WHAT WENT WRONG - Seven Samurai

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

A Kubrickian schedule! Two months of shooting in the mud! Roundworm, tuberculosis, and mass-method acting! What are the building blocks of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic jidaigeki film, Seven Samurai? Chris and Lizzie learn of Kurosawa's battles with censors (Japanese and American), studios, and his own personal demons. Plus, how the score went from the wastebasket to the silver screen, how Toshiro Mifune saved the film from a self-serious tone, and how a request for 10 days off can lead to a two year stay at your director's house.*This episode was made possible by the incredible support of Patrons like Blaise Ambrose! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

25,600 minutes. That's how long seven samurai is. Just kidding. It's a great movie. We're going to talk about it. Hello and welcome back to what went wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop. That just so happens to be about movies. And now it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a sprawling period piece epic with a universal story about the value of knowing when and how to fight. And most importantly, what's worth fighting for. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer and Chris. What unbelievably long movie did you choose for us today? Well, today we have the movie that Lizzie watches between episodes of Love is Blind and mouthfuls of chicken. Can't believe you're outing me. And that is Akira Kurosawa's classic 1954 film, Seven Samurai.

Seven Samurai is a movie I've wanted to cover for a long time. It's very influential. Lizzie, I'm sure you can see the influences throughout Western film in particular. Kurosawa is kind of like a hollow director amidst many of that new wave of atoors in the United States, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. And we've gotten a lot of requests to cover foreign films, which we have not done, we're not done nearly at the rate that perhaps that we should. And this year, as we've done our best Oscars coverage,

there have been a number of wonderful foreign films, both films that have been nominated, sentimental value, the secret agent, et cetera, and ones that haven't no other choice. And so I thought it was time, Lizzie. And I thought we could start with Seven Samurai and just get the really long one out of the way and make you watch it and sit through all of it. So what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching Seven Samurai for the podcast? First time seeing it. It's, you know, it is amazing how many things have continued to iterate on this story. It's, you know, everything from obviously magnificent seven. We discussed this, but a bug's life very clearly as well as just many, many, many, many other things. Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest, yes. Look, it's amazing. I understand why it's a classic.

The final action set piece is pretty incredible, the way that it's shot. Also, I'm hoping I didn't look like they hurt any horses, which was nice. I hope that that's the case, but we'll find out today. You know, I can actually speak to that right now, just because in our research, we found nothing about any injuries to horses or any injuries to animals on this film in general. There were a couple of injuries to actors that we'll get to later. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but based on what we see on screen and the fact that I couldn't find anything, it doesn't seem likely. Okay. It's shot beautifully. The acting for the most part is, it's interesting because some of it is so naturalistic and then some of it is so cartoonish and over the top. It kind of varies by a performer.

It does very much. And that is an interesting experience. And once, that I actually really enjoyed because both worked for me at different times. The man who plays Kikuchio, he is one that I think you could describe as more cartoonician over the top. And yet... Toshito Mifune. Yes, he's so wonderful. And that moment when he's holding the baby, you know, after the mill has burned down and he just says, like, the baby is me. It's really heartbreaking and incredible. I think my favorite storyline I was most interested in was definitely that between Shino and Katsushito, that one. was so fascinating the dynamic with her father, and also, like, he's so freaked out about his daughter

hooking up with a samurai and not at all concerned about the bandits that are coming to murder them all. And it's like, sir, your priorities are out of order, which they do tell him multiple times, which I appreciated. But that whole story I thought was handled very interestingly, and maybe I'm just reading into this, but I thought at the very end, when Kambes Shimada says, you know, we still lost this battle, I almost took that to me. that he was referring a bit to their relationship, because of course you see at the very end that she still has to turn away and go back to work and that he can't be with her. And then he turns around and says, you know, we lost, essentially that we lost four samurai and it's the peasants who won. But I just

thought that that was a really interesting storyline to throw into the middle of this essentially very, very long action movie. And then my favorite performance in the entire movie goes to Seiji Miyaguchi, who plays Kuzo. I love him in this. He is so quiet and, like, still and out of everyone, he and Takashi Shimura give just, like, really modern performances in this, I think, that are pretty incredible to watch. So that's my review. I'm glad I watched it. I should probably watch it again at some point. It's not served by watching it in chunks the way that I did, which I did because I have a terrible attention span and a baby. But I've got his mind was on. We watched one episode of Love is Blind, Chris.

