You know, when we picture a modern movie blockbuster
being made today, there's this underlying expectation
of ultimate sterile control. Oh, completely.
Right, like you can picture actors wearing those
gray motion capture suits, standing in a massive,
totally climate -controlled warehouse that's
just completely surrounded by green screens or,
you know, LED volumes. Yeah, total environmental
manipulation. Exactly. Yeah. If the director
suddenly decides, hey, I want a thousand charging
horses, or a towering castle, or a torrential
downpour. A visual effects artist just does a
few clicks on a keyboard, and boom, there it
is. It's clean. It's so clean, it's safe. It's
basically a digital laboratory, where all the
chaotic variables of the real world have been
entirely eliminated. The filmmaker is totally
insulated from the physical elements, which,
I mean, it makes the logistical process incredibly
efficient. But then, and this is where it gets
crazy, you put on a black and white cinematic
epic. from say the 1950s and suddenly that clean
safe laboratory is just completely obliterated.
Oh absolutely shattered. You're looking at a
screen that is absolutely drenched in real freezing
rain. You are watching actors literally sinking
up to their knees in actual thick mud, swinging
heavy wooden swords. Yeah, swinging for their
lives. There's a level of chaotic, visceral humanity
happening on the screen that is so intense, it
makes you feel like you need a warm towel and
a hot shower just from watching it. It is the
absolute definition of raw, uncompromising filmmaking.
Right. And the chaos you are feeling as a viewer,
it isn't an accident on the era, right? It is
a highly engineered, deliberate assault on the...
senses designed to force you to feel the reality
of the scene. Welcome to this deep dive into
the life, the intense personal struggles, and
the unparalleled cinematic triumphs of Akira
Kurosawa. A true master. Looking through the
comprehensive biographical records and the historical
accounts of his sprawling career, our mission
today is to look way beyond the famous movie
titles you might have heard of. Yeah, the ones
everyone knows. We want to unpack the life of
the man who fundamentally revolutionized global
cinema. We are going to explore how a painter
turned director navigated intense wartime censorship,
bridged a massive cultural gap between East and
West, survived crushing personal and professional
despair, and ultimately secured a legacy as one
of the most influential storytellers in human
history. It is a profound story of survival.
I mean, the resilience he demanded from his characters
on screen was directly mirrored by the resilience
he had to manufacture in his own life, both in
front of and behind the camera. And even if you,
listening right now, have never consciously sat
down to watch a single Kurosawa film in your
life, I guarantee you have consumed media shaped
by his DNA. Oh, without a doubt. You are like
the buddy cop genre. He pioneered it. Are you
a fan of Star Wars? Huge influence there. George
Lucas directly lifted his narrative structures
in visual editing techniques. Do you enjoy epic
movies with chaotic mud -soaked battle scenes
where the weather reflects the emotional turmoil
of the characters? That is all Kurosawa. Okay,
let's unpack this. So to really understand the
origins of that fearless unflinching directorial
style, we have to bypass the movie sets entirely
and go back to his childhood in Tokyo. Right.
Way back. Yeah, Kurosawa was born in 1910, the
youngest of eight children. His father was a
strict military man who, rather unusually for
the time, actually encouraged an appreciation
for Western theater and film. Which is pretty
rare for a military guy back then. Exactly. But
the true architect of Kurosawa's worldview was
actually his older brother, Heiko. And that worldview
was forged in the fires of a literal historical
disaster. It really was. In 1923, the great Kanto
earthquake struck Japan. The devastation was
just apocalyptic. Entire city blocks were flattened,
firestorms swept through the wooden houses, and
over 100 ,000 people lost their lives. Kurosawa
is just 13 years old when the ground stops shaking.
Barely a teenager. And in the immediate smoky
aftermath, his older brother Haigo does something
unthinkable. He takes the young Kurosawa on a
walking tour through the absolute epicenter of
the destruction. They were navigating through
absolute ruins. This wasn't a casual survey of
property damage, you know. They were walking
through streets scattered with the horrific aftermath
of the fire. His body's everywhere. Human and
animal corpses were everywhere. Naturally, a
13 -year -old boy's instinct is to look away,
to hide his face. But Hago physically gripped
him and explicitly forbade him from averting
his eyes. Wow. He forced his younger brother
to look directly at the horror, telling him a
psychological truth. If you close your eyes to
a terrifying sight, the terror will only grow
and fester inside you. You defeat fear by staring
directly at it. That is just staggering. I mean,
it is extreme exposure therapy. Yeah. You figure
if you were forced to stare into the literal
smoldering abyss of human mortality at age 13,
what could possibly intimidate you later in life?
