A Hapless Perfectionist: Akira Kurosawa’s Long Take

In Long Take, Akira Kurosawa says he doesn’t think that films should be seen as having “must-see” points. Instead, “each person has elements that they like, and people should be free to watch as they like. Films are like polyhedrons; they have a dimensionality. You can look at them from many angles” (p. 124). If this might seem like casual viewing indeed, where viewers pay attention to what interests them and ignore the rest, maybe better to perceive it as a roundabout way of explaining Kurosawa’s perfectionism, even his insistence on the arduous. In her introduction to this collection of interviews, essays and reminiscences by his daughter, translator Anne McKnight notes that, while making Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), all Kurosawa’s toenails fell off. She says, “the bravado and endurance of this effort throws shade on Hollywood Westerns” (p. xxv). Or sun on them more appropriately, as she points out that “they don’t have to bother with weather and are not required to have the same ingenuity and work ethic as the Japanese cast and crew…” (p. xxv).

One might see classic Hollywood cinema as pragmatic and Kurosawa’s cinema as dogmatic. If classic Hollywood could shoot on a backlot and take advantage of the sun that was always shining, Kurosawa often would seek out locations that would make his life difficult. In a round table exchange, Yōji Yamada jokes about how Hollywood would be easy on itself, saying: “In American movies, you see the sun shining even when it’s raining” (p. 74). These are obviously rain machines, and the director, it seems, doesn’t even bother waiting for a cloud before operating them. Yet this is partly why Kurosawa so admired John Ford: “He did have an incredible will to make things happen. For instance, Monument Valley, the location you often see in John Ford’s Westerns – in those days it was way out in the middle of nowhere…” (p. 21). The location may not have moved, but getting to it will have become easier, even if the conditions would still be difficult: “The nights were cold, and the days were boiling hot. Just setting up camp and getting down to work in a place like that takes a lot of physical work” (p. 21).

The point Kurosawa seems to be making, when seeing film as a polyhedron, rests on its verisimilitude: a filmmaker is obliged to try and get things right, and not only accommodate the story’s telling. When he speaks about Seven Samurai, he admits that we can’t know what we don’t know, but we have to be as accurate as we can be, to what we think we know. “That’s the part that’s hard to figure out. Exactly how a samurai lives his day-to-day life. Did he really wash his face in the morning? Did he brush his teeth? If he ate his meals at the castle, did he bring his bento or was he served his meals?” (p. 53). There may be a “lot of little things we just couldn’t dig up” (p. 53), but the purpose is to try and recreate the samurai life as accurately as possible. If that means a lot of background research or shooting on location to recreate the arduousness of this existence, then that is what must be done. This incorporates killing as well. “Each time a bandit falls, it’s so detailed, individuated…you can’t just wipe out all the ‘enemy’ at once, like you can with a Western” (p. 53). Kurosawa is presumably talking about the difference between the westerner who uses a gun and the samurai who uses a sword, but we have seen many a martial arts film that has the indifference towards individuating villainy, and some westerns that pay attention to the singularity of a bullet. The director’s attitude to violence may once again be a question of verisimilitude, but it also possesses a broader ethos. This is evident when he says of Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1950), one of his favourite hundred films, “the style of the film really brings home to us the way the characters go through injury after injury, injustice after injustice” (p. 131).

This indicates a twofold interest in the possibilities of the polyhedron. The first focuses on the details that make an onscreen universe as plausible as possible; the second, an ethos that accepts the variety of human experience and the different codes and values people might live by. The first, in simple terms, concerns Kurosawa’s famous perfectionism; the second, his well-known humanism. “Kurosawa’s Humanism” was the title of an article by Charles Higham in The Kenyon Review in 1965, and many have commented on this aspect of the director’s work. Roger Ebert reckoned, Kurosawa “combined two qualities not always found together in filmmakers. He was a visual stylist, and a thoughtful humanist. His films had a daring, exhilarating visual freedom, and a heart of deep human understanding. He often made movies about heroes, but their challenge was not simply to win; it was to make the right ethical choice.”¹ As for Kurosawa’s perfectionism, Donald Richie captures it well in various anecdotes: “He has been known to halt production because his long-distance lenses picked up nail-heads in a period-film set construction. Once he tore down an entire open set because the roof did not look real enough.”² These are examples of the Kurosawan dogmatism. Most viewers might not notice the nail heads, but that doesn’t matter. Kurosawa noticed them, and others might well too. That viewer who sees what they want to concentrate on needn’t be the casual viewer who simply focuses on what interests them, but the one who sees the story played out within a world that they want to believe in as deeply as possible.

