The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.
Interpretation
Film projects stem from a deep need for expression, evolved through scripting and directing.
Akira Kurosawa highlights the essential journey of filmmaking from a foundational emotional need to express oneself. He illustrates that while the script serves as the nourishing element necessary for this creative root to grow, it is the directing that allows the project to flourish and reach its full potential, akin to a tree producing flowers and fruit.
In practice
During a film festival, reflecting on the filmmaking process.
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.
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
Whatever your style or subject matter, in the end, film-making is about searching for authenticity - that is what the audience will divine.
The water crumbles on it's way down as my hands and feet push me forward. The world is lightening, taking shape, and turning to color. It feels like it's being painted around me.
It's always a nice feeling, having people think that you feel things much deeper than you're allowed to say, but this isn't true. If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
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