Nothing, really. Right. If you're a blink at
the end of the world, no cinematic subject, no
matter how dark or violent, is ever going to
scare you off. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, that mandate from Hego to not look away
became the defining philosophical ethos of Curaçao's
entire body of work. It's all right there. It
created a filmmaker with a total willingness
to confront the darkest, most unpleasant and
morally ambiguous truths of the human condition.
He didn't shy away from poverty, greed or brutal
violence because he had been taught from childhood
that you must face the ugly reality head on to
conquer it. But the tragedy surrounding Hego
doesn't end with the earthquake. Hego was a brilliant,
highly artistic, but deeply troubled guy. He
made his living in the 1920s as a benshee. Right,
a benshee. Which was, um... A benshi was a highly
specialized celebrated profession in Japanese
cinema before the advent of synchronized sound.
When silent films played in theaters, the benshi
would stand next to the screen and perform the
movie live. Like a live narrator? Yeah, they
would narrate the action, voice all the different
characters, and explain the plot. They were massive
stars in their own right, sometimes drawing larger
crowds than the films themselves. Heigo was a
master of this craft. Then the 1930s arrive,
and technology marches forward. The talkies hit
the market. Movies now have their own synchronized
audio tracks. And that changes everything. Almost
overnight, the entire benchy profession is rendered
completely obsolete. Haigo loses his livelihood,
he loses his artisting purpose, and he organizes
a massive failed strike against the studios.
Tragically, in 1933, Haigo took his own life.
Kurosawa had been living with Haigo at the time.
He deeply idolized him. The loss was profound
and foundational. It had to be. Nearly 50 years
later, when Kurosawa was writing his autobiography,
the chapter covering this specific period of
his life was simply titled, A Story I Don't Want
to Tell. The wound never fully closed. It's that
exact foundational trauma that eventually pushes
him toward the film industry, almost by accident.
Kurosawa originally wanted to be a painter, but
he couldn't make a living at it. By 1936, he
needed a paycheck, so he answered a newspaper
ad for an assistant director position at a new
film studio. He spent years learning the rigorous
technical ropes of a film set, but he quickly
realized something pragmatic scriptwriting paid
significantly better than being a lowly assistant
director. Just following the money, basically.
Exactly. So he honed his writing skills. This
gave him a massive structural advantage because
he learned how to construct a narrative from
the blank page up. By 1943, he finally gets the
chance to direct his debut film, a martial arts
action movie about Judo called Senshiro Sugata.
And his career almost ended before it began.
Japan is deeply embroiled in World War Two at
this point, and the national wartime censors
review his debut movie and deem it too British
American, which was incredibly dangerous. In
1943, Imperial Japan, calling a piece of media
British American, was basically a death sentence
for the film and potentially dangerous for the
film. filmmaker. The only reason the movie saw
the light of day was because the legendary established
Japanese director Yasujira Ozu intervened and
championed the film's artistic merit to the censorship
board. The Japanese state wasn't interested in
artistic nuance, you know? They wanted pure,
galvanized propaganda. And Kurosawa was tasked
with delivering exactly that for his next project
in 1944, a movie called The Most Beautiful. The
mandate was straightforward, make an inspiring
propaganda piece about female factory workers
happily supporting the war effort by manufacturing
optical lenses. I have to hit pause and push
back on this a little, because this is where
his legendary method emerges, and I find it so
surprising. How so? If you are hired by a strict
military state to make a straightforward, government
-mandated propaganda film, why go to extreme
obsessive lengths? You'd think propaganda would
be the one place where a director just tells
the actors to hit their marks, smile patriotically,
and go home. Why force the actresses to undergo
actual corment? Because Kurosawa found artificiality
physically repulsive. He realized he had to balance
the rigid demands of the military state, giving
them the pro -war narrative they required with
his own uncompromising pursuit of emotional realism.
He couldn't just fake it. No, he figured if these
women are going to represent the struggle and
sacrifice of the Japanese nation, the exhaustion
on their faces needs to be real. The hunger in
their eyes needs to be real. So he literally
forces them to live in a real factory during
the entire shoot. They weren't allowed to go
home. At all? They had to eat the actual meager
factory rations, sleep in the cramped dormitories,
and he demanded they call each other by their
character names, even when the cameras stopped
rolling. He created a pressure cooker. It was
an incredibly early, extreme form of immersive
directing. He was breaking down their polished
acting habits to find the raw human beings underneath.