We haven't even left the pods, okay? We're very behind. Anyway, what about you? So I had seen this movie before, but it was not the Kurosawa film that I would go back to as a kid. So when I was young, young, Ron is like a samurai epic. It's based on King Lear. And I watched that a lot of times because it was in color and it has huge battles and it's crazy. And then he has another film called Dreams.

And those were kind of the two that I watched. Those are of his later work. And I watched those quite often when I was in high school, by quite often, I mean a couple times. And then as I got older, I dug into Roshomon, which precedes Seven Samurai. And I kind of hit all the big ones, you know, like Yojimbo and Hidden Fortress, High and Low, and Ikiru, which is, I think, one of my favorites of his films. Lizzie will talk about it briefly today that I think you should watch. It is Takashi Shimura. So Takashi Shimura, who plays Kambi Shimada in this movie, and Toshito Mifune, who plays Kikuchi, as you mentioned, those two actors, a lot of these actors work with Kurosawa again and again, but those two in particular are in so many of his films, including Bolter and Ra Shaman, et cetera. So you should definitely check out some other of his movies. And if you want something that feels more contemporary, Ihiu's really beautiful. They remade it with Bill Nyei. It was called Living. It came out a couple years ago. Oh, yeah.

It's about a government bureaucrat who discovers that he's terminally ill, and he kind of finds meaning. in his life in building a playground. And it's just a very beautiful, simple story. Very different than Seven Samurai, but there's a humanist quality that runs through all of Kurosawa's movies. And so when I was younger, I would watch them for the action. And then as I've gotten older, I really appreciate everything besides the action. I still appreciate the action.

But this movie... I was least interested in the action, honestly, in this movie. Yeah, and it has a couple, you know, like you mentioned, there's a 30-minute set piece at the end of the film. That's one long extended action sequence. But most of this movie is just a relationship movie. between two groups of people that come from two different classes in this Edo period. It's a hangout film, man.

It's a hangout film. And I really love that. And if you can settle into its rhythm, it is long. There's an intermission. It's a very long film. I feel if you can settle into its rhythm, it's very rewarding in getting to live with these folks, see their desires. I think you also see, I think from a Western perspective, we tend to see Japanese culture as more rigid and formal than our own in some ways. But I love, as you mentioned, for example, with Shino and Katsushito.

folks saying, look, they're young. They're in love. What did you think was going to happen? Well, they're also like, we're about to get murdered. We're about to get murdered. Yeah. To focus on. Exactly. And so I like how it shows all of the humanity underneath a lot of the more rigid seeming class elements of the movie. And I do think that ultimately this is a movie about class in a lot of ways. And as you mentioned, Lizzie, the film ends with Kanbe Shimata saying, you know, we lost the battle. And one of the things I think he's saying is, you know, we failed to pierce. this social stratification. And I love the scene where you're watching the samurai become ingrained in the culture of this small town. And then they just cut to the scene

where Kanbei is holding a baby as he's talking to the town leaders. And you can tell he's just comfortable holding somebody's baby now at this point in the story. And then at the very end, the peasants have their community back. And he's a Ronan. He's a wandering samurai, right? He has no lord.

He has no house. The samurai are like a... community-less class within this society. They remain kind of homeless, I feel, at the end of the movie. Definitely. But that was one question I had just in terms of, like, where in the history of feudal Japan we are, because I know that eventually Samurai became almost like bureaucrats, but I think that was quite a bit later. So tell me if I have this right, that at this point in time, most of them were sort of military appointees of feudal lords, but these, Ronan, obviously, were not, meaning that they had no master, they had no lord, they were not attached to land or anything,

and they, were they just for hire? Were they just kind of soldiers for hire? Or like, what was the function? Well, not necessarily. So they were, and this is a big period of time. So the Edo period, I believe, runs from like 1600, basically, until 1868 with the Meiji Restoration. And so you have like the top figurehead class at the very top, right? The emperor and the court nobility. And then And underneath that, you have the Shogun, the Daimyo, and then the samurai. Which was like a military ruling class, right? That's the military ruling class. It was a very militarized society, and we'll talk a little bit about World War II in this episode

as well. And so they're this noble warrior class, and they have a warrior master feudal relationship with the lords above them. So most of these samurai are attached to a feudal lord in some way, and the ronin were the exception. Okay. And so I think that the Ronan, I believe he's identified as Ronan in that he is a little more rare. And also, he would be free to take on this type of freelance work, unlike other samurai who are attached to, you know, the lords. But yes, samurai, a lot of them, I think, served bureaucratic functions.

