I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the desire for people to find happiness in their relationships with each other.
In this quote, Akira Kurosawa expresses a deep philosophical inquiry regarding the nature of human relationships and happiness. He suggests that despite the variety of themes in his films, a central question prevails: why is it so challenging for people to coexist in a state of happiness? This introspection encourages viewers to consider the barriers and complexities that prevent joyful interactions among individuals.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about fostering positive relationships in communities.
Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.
I can't afford to hate anyone. I don't have that kind of time.
For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.
The role of the artist is to not look away.
but ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
In theory it is easy to convince an ignorant person; in actual life, men not only object to offer themselves to be convinced, but hate the man who has convinced them.
If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
That which lives on reason lives against the spirit.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.
All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.
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