Unsurprisingly, that stubbornness caused massive
friction. On that factory set, The actresses
were completely miserable. They ended up choosing
one of their own, an actress named Yoko Yaguchi,
to act as their unofficial union representative.
She was the brave one. She was tasked with presenting
their collective demands and complaints directly
to Kurosawa. They clashed constantly. The arguments
over the grueling set conditions were passionate
and bitter. Which, amazingly, is exactly how
they fell in love. It's so ironic. The friction
turned into mutual respect, and they argued so
passionately that they ended up getting married
in 1945. She never acted again, and they stayed
married for 40 years until her death. It is an
incredible origin story for a relationship born
entirely out of creative conflict. Fast forward
a few years. The war ends, the atomic bombs are
dropped, and Japan is now under American occupation.
The censorship shifts drastically. A complete
180. Right. Now the American censors are banning
anything that looks too feudal or aggressively
traditional. But this chaotic post -war era is
where Kurosawa truly finds his cinematic voice.
He also finds his greatest on -screen collaborator,
the legendary actor Toshiro Mifune. They kick
off a 16 -film collaboration, starting with a
1948 film called Drunken Angel. Nefune was incredible.
He possessed this explosive, animalistic, almost
feral energy that perfectly matched Kurosawa's
highly dynamic visual style. They were constantly
innovating new cinematic languages together.
In 1949, they made a film called Stray Dog. Oh,
I love that one. It's a sweaty, desperate police
procedural where a rookie detective loses his
gun and has to team up with a seasoned, cynical
veteran to track it down in the sweltering slums
of post -war Tokyo. Film historians widely consider
this the birth of the entire buddy cop genre.
Domestic success in Japan was one thing, but
we have to talk about how Kurosawa accidentally
kicked down the door to the global market and
changed international cinema forever. And it
all revolves around a low budget 1950 movie called
Rashomon. Rashomon was structurally revolutionary.
It recounts a single event, the murder of a samurai
and the assault of his wife in a forest. but
it tells the story from the conflicting, highly
unreliable viewpoints of four different characters.
The bandit, the wife, the samurai speaking through
a medium, and a woodcutter who secretly watched.
Exactly. The studio, Dai, hated the script. They
didn't understand it. They gave him a tiny budget.
Kurosawa took his crew out into the primeval
forest of Nara, and he broke a major technical
rule of the era. He pointed the camera directly
into the sun. Which you just didn't do back then.
No. But the dappled light coming through the
leaves created this mesmerizing, disorienting
atmosphere. They rushed the post -production
because of studio fire, and it released to pretty
lukewarm reviews in Japan. As far as Kurosawa
knew, it was a modest, slightly confusing little
picture. Undenounced to him, an Italian film
representative based in Japan named Giuliana
Stramaggioli saw it. Here's where it gets really
interesting. She was absolutely floored by its
visual poetry and narrative complexity. Without
telling Kurosawa or the studio, she secretly
submitted it to the Venice Film Festival. In
1951, it wins the Golden Lion. the festival's
highest prize. The entire international film
world, which had largely ignored or was completely
ignorant of Japanese cinema at the time, was
in absolute shock. They didn't know it hit them.
A U .S. distributor takes a massive gamble and
brings this subtitled Black and White Japanese
Film to an arthouse theater in New York. It explodes.
It makes an unheard of $35 ,000 in three weeks
at a single theater. This raises an important
question. How did a deeply Japanese story set
in the 12th century high end period manage to
resonate so profoundly with a 1950s Western audience
that had zero cultural context for samurai or
Japanese history? I'm struggling to understand
that exact point. How does a movie with that
much cultural distance shatter the language barrier
and captivate New York audiences? Because Kurosawa
proved that human psychology is universal. The
film isn't really about a samurai or a bandit,
you know, it's an exploration of the subjectivity
of truth. Everybody lies. Right. It's about how
human beings will desperately lie to protect
their egos and how our selfish perspectives warp
our reality. That isn't an Eastern or Western
concept that is a fundamental flawed human trait.
It's just human nature. Exactly. Kurosawa laid
it bare with such technical mastery using the
camera to visually distinguish the lies from
the truth that the cultural barrier completely
evaporated. That international cash flow changed
his entire trajectory. Suddenly, Kurosawa is
bankable on a massive global scale. This blank
check allows him to make his sprawling, insanely
expensive epics, most notably Seven Samurai in
1954. A true masterpiece. This is the three and
a half hour masterpiece of action and character.
