and studied literature at a young age.  He applied for a job at a film studio on a whim, but rose quickly through the ranks due to his understanding of so many of the art forms that make up the medium of film.

Kurosawa was a perfectionist and often went over budget and well past the scheduled shooting time in order to perfect his films.  This caused difficulty with Japanese studios that had to start cutting costs and Kurosawa was forced to seek out funding in other places.  He went long periods of time without making films and at one point thought he had made his last film.  So instead he decided to paint the images of the film that he had in his head.  The series of paintings that he made were eventually used as frames of a storyboard for his 1980 film Kagemusha.  The visuals of the film are incredible and if you see his paintings you can understand why.

His experience with literature helps him craft excellent stories and characters.  His experience in art helps him create beautiful images on screen.  Much of his work was in black and what, but he still developed dynamic images through the staging of the shot and how it’s framed.  A popular trend now is 3D in film, which essentially accentuates the depth of field that films naturally have.  Kurosawa like many other great directors constantly found a way to add incredible depth to each and every shot.  It’s my firm belief that each shot of a film should be considered it’s own work of art and Kurosawa is one of those filmmakers that really makes you feel like that is true.  His dynamic editing and filming methods only add to the artistry and are unique elements to the medium of film.  It’s clear this man brought an artistic and literary eye to each and everyone of his films and you can really see that influence.  There’s a lot more I can probably say about his work, but I think I’ll just leave with a series of his paintings that were used to create the images in his film Kagemusha.