We wouldn’t want to fetishise perfectionism, and for every great filmmaker who insists on controlling each aspect of the production (Kubrick, Leone, Fincher), there are others (Scorsese, Cassavetes, Herzog) who allow the mise-en-scène to be far more slippery if the performances or the environment demand greater freedom. Cassavetes was always seeking feeling over form, which isn’t quite the same as saying he had no interest in the latter; just that it had to come from emotion, and he would sacrifice what others might see as conventional form to achieve it. As Cassavetes insisted, the problem with many films is that they are so professional: the cameraman insists on lighting a space, and the actor is expected to conform to it. “That’s a professional film. It’s one built on fear and not one built on a relationship between people.”³

Kurosawa’s films were built on fear. Near the end of his working life, he admitted, “even today there are times I get so angry at a shoddy job I just about erupt in fireworks[. T]he crew all knows that this kind of thing is bound to happen” (p. 43). This particular issue was over the assistant director failing to hide part of the background in a shot, so that when Kurosawa came to choose the take in the edit, it turned out to be useless. Hence the screaming. Kurosawa doesn’t explain whether there was sufficient coverage or not. It is one thing to find your beloved take is inadequate, and you will have to settle for another that does the job but isn’t exactly right, and finding you have no take at all and would have to go out and reshoot it. In the latter instance, who wouldn’t be angry? In the former instance, perfectionists would be, but many others would shrug their shoulders and accept the contingencies of an art form, one that inevitably has too many cooks, and one of them might just occasionally spoil the broth. Nevertheless, Kurosawa reckons his explosive perfectionism is probably better than implosive perfectionism. “In fact, I think that simmering in silence is actually more stressful for the crew. [Mikio] Naruse is a good example: if he got mad, he would just hold it in. I think that is actually more terrifying” (p. 43).

In Chris Marker’s account of Kurosawa making Ran (1985), AK (1985), Marker’s voice-over notes that in this huge production, which involved 1,400 extras and was the most expensive Japanese film ever made, hierarchy was irrelevant, next to production necessity. As Marker says, “each person regards the film as a whole, in which there is no such thing as a noble or menial task. The head electrician is cutting up grass side by side with the art director; the clap man is rehearsing stunts.” Marker notes this is “most unusual.” If Kurosawa was a perfectionist who would lose his temper, he wasn’t simply an egotist terrorising his crew. And at least he was on set. If hierarchies in film are bad, worse are the ones beyond the immediacy of the production. As Kurosawa notes, speaking to John Gillett at the British National Film Theatre, after Gillett asked him why so many great films came out of Japan at a certain moment: “in that period directors were able to shoot the film they wanted, in a way they wanted. No one really meddled and told them what to do. But at a certain point,” Kurosawa says, “the film studios brought a half-baked version of the studio system, and the executives started telling people to do this or that harebrained thing…which is no way to make a good film” (p. 120).

