Quotes from Akira Kurosawa

And that's just how it is. During youth the desire for self-expression is so overpowering that most people end up by losing all grasp on their real selves. I was no exception. I strained to perform technical tours de force as I painted, and the resulting pictures revealed my distaste for myself. Gradually I lost confidence in my abilities, and the act of painting itself became painful for me.

The result of spending my time on a kind of painting for which I felt no enthusiasm at all was a further, more irrevocable loss of my real desire to paint.

Since I had been doing nothing but follow my brother's lead, his suicide sent me spinning like a top. I believe this was a very dangerous turning point in my life.

Through all of this my father did not let me loose to spin on my own. He just kept telling me, as I became more and more panicky, "Don't panic. There's nothing to get excited about." He told me if I would just wait calmly, my road in life would open up to me of its own accord. I don't know exactly what kind of viewpoint led him to tell me such things; perhaps he was speaking from his own experience of life. As it turned out, his words proved amazingly accurate.

My innocent request for kend? lessons had brought me a load of unexpected tasks. But I had asked for it, so there was nothing I could do.

When someone is told over and over again that he's no good at something, he loses more and more confidence and eventually does become poor at it. Conversely, if he's told he's good at something, his confidence builds and he actually becomes better at it. While a person is born with strengths and weaknesses as part of his heredity, they can be greatly altered by later influences.

The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet.

Years later when I read the historical novelist Yamamoto Shugoro's Nihon fudoki [An Account of the Duties of Japanese Women], I recognized my mother in these impossibly heroic creatures, and I was deeply moved.)

During the war there was a popular song called "Father, You Were Strong" ("Chichi yo, anata wa tsuyokatta"), but I want to say "Mother, You Were Strong.

Akira, it's true that drowning people die smiling—you were." It made me angry, but it had seemed that way to me, too. I remembered having felt a strangely peaceful sensation just before I went under.

It seems that, no matter what is happening to me in my personal life, I am always thinking about my work without even knowing it. This phenomenon resembles some kind of karma.

I don't remember the precise contents of my essay, but I had thoroughly savored and consumed foreign films under my brother's tutelage, and as a movie fan I found many things in Japanese cinema that did not satisfy me. I undoubtedly gave vent to all my accumulated criticisms and had a fine time doing so.

In the early Taish? era (1912–1926), when I started school, the word "teacher" was synonymous with "scary person." The fact that at such a time I encountered such free and innovative education with such creative impulse behind it—that I encountered a teacher like Mr. Tachikawa at such a time—I cherish among the rarest of blessings.

It was chance that led me to walk along the road to P.C.L. and, in so doing, the road to becoming a film director, yet somehow everything that I had done prior to that seemed to point to it as an inevitability.

I can't help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.

Every time the sun shone on me in the morning, I couldn't help thinking that from that moment on my day would begin to be like that of an ordinary child. But it wasn't out of discontent that this feeling came to me; it was a sense of self-sufficiency and satisfaction.

Now, don't get angry, Kei-chan. We're both crybabies, aren't we? Only now you've become a romantic crybaby and I'm a humanist crybaby.)

I think this was the first time I ever experienced the savagery that lies in the human heart. I could never find pleasure studying under this teacher. But I acquired a determination to work so hard that this teacher would never be able to criticize me again.

When I stood behind Yama-san in his director's chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same feeling—"I've made it at last." The work he was doing was the kind that I really wanted to do. I was standing in the mountain pass, and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single straight road.

A movie director is like a front-line commanding officer. He needs a thorough knowledge of every branch of the service, and if he doesn't command each division, he cannot command the whole.

Since I wanted nothing except permission to leave quickly and go to Mr. Tachikawa's house, I applied myself with fervor to copying the teacher's calligraphy. But you can't love what you don't like.

No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it.

Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.

Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Y?ichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it's precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.