It took a year to shoot. It went three times
over budget. It was the most expensive Japanese
film ever made at the time. The mechanics of
how he shot Seven Samurai revolutionized action
cinema. Prior to this, action was often shot
wide and static. Kurosawa pioneered the use of
multiple cameras simultaneously, an A, B, and
C camera running at the same time from different
angles. Just brilliant. He did this because he
realized that in a chaotic battle scene involving
dozens of horses, thick mud, and heavy rain,
you cannot ask an actor to perfectly repeat a
spontaneous moment of exhaustion or terror. You
have to capture the lightning in a bottle from
every angle the first time it happens. He also
perfected the axial cut. Oh, yes. Instead of
smoothly zooming in on an actor's face during
a tense moment, the camera aggressively jumps
forward along the exact same line of sight in
jarring increments. It creates this percussive
energetic punch to the viewer's focus. He built
an entire medieval village just to burn it to
the ground. He created the modern action epic.
But massive ambition eventually becomes a double
edged sword. As we move into the late 1960s,
the landscape of global entertainment fundamentally
shifts. Television begins dominating Japanese
leisure time. Movie theater attendance plummets.
The studios panic. Right. Kurosawa is still demanding
year -long shoots, infinite takes, and massive
budgets. But the studios no longer view his perfectionism
as an artistic necessity. They view it as a terrifying
financial liability. Which forces him to look
to America. He attempts a massive Hollywood transition
with a product called Tora. Tora. Tora. The concept
was fascinating. Make a definitive film about
the attack on Pearl Harbor showing both sides.
An American director handles the US side and
Kurosawa directs the Japanese side. The production
was a catastrophic culture clash from day one.
Kurosawa was used to absolute dictatorial authority
on his sets in Japan. Suddenly, he's dealing
with strict American Union rules, an unfamiliar
crew, a massive language barrier, and the rigid
corporate oversight of 20th Century Fox. It perfectly
mirrors a visionary tech founder being aggressively
ousted by a corporate board of directors. You
have this unorthodox genius who built the industry
from the ground up, but the corporate suits don't
understand his grueling methods. They just saw
numbers on a page. They just see a guy burning
through their cash reserves, waiting days for
the exact right cloud formation to pass over
the set. The American producers, led by studio
executive Darrell Zanuck, literally couldn't
comprehend his process. They assumed his intense
erratic behavior meant he was losing his mind.
So they basically called in a doctor. They brought
in a neuropsychologist to examine him. This doctor
forwarded a diagnosis to the Fox executives,
claiming Kurosawa was suffering from neurasthenia,
citing sleep disturbance, anxiety, and manic
excitement. Which honestly just sounds like the
medical definition of a passionate director trying
to make a massive movie. But Fox used that diagnosis
as corporate ammunition. On Christmas Eve 1968,
they released a statement announcing Kurosawa
was leaving the production due to Fatigue. That's
such a cover -up. They effectively fired him
and replaced him. Not a single frame of his meticulously
planned footage made it into the final film.
His reputation back in Japan was shattered. The
industry whispered that the master was finished,
that his sanity had fractured. Desperate to prove
them wrong, he quickly pulled together an independent
film in 1970 called Dore Sukarin, focusing on
outcasts living in a garbage dump. A huge pivot.
He shot it rapidly and cheaply to prove he could
adhere to a tight schedule. The audience completely
ignored it. It bombed at the box office. And
this is where the story hits its most tragic
low. In December 1971, a 61 -year -old Kurosawa
is sitting at home. He is convinced he will never
be allowed to work again, that his life's singular
purpose has been permanently revoked. It's heartbreak
though. He takes a razor and slashes his wrists
and his throat in this suicide attempt. It is
a stark, sobering reality of what happens when
an artist's entire identity is inextricably linked
to their output. When the ability to create was
removed, he simply couldn't justify his own existence.
Thankfully, miraculously, he survived the attempt.
His family found him, and he slowly recovered
his physical health. But the looming question
remained, how does a 60 -something director come
back from total industry excommunication? He
finds salvation in unexpected places. First,
the Soviet Union offers him a lifeline. The USSR.
Yeah. He travels to the literal freezing taiga
of Siberia to direct Dersu Uzala in 1975, enduring
incredibly harsh natural conditions that reinvigorated
his spirit. That film goes on to win the Academy
Award for best foreign language film. But the
punchline is, even with a fresh gleaning Oscar
in his hand, the Japanese studios still refuse
to fund his next movie. They wouldn't touch him.