They worked the lower level samurai, you know, did guard work. They were messengers. They would get, you know, kind of subsistence wages. So some samurai, I think were very powerful. And then others very much not so. It was a wide range. One other interesting thing is below that class. Then you have the peasants, but below the peasants were the craftsmen,

and then the lowest class was the merchant class. Really? Interesting. Yeah, and that's actually been true of a lot of societies. I know in capitalist America, the merchant class is much higher than a lot of others. But in a lot of societies, the merchant class was considered the lowest class, which is interesting. I mean, that makes sense in like the merchant of Venice. Yeah, I think the philosophy was, oh, they're the most useless class. They profit off of the production of other people.

But I do think, again, it's far more complicated than just a simple stratification. And I was reading some sources saying, oh, it was really just a philosophical distinction. Farmers were philosophically placed above merchants, even though throughout a lot of this period, there were a lot of merchants who were living far more materially lavish and wealthy lives than any farmers at the time. But let's get into it, Lizzie, because this episode is really interesting, and I think it's a really fun flip side to Casablanca, which we just discussed. and deals with the United States entering World War II. And this film's going to touch a lot on the Japanese perspective of World War II

and the U.S. occupation afterwards. Can I say one thing before we dive in? Please. I know I'm going to get a lot, a lot of shit and a lot of comments from film bros who are like, you've never seen the Seven Samurai. And, you know, they're right. I'd never seen The Seven Samurai before. And I just want to say to anybody out there who's listening who also hasn't seen The Seven Samurai,

that's okay. That's okay. Well, you should probably call it Seven Samurai because that's the title. Fucking A. Anyway, if you haven't seen Seven Samurai, that's all right. And I, you know... Of course it's all right. But watch it before you listen, maybe, because there will be some spoilers.

That's what I was going to say. You should watch it. It is worth watching. You do not have to have seen every single classic film in order to be able to discuss film. As I have not, and you have not, the whole point of this show is to try to get people, including us, to watch more movies. That's right. So go watch more movies.

But let's dive into the details. Seven Samurai, also known as the Seven Samurai, It's a 1954 Gidehiki film, which translates to period drama. And this refers to stories that take place before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. So a very wide period. Many of these were samurai films, although certainly not all. Can you briefly clarify what the Meiji Restoration is, just because we keep referencing it? The Meiji Restoration, 1868, followed, I believe, the reopening of Japan to Western influence,

which was a bit of gunboat diplomacy executed by the United States, basically saying, hey, we got all these ships on your shore, we'd love to trade with you. And Japan said, well, we don't know. And they said, are you sure you don't know? Because we got a lot of cannons on these ships. Sounds like us. Yeah, that's great.

Let's do it. So basically, it led to the restored imperial rule of Japan and the westernization of Japan in many ways. And so that is the Meiji Restoration of 1868 in a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very. small nutshell. All right. So the film is directed by Akira Kurosawa, as we mentioned. It was produced by Sojiro Motoki from a screenplay by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni. It stars Takashi Shimei as Khambe Shima, I'll call him. Yoshio Inaba as Gorobai Kata Yama, the wise one. Daiseke Kato as Shichiroji,

and that's the old friend. Seiji Miyaguchi as Kyozo, and that is the badass quiet one, My faith. As you mentioned, the one you got to look out for it. Yeah. I love when he just says, they realize they have muskets. There's snipers. And then Toshito Mufune says, you know, I'll go deal with it. And then the quiet one just says, I got it. He sprints into the forest. And then the next morning he comes back and he just throws a couple muskets on the ground. And then he goes to sleep. Yeah, he's amazing. It's pretty badass. Minoru, Chiaki, as Hehachi, Hayashi, Hayashira, the charming one. Isao Kimura as Katsushira Okamoto, the young one. And Toshiro Mifune as Kishu-Mifune as Kikuchio, the wild one, the former farmer, as we learn, the man born of farmers.

