Akira Kurosawa, the Screenwriter

Just recently I had an opportunity to visit National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ) at Kyobsashi, Tokyo where an exhibition on world famous movie director, Akira Kurosawa was being held.

I learned a lot from this exhibition and so would like to share some of the points here.

Before a movie director, Kurosawa was always a screenwriter, first and foremost.

It is an exhibition to attempt to analyse his process of creating his famous screenplays like Seven Samurai (1954).

Obviously Akira Kurosawa is an iconic figure and history of Japanese movie making (if not world’s) cannot be explained without his pile of work.

But I realized it is just a handful of his works I actually saw.

I found out the amount of work he and his team created is vast and so are the screenplays he himself had written.

What I learned from this time’s exhibition was how studious Kurosawa was through out his life.

From the early stage in his career, he honed his skills in writing scripts while voraciously reading and studying world’s literature giants like Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Shakespeare, Balzac and many others.

Though come to think of it, we could detect the literature influence from his works.

The exhibition tells us Kurosawa’s The Idiot was influenced by Dostoevsky (this one is easy), and The Throne of Blood and Ran are of Shakespeare’s influence (Yeah maybe…) and Sanjuro, Red Beard, and Dodeskaden are from Shugoro Yamamoto (…Japan’s literature giant).