Akira Kurosawa: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers) (Paperback)

~ Bert Cardullo (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) moved with ease and mastery from subjects mysterious and interior to scenes spectacular and panoramic. Kurosawa was a man of all genres and all periods, bridging the traditional and the modern, the old and the new, the East and the West. He had a flair for fusing Western literature with elements from his native Kabuki theater. Ran retells King Lear as a samurai tale; Throne of Blood retells Macbeth; Hakuchi adapts Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot as a tale set in northern Japan.

Kurosawa became the first Japanese director widely known in the West when his Rashomon won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. His film techniques and storytelling innovations have greatly influenced European and American film, particularly in westerns.

Because of his ability to control all aspects of film production and to maintain artistic control on almost all of his projects, Kurosawa was known throughout Japan as "the Emperor." Ranging from 1952 to the mid-1990s, this collection includes an interview by Lillian Ross, a conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, and a previously unpublished interview with the book's editor.

From the Publisher

This book

---Collects interviews with the master director of Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran, Ikiru, and Throne of Blood
---Features interviews from the New Yorker, the New York Times,Sight and Sound, and other fine periodicals
---Expands the Conversations with Filmmakers Series

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Product Details

• Paperback: 194 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (December 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578069971
• ISBN-13: 978-1578069972
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #222,323 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Various Lenses Focussed on Kurosawa, June 25, 2008

By	Samurai Girl (Michigan) - See all my reviews

The interviews collected by Bert Cardullo in "Akira Kurosawa Interviews" give us various lenses and filters through which the great director's works were seen, over a fairly decent period of time. We have Japanese filmmaker interviewers, American critics, A Latin American novelist interviewer, and Bert Cardullo himself. We have the very respectful, the respectful but inquisitive, the annoyingly self-absorbed (you'll know it when you read it...a tipoff is that, after the most pompously convoluted question Kurosawa laughs...)and the one mind that provokes a real emotional response from Kurosawa.

That's a nice survey! You will hear many stories repeated (I begin to think that Kurosawa relied heavily on some basic themes drawn from his experience, and reiterated in his work with Audie Bock:"Something Like an Autobiography" and nearly word-for-word in Cardullo's final interview in the book) but, despite the repetition, new stuff is intermixed, and quite fascinating for Kurosawa fans and scholars.

Goes on the Kurosawa bookshelf.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Conversations with a master, May 29, 2008

By	K. I. Stidworthy (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Akira Kurosawa: Interviews.

I recommend this book unreservedly to anybody interested in film. In conversation with knowledgeable and distinguished interviewers Kurosawa gives detailed insights into how he works: how every stage of a film is exhaustively discussed beforehand by all its participants and the Director himself; how unplanned factors such as the weather can contribute to episodes of unforgettable beauty and mystery in the finished film; his refusal to be regarded as a philosopher, let alone a preacher ('I look at life as an ordinary man. I simply put my feelings into the film'); his passionate interest in, and extraordinary knowledge of Japanese history, of the social and military life of the given period; of how his early training as a painter has informed his perceptions and his methods.
Apart from all that we learn about Kurosawa's work, the book is full of insights into recent Japanese history and contemporary society, including, of course, Japanese cinema.
Kurosawa's speech is engagingly fresh and energetic, and despite his great fame he seems to be utterly without self-importance.

4.0 out of 5 stars GOOD REFERENCE BOOK, August 28, 2008

By	Cesar Diaz "madmundo" (Bogota, COLOMBIA) - See all my reviews

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This title is part of a series edited by the University Press of Mississippi, and as I've already reviewed one of the other titles, I'll just say this one is good as usual, but it still lacks the depth of Kurosawa's own "Something Like An Autobiography". The good thing is, his autobiography stops right when he becomes an international director, because he considers unnecessary to tell what people might already know. This book covers a longer span, up until Kurosawa's last "Madadayo". There's nothing wrong with this book, but if you really want to know about Kurosawa, and not just about the way he made films, you'd better start by the autobiography. Then, read this one.