A good film seems to be made with a singular vision, yet with manifold contributions, and Kurosawa has always been generous in recognising those he has worked with. In Something Like an Autobiography, he says of his early film, Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel, 1948): “It is not possible for me to talk about Drunken Angel […] without devoting some attention to the actor Mifune Toshiro.”⁴ Mifune would, of course, be to Kurosawa what John Wayne happened to be for John Ford, an immediately identifiable presence in many of his most important films, including Seven Samurai, Kumonosu-jō (Throne of Blood, 1957), Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), Yojimbo (1961), and Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low, 1963). Yet if Mifune was the most visible feature of his work, behind the scenes were his scriptwriters. Hideo Oguni “was magnificent[,] his knack with storytelling was just unparalleled” (pp. 62-63). Kurosawa credits Shinobu Hashimoto with much of the research on Seven Samurai. As for his frequent cinematographers and his use of three-camera set-ups, he believes that “I think in Japan the only cinematographers who can [master it] are Nakai Asakazu and Saitō Takao.”⁵

A perfectionist can function well on their own in other art forms like painting and literature, but Kurosawa cannot deny he is working in a medium that needs collaborators. He needed them even more domestically, and his daughter pointedly notes that “because my mother never made my father do anything, and took care of all his needs, my father never knew anything but movies” (p. 153). She laughs, recalling that “he didn’t know things like how to make a call on a public phone[. H]e thought maybe you folded a thousand-yen bill into the slot where you’re supposed to insert a ten-yen coin. He really puzzled over that one” (ibid). Kazuko also tells a story about her mother once asking Akira to pick up some beans, giving him ten thousand yen: “He came home hauling a huge sack, like a big bag of rice, in both hands. He had spent the whole ten thousand yen. My mother had to tell him that most people just ask for a few hundred grams” (pp. 153-154). This isn’t quite Jack and the Beanstalk, but clearly Kurosawa lacked a yen, so to speak, for practicalities.

It might seem contradictory that Kurosawa had no idea how to live in the 20th century, yet was determined to get the lives of samurai warriors living in the 16th right. However, this would be to confuse life with art, a conflation often used to dismiss the dreamer who knows too little about the real world and instead lives in fantasy. But it is more that the artist, while aware the world is without ready parameters, the art work has self-imposed limitations. It isn’t that the creative person is incapable of living in this world; more, that the one we call real is so chaotic and profuse, that a perfectionist like Kurosawa would understandably want to reject it, and find for himself a series of carved-up universes that he could call his films. We might understandably find ourselves irritated that yet another male artist relies on a woman to pursue their genius, but if we put aside the gender inequality that usually means the woman gets to face reality, while the male makes the art, we can see that the notion of perfectionism requires limits within which to be perfect. Some filmmakers liked imperfections and wanted life to bleed into the work, as in Cassavetes. Others were more interested in seeing a film as a controlled experiment, closer to Kubrick.

Yet, however perfect or imperfect the work, this wouldn’t alter the fact that all films will inevitably be viewed as polyhedrons, as Kurosawa insists on asserting his vision on the material absolutely, but accepts that it will be viewed from the chaos of the real world perspectives upon it. Though viewers will see what they want to see, Kurosawa insists that they won’t see anything that will undermine the suspension of disbelief in the context of this vision. If this requires a large budget, as we have noted in Ran, then that is the necessary price to pay for the perfectionism Kurosawa insists upon. When writer Hisashi Inoue says that when it was made, Seven Samurai cost 210 million yen, which would have covered the cost of seven films, Kurosawa replies, “well, it did make about a hundred times that at the box-office. Management would probably say it would have made more if it had been shot on budget, but that’s not true. That movie is entertaining in the exact degree that it went over budget” (p. 67).

Films inevitably contain numerous continuity errors and details that creep into the shot, no matter how vigilant the director and crew, and maybe another filmmaker would have tolerated the background discrepancies he discusses that led Kurosawa to have one of his many temper tantrums. Yet Kurosawa has always been a great director of the frame, and one watches his films aware that the drama we see is no less the composition that he has created. To concentrate on the drama, we might miss details in the frame, and since many a film’s purpose is to make the frame invisible, so we can concentrate on that drama, a few stray details needn’t impact too strongly on the work. Yet if the viewer is made aware of the frame, it announces its own constraints, and extraneous elements could be read as meaningful when they are in fact randomly meaningless. In High and Low, the balanced compositions in central character Gondō’s apartment, based on sectioning off the image with window panes and choreographed movements of the characters through the space, leaves little room for error, while in a frenetic work like Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), we might be left wondering whether the choreography of certain moments, as when numerous guests pile into Mabel and her husband’s house, have an aspect of the random, because the film can accommodate the contingent as Kurosawa’s work cannot. This needn’t alter the manifold interpretations available in either work, but certain speculations are less likely in Kurosawa’s films than in Cassavetes’s.

