70 Fun Facts About Akira Kurosawa

In what year was Akira Kurosawa born?

He was the eighth and youngest child of a Tokyo family whose father came from Akita samurai stock.

How many feature films did Kurosawa direct across his six-decade career?

He was also a prolific screenwriter for other directors, a sideline that paid better than assistant directing.

What was Kurosawa's 1943 directorial debut, a judo story adapted from a Tsuneo Tomita novel?

He bought the novel on publication day, read it in one sitting and had Toho grab the rights before three rival studios could.

Which famous director's intervention got Kurosawa's debut past Japan's wartime censors?

The censors later cut 18 minutes anyway, much of which is now lost.

Which unknown actor did Kurosawa cast in Drunken Angel (1948), beginning a 16-film partnership?

His explosive turn as a tubercular yakuza stole the film from its nominal hero, the alcoholic doctor.

Which prize did Rashomon unexpectedly win at the 1951 Venice Film Festival?

Kurosawa didn't even know the film had been entered; an Italian distributor's representative pushed Daiei to submit it.

Who got Rashomon entered at Venice without Kurosawa's knowledge?

Giuliana Stramigioli had seen and admired the film and talked Daiei into submitting it.

Rashomon's murder-from-four-viewpoints plot comes from which writer's short story 'In a Grove'?

The title and the gate framing story come from a different Akutagawa story altogether.

What taboo did Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa break while shooting Rashomon in the forest?

Robert Altman said he copied the sun shots into his own work the day after first seeing the film.

Under what structure do the woodcutter, the monk and the commoner shelter from the rain in Rashomon?

The Rashōmon was the great southern gate of Heian-era Kyoto; the film's set was built at Daiei's Kyoto studio.

Ikiru (1952) was based on a novella by which Russian author?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich became the story of a Tokyo bureaucrat with stomach cancer building a children's playground.

Which member of Kurosawa's regular troupe plays the dying bureaucrat Watanabe in Ikiru?

He'd already played the doctor in Drunken Angel and would lead the samurai as Kambei two years later.

In Ikiru's famous final image, Watanabe sits on a swing in the snow singing which song?

He first sings the 1915 song in a nightclub, silencing the room; it returns at the end as pure release.

How many days of shooting did Seven Samurai require, spread across almost a year?

It opened half a year late and three times over budget, then the most expensive Japanese film ever made.

Where did Kurosawa take his two co-writers for 45 days to write Seven Samurai?

Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni had just written Ikiru with him; Oguni would co-write twelve of his films.

Where did Seven Samurai place in the critics' section of the 2022 Sight & Sound greatest-films poll?

A 1999 poll of Japanese critics had already voted it the best Japanese film ever made.

Throne of Blood (1957) transplants which Shakespeare play to feudal Japan?

Kurosawa told his Lady Macbeth figure, Isuzu Yamada, to treat it as a Japanese classic rather than a European one.

How was Washizu's death scene, in which his own men turn on him, staged in Throne of Blood?

Mifune reportedly waved his arms to signal the direction he'd move next so the archers could avoid him.

The stylised acting in Throne of Blood draws heavily on which traditional Japanese theatre?

Isuzu Yamada's near-motionless Lady Asaji is modelled on a Noh mask.

The Lower Depths (1957) adapts a play by which Russian writer, relocated to Edo-period Japan?

It was shot on just two confined sets to stress how trapped the characters are.

Kurosawa relocated Dostoevsky's The Idiot from Russia to which part of Japan?

The studio cut his 265-minute version down to 166, and the full cut no longer exists.

Which 1977 blockbuster did George Lucas say was heavily influenced by The Hidden Fortress?

Two squabbling peasants escorting a princess through enemy lines became two droids and a princess.

What are the names of the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress?

They are played by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, both veterans of Seven Samurai.

What does the wandering rōnin in Yojimbo look at when he invents his surname?

Kuwabatake means mulberry field; Sanjuro means 'thirty years old', which he admits is a rough guess.

