Some questions about Kurosawa and the people he worked with

Posting all the questions together because I didn’t want to spam the site. I figured this is the best place to maybe get some of these answered. Also, when I say “anybody” below I mean any actors or crew members he worked with.

1. Why did Machiko Kyo and Kurosawa never work together again? Did they ever try to work together again?
Kurosawa reuses the same actors a lot but after the success of Rashomon they never worked together again. I’ve seen that he wanted Setsuko Hara for the role in Rashomon but couldn’t find anything on him wanting Kyo for another role. She could have played the Miki Odagiri role in Ikiru for example.

2.. Does anyone know exactly why or have a good idea why Kurosawa and Mifune stopped working together? Did they actually make up before they died?

3. Did anyone else ever speak about the separation?

4. Are there any interviews of anybody speaking about the success of some the films? For example Mifune, Kurosawa, or Kyo talking about the success of Rashomon?

5. Did anybody talk about the success and influence of Seven Samurai? Yojimbo, High and Low, Red Beard, etc?
I know an interview exists of some of the cast of The Hidden Fortress talking about it, anything else like that.

6. Did anybody ever talk about being on set for some films, working together, their relationships?

7. Were Kurosawa’s films financially successful? Did they do well box office wise?
Kurosawa wasn’t as appreciated in Japan compared to worldwide but did his films still do well when they dropped.

Hi RashomonFan, and welcome to the website!

1. Why did Machiko Kyo and Kurosawa never work together again? Did they ever try to work together again?

While I don’t know for sure, I would suspect it was due to Machiko Kyo working for Daiei Film studios, while Kurosawa did most of his films for Toho Studios, which was another film company. This would have made it impossible, or at least very difficult, for them to work together more. Rashomon was one of the only two films that Kurosawa did for Daiei.

2. Does anyone know exactly why or have a good idea why Kurosawa and Mifune stopped working together?

I don’t think anyone really knows for sure, but I would guess it was probably a combination of things. Following their last film together, Kurosawa went on to pursue projects with Hollywood producers in the late 60s, and didn’t really seem interested in bringing other Japanese talent with him for that career leap. Mifune publicly criticised Kurosawa for this during the pre-production of Tora! Tora! Tora! for which Kurosawa was to direct the Japanese sequences, and for which he wouldn’t use professional Japanese actors. After that episode, even if Kurosawa had wanted to use Mifune (which he probably didn’t), Mifune might have been too expensive for Kurosawa’s next film Dodesukaden which was something of a low budget work, impossible to arrange for Dersu Uzala, and by Kagemusha (whose premiere Mifune reportedly attended) it had been a full 15 years or so since the two had worked together, which is a long time.

Did they actually make up before they died?

My understanding is that they sort of did in the early 90s. It is also often reported that at Ishiro Honda’s funeral in 1993, the two embraced each other with tears in their eyes.

3. Did anyone else ever speak about the separation?

I don’t think anyone has talked about it in any great or authoritative detail. Of course, everyone who writes about either of the two men mentions it and speculates.

4. Are there any interviews of anybody speaking about the success of some the films? For example Mifune, Kurosawa, or Kyo talking about the success of Rashomon?
5. Did anybody talk about the success and influence of Seven Samurai? Yojimbo, High and Low, Red Beard, etc?

Galbraith‘s book is pretty good at looking at how each film was received, I would highly recommend it.

6. Did anybody ever talk about being on set for some films, working together, their relationships?

There is a documentary series called Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create which documents the making of many of Kurosawa’s films. The 21 episodes (about 30-60 minutes each) in the series cover 21 of Kurosawa’s films and the series goes into quite some detail about how the films were shot and what happened during production. These documentaries have been released as extras on many DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Kurosawa’s films.

I would also highly recommend Shinobu Hashimoto’s book Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I. Hashimoto was a co-screeenwriter for many of Kurosawa’s films, including Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Throne of Blood and others. He goes into details about their writing practices with Kurosawa and gives some great insights into Kurosawa as a person and an artist.

Also Teruyo Nogami’s book is absolutely wonderful in this regard. She worked with Kurosawa for four decades.

7. Were Kurosawa’s films financially successful? Did they do well box office wise? Kurosawa wasn’t as appreciated in Japan compared to worldwide but did his films still do well when they dropped.

Despite being relatively expensive to make, Kurosawa’s films were financially successful in Japan. I think the first film that lost money was Dodesukaden.

I would say that the idea that Kurosawa wasn’t appreciated in Japan is something of an often repeated myth. Kurosawa’s films were big events, they won Japanese awards and consistently ranked high on yearly Japanese film magazine rankings. The fact that his films always weren’t the biggest sellers or the most awarded was perhaps taken in the west as a sign of Japanese people not appreciating Kurosawa, rather than for a sign that there were a lot of other great films made in the country as well.

And Kurosawa of course had trouble finding financing for his films in the 70s, which again made many in the west think that he wasn’t appreciated by the Japanese film industry. But pretty much every Japanese film director had trouble getting films off the ground at that point, as Japanese cinema was undergoing some pretty dramatic changes.