Quotes from Akira Kurosawa

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

It's a mistake to decree that a year's progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.

You don't need what you don't need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them.

There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can't have such people among film directors.

They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.

Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.

But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

This little story has its charm and doesn't really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.

But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination.

As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, "eroguro nan-sensu" ("erotic-grotesque nonsense").

But I have undertaken this series with the feeling that I must not be afraid of shaming myself, and that I should try telling myself the things I am always telling my juniors.

Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature, theater, music and film.

His attitude was that in order to train his assistant directors it was worth sacrificing his own pictures. At least, that seems to me the only possible interpretation.

In matters of both film and literature I owe much to my brother's discernment. I took special care to see every film my brother recommended. As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie he had said was good.

Yet the same Yama-san who educated us in this exceptional manner made the following claim in a magazine once: "All I ever taught Kurosawa was how to drink." How is it possible to express one's gratitude to someone so selfless?

However, my contact with the movies at this age has, I feel, no relation to my later becoming a film director. I simply enjoyed the varied and pleasant stimulation added to ordinary everyday life by watching the motion-picture screen. I relished laughing, getting scared, feeling sad and being moved to tears.

When I was small, it seems that I was very weak and sickly. My father used to complain about this state of affairs in spite of the fact that "we had the yokozuna [champion sumo wrestler] Umegatani hold you in his arms when you were a baby so that you would grow strong.

As the teacher gave his lessons, he would look over at me from time to time and say, "Akira probably won't understand this, but Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â or "This will be impossible for Akira to solve, but Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â The other children would turn to look at me and snicker when he did this, but no matter how bitter I felt, he was right. Whatever the subject, it was completely incomprehensible to me. I was pained and saddened.

With my head crammed full of art, literature, theater, music and film knowledge, I continued to wander, vainly looking for a place to make use of it.

To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.

But I often wonder what would have happened if I had actually been drafted. I had failed military training in middle school, and I had no certificate of officer's competence. There would have been no way for me to stay afloat in the Army. On top of that, if I had ever run into that Army officer who had been attached to Keika Middle School, it would surely have been the end for me. Even thinking about it now makes me shudder.

I have that officer who administered the Army physical to thank for sparing me. Or maybe I should say I have my father to thank.

There were some excellent painters in this group, but in general, rather than an artistic movement with its roots in the essentials of painting, it was a practice of putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas—a "leftist tendency" movement, as not only paintings but films of this type came to be called.