And many, many more and more actors will get into as we move through this. It was released in Japan on April 26, 1954, and it premiered in the United States two years later, on July 3, 1956. It was released wide in the United States on November 19, 1956. As always, the IMDB logline reads, farmers from a village exploited by bandits hire a samurai for protection, and he gathers six other samurai to join him. Very simple.

Sources for today's episode include but are not limited to The Emperor and the Wolf, the lives and films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith. Compound Cinematics, Akira Kurosawa and I by Shinobu Hashimoto, something like an autobiography by Akira Kurosawa. Akira Kurosawa interviews, a compilation edited by Bert Kardulo, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film.

And before we dive in, guys, we have done our best to look up all of the pronunciations of names, and I will be doing the Western ordering of names. So do the first name and then the surname. In Japanese, it would be the surname and then the first name, but I believe this will be easier for both me to say and our audience to understand our primarily Western audience. My apologies, if I get anything wrong, feel free to send us an email if there are any corrections I can put in the show notes. All right, Lizzie, let's talk about Akira Kurosawa and try to figure out, if any, which

the seven samurai he's most like. So he was born in Tokyo on March 23rd, 1910. He had four older sisters and two older brothers, making him the seventh of seven children. You could say eight. He had a brother who passed away before Kurosawa was born. But we'll stick with seven. And of the seven samurai, he reminds me most of Katsushito, the young one, lying in that bed of flowers on the mountain side. He was the baby. He was sensitive. And he was really, really, really bad at school. Here's what he said about his first year at private school, which he described as jail. It was a fact that I was slow.

Because I understood nothing of what the teacher was saying. I just did whatever I wished to amuse myself. Finally, my desk and chair were moved away from those of the other children, and I ended up getting special treatment. As the teacher gave his lessons, he would look at me from time to time and say, Akira probably won't understand this, but, or this will be impossible for Akira to solve, but the other children would turn and look at me and snicker when he did this. but no matter how bitter I felt, he was right. Whatever the subject, it was completely incomprehensible to me.

I was pained and saddened. So a couple of years later, he transfers to a more traditionally Japanese school, and he sticks out like a sore thumb. Imagine someone like me suddenly appearing among a group that lives by purely Japanese customs. They pulled my long hair, poked at my knapsack, rubbed snot on my clothes, and made me cry a lot. They called him Conbeto San, a.k.a. Mr. Gumdrop,

Which sounds like a good nickname, Lizzie, but it's actually about a little boy who's always crying in this song and his tears are as big as gumdrops. So basically they're saying, Akura Kurasawa is a cry baby. At least his older brother, Hago, had his back, kind of. So in his autobiography, he says he would walk to school with his older brother and his older brother would insult him the entire time, speaking just loud enough for Kurasawa to hear, but nobody else to hear. You little stupid, you son of his best boy. Oh, no one can hear that. And then at school, if Kurosawa got picked on, his brother would appear and call Kurasawa over to save him from being picked on.

But then when Kurasawa came over, his brother would just walk away and just appear again. So it was very complicated upbringing, a lot of insults, a lot of crying. And then things start to get a little better for him when an art teacher recognizes that Kurosawa has a unique talent for drawing. His name was Mr. Tachikawa, and he gave Kurasawa the highest mark a student could get. And all of a sudden, Kurwasawa has something to look. forward to. He becomes really good at drawing. And when he gets better at drawing, his confidence improves and he gets better in his other classes. All of a sudden, he turns things around and

he's president of his class. And in some ways, he was the opposite of his father, Isamu. Now, his father had samurai lineage. And when Kurisaw was a child, he had a top knot, which is the traditional samurai hairstyle. He was a military man. He taught physical education. He loved sports. Isamu actually helped set up judo and kendo studios. He built Japan's first swimming pool and he helped popularize baseball. In fact, when Kurosawa was a baby, Isamu put him in the arms of a Yokozuna, which was a champion super wrestler, so that he'd grow big and strong. And he grew big, but he didn't grow strong. He was six feet, but he couldn't do a pull-up and he set a record by getting a zero in PE. Relatable. During morning exercises, his teacher would tell all the students to stand at attention,

and Kurosawa would hold his breath and faint. So it was a tough upbringing. Kurosawa wasn't really fitting into the image that his father had for him, but his father had a soft spot for the arts. Kurosawa said he was a strict man of military background, but at a time when the whole idea of watching movies was hardly well received in educator circles, he took his family to the movies regularly. And not only movies made in Japan, he would take them to a local theater that only showed foreign films. So Kurosawa grew up watching movies from the U.S. and from Europe. Now, early Japanese films were heavily influenced by like, you know, Kabuki Theater, for example, so he's seeing more than just that style. By 19.