They still view him as radioactive. That is the
moment two young, wildly successful American
directors step in, George Lucas and Francis Ford
Coppola. George Lucas had just fundamentally
altered pop culture with Star Wars in 1977. And
Lucas has always been incredibly open about the
fact that the narrative architecture of Star
Wars was heavily lifted from Kurosawa's 1958
film, The Hidden Fortress. It wasn't just visual
nods. It was the core storytelling mechanic.
Kurosawa had the revolutionary idea to tell a
massive sweeping epic about princesses and generals,
but entirely from the point of view of the two
lowest, most ignorant, bickering peasants. Lucas
took that exact framework and turned those two
peasants into R2 -D2 and C -3PO. Recognizing
his profound debt, Lucas uses his massive new
industry clout to force 20th Century Fox to help
finance Kurosawa's next epic, a samurai film
called Kajimusha. It's amazing. Isn't it incredibly
poetic that the very studio that fired him, 20th
Century Fox, the ones who called him crazy on
Christmas Eve a decade earlier, is now being
strong armed into writing him a check by the
kid who grew up studying his framed compositions.
It perfectly mirrors the master and disciple
dynamic that runs through so many of Kurosawa's
own films. The older, weathered mentor passes
his knowledge down to the young novices, and
in the third act, the novices use their newly
acquired power to protect the master. Kajimusha
comes out in 1980, wins the Palme d 'Or at Cannes,
and acts as the stepping stone to his 1985 magnum
opus, Ran, which is a breathtaking adaptation
of King Lear. It is fascinating, though, to look
at the historical records of how his later work
was received, because his massive cultural footprint
became a roll shot test for different political
anxieties. Well, heavily. Now, obviously, we're
just reporting these critiques from the source
material. We aren't taking a side or validating
either political viewpoint here. But on one hand,
you had left -wing Japanese critics accusing
him of being elitist, arguing he focused too
heavily on heroic individuals rather than the
collective struggles of the working class. And
then on the other side. Right. On the other side,
when he released Rhapsody in August in 1991,
which dealt with the emotional fallout of the
Nagasaki atomic bombing, some American critics
loudly accused him of pushing anti -American
sentiment and ignoring Japan's own wartime atrocities.
As the inevitable friction of being a global
icon bridging to cultures that were recently
at war. Art of that magnitude always invites
sharp polarized critique. It comes with the territory.
But regardless of the political debates, his
technical innovations, like his mastery of the
axial cut, his brilliant use of extreme weather
to externalize internal emotion, and his iconic
screen wipes to transition scenes, which Lucas
also borrowed, they permanently rewired the grammar
of modern filmmaking. So what does this all mean?
It means Kurosawa's story is the ultimate masterclass
in creative resilience. Whether you're prepping
for a massive corporate pivot, trying to learn
a dense new field, or pursuing your own artistic
endeavors, Kurosawa proves that staying fiercely
true to your vision can cement your legacy. Even
when the industry calls you obsolete. Exactly.
Even when corporate boards oust you, and even
when you hit absolute rock bottom, outlasting
your critics through sheer, uncompromising force
of will is sometimes the only way forward. He
didn't alter his sweeping vision to fit the cheap,
fast television models of the 1970s. He patiently
waited until he could force the world to let
him make his movies again. Before we wrap up,
I want to leave you with a final thought to mull
over. building on the core of what made Kurosawa
a genius. We spent a lot of time talking about
how he relied on grueling, physical, practical
filmmaking. He forced actresses to live in real
factories. He dragged his crew to the freezing
Siberian wilderness. He demanded actors swing
swords in thick, freezing mud. The physical struggle
against the elements was completely inseparable
from the art itself. But imagine for a moment
if Kurosawa were alive today with total access
to that modern sterile digital laboratory we
talked about at the very beginning. The LED volumes
and green screens. Yeah. Imagine he has limitless
CGI, powering LED screens and perfect digital
control over every single raindrop and background
extra. Would this infinite control have unleashed
an even greater uninhibited genius, or, and this
is the real question, would the removal of that
physical struggle, the total elimination of the
freezing mud and the unpredictable wind, have
actually destroyed the raw, authentic humanity
that made his film's masterpieces in the first
place? That's a huge what -if. What happens to
human art when the struggle against physical
limitation is completely removed? It is something
to think about the next time you watch a modern
movie where the environment looked perfectly
digitally flawless. A truly profound question
to consider. Thanks for diving deep with us.
Keep questioning the picture.