Yet there is a difference between interpretation and speculation, even if some insist on turning the latter into the former. Viewers of The Shining (1980) are determined to see minor continuity errors as meaningfully uncanny and take Kubrick’s perfectionism as a given, with no mistake appearing in his work unless deliberately made. John Fell Ryan muses over various moments in the film that could be deliberate or could be accidental. He notes when “Wendy goes from left-handed to right-handed to left-handed to right-handed in the four scenes of her ‘shining’ visions of The Hotel – colour-coded blue and red too. I don’t know what to make of this one, even if the knives seem only to be literally shining in the blue scenes.’’⁶ We don’t doubt the shift in colour is deliberate, but can we say with the same confidence the knife’s shift from one hand to the other? Generally, this is where the common application of Occam’s Razor may apply: assume the simplest explanation, and that numerous mistakes are made when making a film, and nobody is immune to error. When the filmmaker is deemed a perfectionist, it is tempting to see a greater plan and assume deliberation. If one finds such analysis beside the point, it might rest on a version of the intentional fallacy that critical theory has worked hard to undermine. It leaves the viewer abdicating interpretive freedom and incarcerating themselves within an artist’s genius. Instead of musing over how they can make the film their own, based on the affects the film produces, the viewer gets stuck on trying to understand the anomalous as purposeful.

Obviously, if it seems part of the pattern of the work as we find in Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) and Providence (1977), where mirrors or staircases appear and disappear, and the spatial organisation is consistently inconsistent, this needs to be read as a principle within modernist tendencies and surrealist inclinations. But if it is predicated upon a filmmaker unable to do any wrong, it remains within the realm of the dubiously speculative, rather than the fruitfully interpretive.

It is surely the latter Kurosawa seeks when he believes a film can be viewed from many angles. His purpose as a filmmaker was to create a vision that would be coherent enough for it to be taken as a world that could be comprehended in many ways within the consistency of the universe it generates. This didn’t mean Kurosawa wouldn’t entertain contingencies. As he insists, “things can happen without warning that produce a startling effect. When these can be incorporated in the film without upsetting the balance, the whole becomes much more interesting.”⁷ But balance is still what matters, and while it can enrich a work, it must never lead the film to become asymmetrical. It allows us to understand Kurosawa as a perfectionist but not a control freak, a person who could find himself putting a note into a coin slot machine, but who could also command a cinema crew as if it were a large fighting force. Comparing himself reluctantly to the military, he says “that if you compare the production unit to an army, the script is the battle flag and the director is the commander of the front line. From the moment production begins to the moment it ends, there is no telling what will happen. The director must be able to respond to any situation, and he must have the leadership ability to make the whole unit go along with his responses.”⁸ Nobody doubted Kurosawa had this leadership quality, and it made his cinema work as rich as his personal life was timid. As Kazuko says, “probably my mother was actually a bit more ‘manly’ than my father” (p. 153). Few filmmakers have been known more than Kurosawa for exploring the assertiveness of the masculine, and there he was, in his personal life, a domestic disaster thoroughly reliant on others to get through his day. This could be seen as a great irony, or a simple fact that in many instances, a person knows how to make art, but wouldn’t know how to make dinner. There is immense value to the latter, but Kurosawa might have insisted that one cannot live by bread alone. His wife may have replied that you can’t live without it either, as she looked on at the enormous bag of rice the great AK had uselessly dragged over the threshold.

Akira Kurosawa, Long Take, Anne McKnight, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026).

Endnotes