In 1915, Japan's importing foreign films and droves, and suddenly the Japanese public's influenced by all of these Western ideas. And as Kurosawa's coming of age in Japan, things are turbulent. What are a few things going on in the world, Lizzie, between 1910 and 1935, for example? A rise of fascism across Western Europe. Spanish flu, World War I. Yeah, that. Great Depression. World War I, Spanish flu, Great Depression.

I was getting there. That's right. I know there are a number of things. You weren't. I cut you off. There are a number of things that we might not be aware of. For example, the great Canto earthquake, which led to widespread fires and the mass murder of thousands of Koreans and Chinese in Japan called the Kanto Massacre.

Yeah. He was 13 when he saw this, and his brother made him go look at the ruins. If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there was nothing to be afraid of. When he was 18, there was the mass arrest of. the Communist Party members in the March 15th incident, and then the assassination of the Manchurian warlord Changsou Lin by Japanese officers. And then the next year, when he turned 19, the Great Depression hit Japan.

So he struggled to keep up with his painting. He probably thought, like, well, what's the point? He felt it was impossible to sit quietly and paint amidst all this social upheaval, and all of the painting supplies are extremely expensive because Great Depression. So he says, I'm going to explore literature, theater, music, film. He basically joins this proletariat artist league that's kind of kind of, and works as a courier for an underground newspaper, then he abandons communism. He goes to live with his brother, Hago, and his brother had found a really unique job in the movies.

So as silent films grew in popularity, Japanese theaters hired Benchie. Benchie were storytellers who would sit next to the screen and narrate the films. Oh, wow. So Hago had found a career as a Benji. And so Kurosawa found himself spending a lot of time at the movies. But Lizzie, what changed at the end of the 1920s? Talkies. The talkies invaded. Recorded dialogue became the norm, and silent films disappeared. All of the sudden, the Benji, like the samurai, were no longer needed. So Hago's work dried up,

Kurosawa moved home, and in 1933, Hago died by suicide. Oh no. Kurosawa was 23 years old. Not long after, he lost his oldest brother to sickness, and he was the only son left. He felt responsible for his parents. He was really impatient with his own aimlessness. He found work as a commercial artist, but he hated it. So he started to panic because brother's death sent him spiraling. But his father told him to stay calm. He told me if I would just wait calmly, my road in life would open up to me of its own accord. And soon it would. So in 1935, Akira Kruisawa comes across a newspaper ad. PCL film studio was looking for assistant directors. PCL would eventually become one of the most famous studios in Japan. They would go on to make

Godzilla. Do you know what the studio's name is, Lizzie? Toho. Toho Studios. One recent example, Godzilla minus one, which just won an Oscar for visual effects and became the highest grossing Japanese live action film in the U.S. and Canada. I really enjoyed that. It's a great movie. Yeah. Now, it started as a company that serviced other studios. So PCL stands for photochemical laboratory, and they were founded in 1929 and they provided lab services like film development, for example, for other studios in Japan. But as the talkies became popular, they expanded their services. They built sound stages and recording facilities,

and they started to produce their own films in roughly 1933. So the application required an essay, and Kurosawa was supposed to write about the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese films, and to give examples and suggest ways to correct the problems. Now, Kurosawa is a smart ass, and he decided that if the problems are fundamental, there was no way to correct them.

And that was his essay. A few months later, he got the job. So if Kurosawa is our Katsushu, this is the moment when he meets his Kambay Shimada. So he joins PCL in 1936, and he starts working primarily for actor-turned-director, Yamamoto Kajiro. Kurosawa called him the best teacher of my entire life. And things changed as quickly for Kurosawa as they did for Japan.