Which Sergio Leone film was an unauthorised remake of Yojimbo, prompting a successful Toho lawsuit?

Kurosawa reportedly wrote to Leone that it was a very fine film, but it was his film.

High and Low (1963) was adapted from King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel written under which pseudonym?

Evan Hunter's kidnapping story became a film Kurosawa meant as a condemnation of a crime he considered among the worst.

What is the single splash of colour in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low?

The smoke rises from an incinerator where the kidnapper burns the marked briefcases, giving away his location.

Which of his films did Kurosawa make in 1965 as his last collaboration with Mifune?

The shoot ran well over a year and left everyone exhausted; why the two never worked together again was never fully explained.

Which 1970 Pearl Harbor epic did Kurosawa leave after three weeks, effectively fired by the studio?

He was to direct the Japanese half; his American producers concluded he must be mentally ill and had him examined.

Which director was originally slated for the American half of Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor film, before Richard Fleischer?

Kurosawa's script for his half ran over four hours; the studio then capped his segment at 90 minutes.

Which 1970 film was Kurosawa's first in colour?

He shot it in about nine weeks to prove he could still work fast and cheap; it lost money and his production club dissolved.

Which Kurosawa film shot in Siberia for Mosfilm won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar?

He'd wanted to film Vladimir Arsenyev's memoir about a Goldi hunter since the 1930s; the shoot took a year and a half.

Which two American filmmakers got Fox to back Kagemusha and are its executive producers?

Fox was the very studio that had fired him a decade earlier.

Kagemusha shared the 1980 Palme d'Or with which American film?

Bob Fosse's musical and Kurosawa's samurai epic made an odd pair on the Cannes podium.

Which dying warlord does the petty thief impersonate in Kagemusha?

The real Shingen died in 1573 during a siege, and his death was reportedly kept secret for years.

Which actor was fired from the lead of Kagemusha for insisting on videotaping his own performance?

He was famous as the blind swordsman Zatoichi; Nakadai took over and then led Ran too.

Ran (1985) is partly based on which Shakespeare tragedy?

The idea actually started with the legend of a daimyō and his three loyal sons; Kurosawa wondered what would happen if they weren't loyal.

Which real Japanese daimyō, famous for three loyal sons, inspired the story of Ran?

He is credited with the parable of the three arrows: one snaps easily, three together do not.

Ran won its only Academy Award in which category?

Emi Wada's costumes took years to make; Kurosawa himself got his only Best Director nomination.

Which American director campaigned to get Kurosawa a Best Director Oscar nomination for Ran?

He also called Kurosawa the 'Beethoven of movie directors'; Sydney Pollack won the award for Out of Africa.

Which filmmaker plays Vincent van Gogh in the 'Crows' segment of Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)?

When Coppola asked who could play the painter, Kurosawa said only one name came to mind and wrote him a letter.

Which director convinced Warner Bros. to buy the international rights to Dreams so it could be financed?

For the first time in over forty years Kurosawa wrote the screenplay entirely alone.

Which Hollywood star, the only American cast by Kurosawa, has a small role in Rhapsody in August (1991)?

He plays the Hawaiian-Japanese nephew of an elderly Nagasaki survivor.

What was Kurosawa's final film, released in 1993, about a professor's yearly birthday parties?

The title means 'Not Yet' — the professor's answer when his students ask if he is ready to die.

In his 1990 honorary Oscar speech, what did Kurosawa say he was 'a little worried' about?

He was 80 and considered by many the greatest living filmmaker at the time.

What job did Kurosawa's beloved older brother Heigo hold in late-1920s Tokyo?

Talkies put narrators out of work; Heigo took his own life in 1933, a loss Kurosawa called 'A Story I Don't Want to Tell'.

Which director became Kurosawa's mentor after championing his hiring as an assistant director in 1936?

He promoted Kurosawa from third to chief assistant within a year and told him a director must master screenwriting.

