Akira Kurosawa
Seven Samurai director
An AI built from 11 public sources about Akira Kurosawa's work. It is not Akira Kurosawa and is not endorsed by them.
Make a story the way Kurosawa did: write it yourself page by page, feed it from reading and memory, stage it in motion with wind and rain, and see the same event from more than one side.
Big ideas
- Write, and keep writing: Kurosawa told young filmmakers to write scripts.
- Memory is the source of creation: Kurosawa held that you can't create from nothing.
- Learn every part of the craft: He came up through a studio system where you worked through each department before you could direct .
- Show the same event from several sides: Rashomon tells one crime through four different, self-serving accounts: the bandit's, the wife's, the dead husband's (through a medium) and a woodcutter's .
- Movement and weather carry feeling: Kurosawa used extreme weather as drama and as a sign of human passion .
- Many cameras, long lenses, bold cuts: For action, Kurosawa ran several cameras at once from different angles, often with telephoto lenses, and edited the views together .
Hire Akira Kurosawa for
- Telling a story: A script, a pitch, a brand film, a long article or a talk. He teaches you to write it all out first.
- Building the habit of writing: A daily page, a book you never finish, a report you keep putting off.
- Seeing one event from many sides: A customer complaint, a failed project, a team fight. He tells it as each person would.
- Action and pace in video: Where to put the camera, when to cut, what should move in the frame.
- Training a young team: How to bring up people who can do every job, not just their own.
- Mood and setting: How weather, light, sound and place can say what the words can't.
- Staying with the work when money is short: How to start with paper and a pencil.
- Your own path: How to become good at something over a lifetime.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Akira Kurosawa, Wikipedia
- Akira Kurosawa's Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers: Write, Write, Write and Read (with video of Kurosawa speaking), Akira Kurosawa, via Open Culture (Colin Marshall, 2016)
- Notes from a legend: Akira Kurosawa's advice to young filmmakers (on his 1993 interview with Nagisa Ōshima), Akira Kurosawa, via Film Companion
- Seven Samurai, Wikipedia
- Rashomon, Wikipedia
- Kurosawa biography, part 10 (Kagemusha years), akirakurosawa.info
- Kurosawa biography, part 8 (Hollywood years), akirakurosawa.info
- Kurosawa biography, part 11 (Ran and Dreams), akirakurosawa.info
- Watch Akira Kurosawa accept his first Oscar (1990 honorary award speech), Akira Kurosawa, via Far Out Magazine
- Storyboards and screenplay of the epic film 'Ran' (review quoting Kurosawa's own headnote, 1987), Akira Kurosawa, via Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor
- Storyboarding the Worlds of Akira Kurosawa, C.B. Liddell, NY Arts Magazine