He's working on editing, dubbing, he's writing scripts of his own. He climbs the ranks, third assistant director, second assistant director, chief assistant director. And as Japan enters the second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese government temporarily bans U.S. films. As early as the 20s, they're concerned about the ideological and economic impact of Western films, mostly United States films in Japan. And in fact, Lizzie, in 1932, there was an ultra-nationalist group in Japan that planned to

assassinate Charlie Chaplin when he came to Tokyo. Okay. The goal was to assassinate Charlie Chaplin to provoke the United States into a war with Japan, and then this group could overthrow the civilian government and militarize Japanese society. Jokes on them. We don't care about our actors that much. That is very true. Go watch the interview. Charlie Chaplin survived his trip. Prime Minister Inuke Suyoshi did not.

He was assassinated on May 15th the day after Chaplin's arrival. There was another coup attempt four years later. This is an extremely tumultuous time. Yeah. And on December 7th, 1941, the ultra-nationalist got their wish when what happened, Lizzie? Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor. In February of 1942, the United States government started imposing curfews on Japanese Americans in the United States. By March, they're being forced to report to prison camps up and down the West Coast. The U.S. government felt Japanese Americans

were two Japanese to be trusted. They stripped their own citizens of their inalienable rights. And in Japan, the Japanese government thought Akira Kurwasawa was too American. So in 1943, they flagged his directorial debut, San Shiro Sugata, as two Western. He says that they fixated on a scene where Sanjito meets his rival's daughter for the first time,

and the censor said, this is a British-American love scene. You cannot have this in your movie. Apparently, they just met on a staircase, and that was considered far too Western. I'm not sure why. It reminded me of the scene, you know, and It's a Wonderful Life, where they are on the phone on the staircase. You can't be at different heights. You have to be at eye level. Oh, that's interesting. Maybe she was standing too tall. Curisawa could not stand this. He said he would

fly into a rage, so he did his best to look out the window and think of other things. Now, the master director, Yasujito Ozu, who is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and one of the most popular Japanese filmmakers at the time argues for this film's release. It is released. It is a success. And then on August 6th and 9th, the United States bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And on September 2nd, 1945, World War II comes to an end. So the censors, no longer have any power over Kurosawa. But the film industry has a new group to contend with advisors from the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

This is the Occupation Force censorship program now. And they are requiring English versions of all screenplays to be sent to the SCAP for review. Anything with the following is prohibited. Militarism, revenge, nationalism, anti-foreign sentiment, distortion of history, approval of religious or racial discrimination, partiality toward or approval of feudal loyalty. Excessively light treatment of human life, direct or indirect approval of suicide, approval of the oppression or degradation of wives, admiration of cruelty or unjust violence, anti-democratic opinion, exploitation of children, and opposition to the Potsdam Declaration or any SCAP order, which is, you know, like, all the fun stuff that you can put in a movie.

Yeah, you know what you can make? Virgin River on Netflix. That's what you can make. Akira Kourisara. Sound good, Virgin River. Virgin River. I've watched it. The one nice thing is that Western love scenes were suddenly being encouraged. That's right. The SCAP didn't like bowing, which they thought displayed futile tendencies. So they said, let's do some on-screen kissing, to which I say, You guys are all perverts. Now, not all the guidelines and interpretations were so cut and dry. And there's one interesting case we'd to talk about briefly. This is Kurosawa's the men who tread on the tiger's tail.

It was shot at the end of World War II, and at first, the Japanese censors wanted to ban it for being too democratic and American. And then the war ends as production is being wrapped, and the U.S. takes over. and they say, whoa, this is too feudal and two Japanese. And so, Curacao is just always stuck between these two. He is too Western for Japan and two Japanese for the West. So several film historians do note that Curasawa seem to have more of a problem with the Japanese sensors than with the American ones. So if anything, he might skew a little Western in some ways.

So between 45 and 50, he makes nine films. He branches out. He's starting to work with other writers. And it's around this time that he is sent a story. screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto. And he has no idea who Hashimoto is, but he's about to become the first of his seven samurai. So Shinobu Hashimoto's a few years younger than Kurisawa. And like Kurisawa, he wasn't really cut out for physical activity. He's discharged from the military in 1938 after he catches tuberculosis. He gets sent to a military hospital, then a rehab facility for disabled veterans,

which may have been a sanatorium. We're not sure. He has to spend this first week on bed rest, and he forgets to bring something to pass the time. There are no iPads. There is no television. He is just sitting there. The cicadas are screaming. And he's thinking, am I going to die here? And then one of his neighbors says, shut up, and he throws him a magazine. His neighbor's name was Isuke Narita, and the magazine was called Japanese cinema.

