The Blood of Heroes: On Set With Akira Kurosawa

As a retrospective within a retrospective, Film Forum’s ongoing tribute to the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai features five films directed by Japan’s grand master of filmmaking, Akira Kurosawa. It’s difficult to overestimate this great movie artist’s influence on mainstream filmmaking. One could, for instance, compile a weeklong screening series of films that were cribbed from Kurosawa’s 1954 classic “The Seven Samurai,” ranging from John Sturges’s “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) to Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” (1998). “Yojimbo,” a period samurai drama itself inspired in part by the work of the American detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, became the basis for Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and the radically different approach to the Western genre that followed in both Italy and America.Accompanying Mr. Nakadai on his current visit to New York is the star’s longtime friend, Teruyo Nogami, who served as Kurosawa’s script supervisor and assistant. Ms. Nogami will appear tomorrow evening at Japan Society for a program called “50 Years with Akira Kurosawa: An Evening with Teruyo Nogami,” in which the guest of honor will discuss her years with Kurosawa and her new book, “Waiting on the Weather,” an illustrated account of her decades of work with the director, from 1950’s “Rashomon” until his death 10 years ago.Kurosawa’s pioneering use of multiple camera coverage and slow motion, his breathtaking gift for composition and atmosphere, his mastery of both long-take camera blocking and acute editorial montage were without peer. For most of the director’s storied career, Ms. Nogami was at his elbow bearing witness to nearly every creative decision he made. Though she demurs in this regard, after reading her book and speaking with her in person recently, if one were to say that Kurosawa is one of the 20th century’s filmmaking deities, Ms. Nogami was his archangel.On most film sets, a script supervisor works with the director and the rest of the crew to ensure that all the business spelled out in the shooting script is captured on film in a way that will maintain continuity when the discontinuous pieces of a sequence, invariably shot out of order for practicality, are assembled in the editing room.“It’s a very important part to play,” Ms. Nogami said via translator. “But for Mr. Kurosawa, this was not so important. Mr. Kurosawa would say that when he was shooting a film, he was just gathering material in order to edit.”Each day on-set or on location during the making of a Kurosawa film was followed by a marathon editing session using the previous day’s footage. “He was always editing during the course of shooting,” Ms. Nogami explained. The director carried the film in his head for the entirety of production. “The next day, when he was shooting something, he had the previous day’s editing in mind.”Kurosawa’s particular and highly influential brand of two-fisted humanism yielded action sequences of spectacular imagination and impact. If one is looking for summer blockbuster thrills with the gravity of real drama and the resonance of bravura storytelling, one need look no further than 1961’s “Yojimbo”; its ostensible sequel, 1962’s “Sanjuro”; 1963’s “High and Low”; 1980’s “Kagemusha,” and 1985’s “Ran” in their big-screen engagements at Film Forum.A body of work as strong as this almost requires such an evening of discussion with its makers, but there was one question that this reporter couldn’t resist asking Ms. Nogami in advance of her appearance at Japan Society.As “Sanjuro” comes to a close, the titular errant samurai, played by Toshiro Mifune, makes his getaway having freed a group of young swordsmen from a frame-up by their superiors. But as the young men look on, Mr. Nakadai’s character confronts Mifune and demands satisfaction. Face to face, barely a pace apart, the two samurai stare each other down for what seems an eternity but is in fact less than 30 seconds. Then, in a single, lightning-quick move, they draw their swords out and up. Mr. Nakadai’s chest erupts in a geyser of blood that, though it single-handedly reset the standard for on-screen graphic violence, is upstaged by the look of absolute astonishment on the actor’s face. Once seen it is simply unforgettable.I asked Ms. Nogami to confirm the long-standing rumor that Kurosawa cultivated Mr. Nakadai’s remarkably realistic reaction by attaching the necessary special-effects hardware to both actors and not telling either of them which one was going to die on-screen. Was she also in the dark as to which character was marked for death?“No, no, no,” she said. “Of course I knew and they knew.” With that, Ms. Nogami produced a pen and, holding it loosely overhand in the Japanese way, began to sketch on a sheet of paper. “It would have been impossible to put the thing in two people,” she said as she drew the two combatants, one of whom is tethered to the earth by a thick black line traveling down one leg. “It started from here, and traveled through this pipe,” she said of the tubing that would provide the blood fountain set to erupt on cue. The rest of the hose was buried in the ground and traveled back far enough that the pressurized plunger that would set it off was out of sight of Kurosawa’s cameras.“It took one month of practice,” Ms. Nogami said — practice for which Mr. Nakadai was conspicuously absent. “It was important that he not know how it was going to happen.” When the time came to take the shot, Mr. Nakadai needed to be unfamiliar with what the effect would feel like. “They rehearsed with a stand-in,” she said.On the day of the actual shoot, Mr. Nakadai only “knew that he was going to be killed and that there would be blood somehow,” Ms. Nogami said. “When they put the pipe on him, he said, ‘How is this going to happen?’ And the technician in charge said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, you’ll just feel a little push.'”With everything in place, the cameras rolled and Ms. Nogami counted down the 25 seconds until the fateful sword draw took place. When the blood erupted, it was so explosive that Ms. Nogami recalled the actor later telling her that “the pressure of the liquid pushed him toward the sky and he had to fight to control it.”For Kurosawa, the resulting mixture of mock viscera and very real astonishment meant that the first take was the keeper. “When the blood came out, Nakadai was so surprised,” Ms. Nogami said. He wasn’t the only one. As the cameras rolled, Ms. Nogami recalled, the connecting hose sprang a leak in view of the other two cameras. Nevertheless, the director knew a performance when he saw one. “‘Even with this incident,'” Ms. Nogami said he told her, “‘I’ll take it. We cannot do it another time. Nakadai will know how it happens and he will never get the same expression.'”Despite a month’s work yielding only a single take, Kurosawa, according to Ms. Nogami, “refused to take another shot.” The solution as to how best to deal with an enormous change at the last minute lay not on the set that day but in the cutting room the following night. “No,” he told his assistant, “I’ll think about it when I edit.”

The Blood of Heroes: On Set With Akira Kurosawa

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