Which editing transition became Kurosawa's visual signature in his mature work?

George Lucas borrowed it wholesale for the scene changes in his 1977 space saga.

On the set of which 1944 propaganda film did Kurosawa meet his future wife, actress Yōko Yaguchi?

She was chosen by the other actresses to present their complaints to him; the arguing brought them together.

Which composer, Kurosawa's close friend, died of tuberculosis during the making of I Live in Fear (1955)?

His student Masaru Sato finished the score and went on to score the next eight Kurosawa films.

Which friend of Kurosawa, later director of Godzilla, shot the war-torn Tokyo footage in Stray Dog (1949)?

The nearly wordless eight-minute sequence follows Mifune's detective through the black markets hunting his stolen pistol.

Which of these directors joined Kurosawa in the 1969 'Club of the Four Knights' production company?

Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi were the other two; the plan was mostly to help Kurosawa get back to work.

Which product did Kurosawa advertise in a series of 1976 Japanese television commercials?

The famously hard-drinking director otherwise refused all television work except one horse-racing documentary.

Kurosawa's leading man Mifune was born in which country?

His father ran a photography business in Japanese-occupied Qingdao; Mifune didn't set foot in Japan until adulthood.

Which Swedish director called his own film The Virgin Spring a 'lousy imitation of Kurosawa'?

He added that his admiration for Japanese cinema was so high at the time that he was 'almost a samurai myself'.

Kurosawa's abandoned English-language project was finally filmed in 1985 by Konchalovsky under what title?

The Embassy Pictures thriller would have been Kurosawa's first colour film; the language barrier sank it.

How old was Kurosawa when he died of a stroke in Tokyo in 1998?

A 1995 fall that broke the base of his spine had left him in a wheelchair and ended his hopes of dying on set.

Before entering the film industry, what career did the young Kurosawa pursue?

He exhibited with the Proletarian Artists' League but never made a living from his art, and later drew his own storyboards.

Which director made The Magnificent Seven (1960), the Western remake of Seven Samurai?

Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson were among the seven gunfighters defending a Mexican village from Eli Wallach's Calvera.

Which 1962 Kurosawa film is a sequel to Yojimbo, reworked from a Shūgorō Yamamoto novel?

The script had begun as an adaptation of Hibi Heian before Yojimbo's success prompted the return of Mifune's rōnin.

In Stray Dog (1949), what is stolen from rookie detective Murakami on a crowded trolley?

Set in a Tokyo heatwave, the film is regarded as a precursor to the police procedural and buddy-cop genres.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a critique of corporate corruption, draws on which Shakespeare play?

It was the first film made by Kurosawa's own independent production company and stars Mifune as a man avenging his father's death.

Which 1996 Bruce Willis film relocated Yojimbo to a Prohibition-era Texas town?

Walter Hill's remake was a commercial disappointment, grossing $47 million against a $67 million budget.

Ran's $11–12 million budget made it what at the time of its 1985 release?

Costume designer Emi Wada won an Oscar for the film, and Kurosawa received his only career nomination for Best Director.

Kurosawa's father Isamu came from a samurai family in which Japanese prefecture?

Isamu ran the Army Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school; Kurosawa's mother came from an Osaka merchant family.

In December of which year did Kurosawa attempt suicide after failing to fund new projects?

He recovered quickly and went on to make Dersu Uzala for the Soviet studio Mosfilm.

What profession did Kurosawa's daughter Kazuko take up?

His son Hisao became a producer on some of his father's last projects.

Rashomon won Best Foreign Language Film at which edition of the Academy Awards?

It was also nominated for Best Film at the 6th BAFTAs, having first stunned Venice by taking the Golden Lion.

The Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Film Directing is presented at which festival?

A separate Akira Kurosawa Award is given at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Which villain leads the bandits raiding the village in The Magnificent Seven?

Eli Wallach played the ruthless chief; the film spawned three sequels, a TV series and a 2016 remake.