Akira Kurosawa: Some Random Notes on Screenwriting

Akira Kurosawa, Japan's most acclaimed filmmaker, created an astounding body of work that stands as a testament to artistic brilliance. Though he is most renowned for his samurai epics like as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, his intimate, contemporary dramas such as Ikuru and High and Low are also as powerful. The director's first significant phase began in the postwar era with Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, two arresting noirs that launched a long partnership with combustible leading man Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa acquired international prominence in the early 1950s with Rashomin, a seminal work of nonlinear storytelling that sparked international interest in Japanese film. In the years that followed, the auteur maintained a fertile dialogue with the West, gaining inspiration from everything from Shakespeare to Dashiell Hammett and developing cinematic methods that would influence directors as divergent as George Lucas and Sam Peckinpah. 

Kurosawa began filming Dersu Uzala (1976) in 1975, a harrowing survival tale set in the Siberian forest. With substantial financial backing from Soviet and Japanese sources, the director had the time and resources to create on an epic scale once more. The resulting picture was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received the Moscow Film Festival's Gold Medal. It marked Kurosawa's triumphant return. 

Kurosawa directed Kagemusha (1980) in 1980, with financial backing from American directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. The film is a spectacular—but deeply humanistic—Samurai epic about a condemned criminal who assumes the identity of a deceased warlord. The film won the Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm and a slew of other international accolades. Kurosawa received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director in 1985 for Ran, a Japanese adaptation of King Lear that included some of the most stunning fight sequences ever filmed. The triumph of these two epics cemented Kurosawa's position as one of modern cinema's masterpieces. 

Kurosawa then directed Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), a film adaptation of the director's own midnight hallucinations at the age of 80. Although few could deny the picture's aesthetic magnificence, the highly personal film received mixed critical reviews. Rhapsody in August (1991), a more mainstream production geared at Western audiences and starring American actor Richard Gere, received an even more negative reception. Madadayo (1993) returned to more typically Japanese subject matter, telling the storey of an ex-professor who lives in a hut and refuses to acknowledge his impending death. Several of Kurosawa's screenplays were adapted into films in the mid-1990s, most notably Bruce Willis's Last Man Standing (1996). 

Kurosawa, a subtle innovator, purposefully shunned many of his postwar colleagues' aesthetic tricks and emotional exhibitionism in favour of rational but complex structural development, compositional precision, and meticulous character study. His apathy toward limiting cultural rituals contributed to his becoming the most catholic of his country's film makers. In 1989, the director received an honorary Academy Award for "achievements that have inspired, pleased, enriched, and thrilled audiences worldwide and influenced filmmakers worldwide."

The following comments were originally made by Akira Kurosawa in 1975 as advice to young people considering a career in filmmaking. They were adapted by Audie E. Bock and published as an appendix to Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography.

When I begin to consider a film project, I always have in mind a number of ideas that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I’d like to film. From among these one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.

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. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this. 

A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-part structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kya (haste). If you devote yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge naturally in your films. The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else in the world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for people of today to understand.

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.

I began writing scripts with two other people around 1940. Up until then I wrote alone, and found that I had no difficulties. But in writing alone there is a danger that your interpretation of another human being will suffer from one-sidedness. If you write with two other people about that human being, you get at least three different viewpoints on him, and you can discuss the points on which you disagree. Also, the director has a natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot along into a pattern that is the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about two other people, you can avoid this danger also.

Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novels can also be very instructive.