Ashimoto flips it open, and he lands on a screenplay that's been printed in the back of this magazine. He's never read a screenplay, and he goes, wait, is this a real? Is this really a screen? This is so simple. And he asks Narita, he says, is this real? He says, yeah, it's real. He goes, no, I could write something like this. And Arita says, no, no, you could not write something like that.

And he goes, yeah, not only could I write something like this, I could do it better. And Narita says, you absolutely cannot do better than this. And Hashimoto says, tell me, who is the greatest Japanese screenwriter? And he says, Mansaku Itami. Hashimoto says, fine, I'm going to write a screenplay, and I will send it to this Mansaku Itami. So it turns out writing a script is harder than he thought. It took him three years to write his first. first screenplay. It was called the Mountain Soldier. He left this facility. He gets work as an accountant

at a munitions factory. And when he finishes this script, he sends it to screenwriter and director Monsaku Itami. And then Itami wrote back. Hashimoto couldn't believe it. Itami even offered feedback to improve the script. Wow. And so Hashimoto calls up Narita to tell him the news, but it's too late. Narita had passed away of tuberculosis. And Itami was also sick with tuberculosis. But he agreed to mentor Hashimoto. And so Hashimoto would write scripts by hand on a clipboard during the 50-minute train ride to and from work. He'd then bring them to Itami, who was, quote, displeased with the vast majority of them and would become irritated and angry with me. But sometimes, every once in a while, Itami would get excited and he would tell him how he'd like the writing and

he'd talk about revising it and directing it, but they'd never have the chance. So Itami died in 1946, three years after he began mentoring Hashimoto, but before he passed, he did something really amazing. He arranged for writer-director, Kyoshi Saihi, to take over as Hashimoto's mentor. And in one of the last meetings, he said, try an adaptation. So after Ritami died, Hashimoto adapts a short story called Anna Grove by Ryunuske Aktagawa. It's basically a compilation of seven different testimonies of an alleged rape and murder. Lizzie, is this reminding you of anything yet? I'll keep going. Jump in. If this is this. reminds you of a movie. Hashimoto finishes it in three days, and he calls it Shiu, which means

male and female. And one day, his new mentor, name drops Kurosawa in conversation, basically like, yeah, me and Kurosawa, that Kurosawa, we're pretty good friends, not a big deal. And Hashimoto says, great. Here is a stack of all of my screenplays. I want you to take them to him. And he does. And somehow, nine months later, Hashimoto gets a postcard from a producer named Sojidi Motoki. It says, greetings. We have decided. excited that your work, Shiu, is to be filmed by Akira Kurasawa as his next feature. To this end, you will need to meet with Kurasawa, and we ask that you come to Tokyo at your earliest convenience.

Please let us know of your availability. Forgive the brevity of this message. I just love the formality of this era. It's so much better than send me your avails that we have nowadays. So in spring of 1949, Hashimoto meets Kurasawa for the first time at his home in Tokyo. And according to Hashimoto, the meeting lasts five minutes. But according to Kurasawa, the meeting is a meeting. last hours. So we don't know who to believe. I kind of lean towards Hashimoto. I don't know.

Yeah, I do too. Five minutes is a memorable, yes. Yes. Caritasah, no, he was here for hours. We were shooting the shit. Hashimoto's like, he had me in and out of there so quick. So one thing they agree on, Karasawa told him the script for Shiu was too short. And without thinking, Hashimoto says, no problem. I'll make it longer. I'll add in another story by the same author. Now, Kurosawa actually said that this was his idea. So again, I'm not 100% sure. sure who to believe, but I tend to believe Hashimoto because he was the one adapting the book. Right. So I would imagine he would be the one saying it. Either way, the second story was called Rush Oman.

Okay. And we will save the making of Rushaman for another day. But Lizzie, have you seen Rashomon? I'll just give you a brief synopsis if you've not seen it. No, but I understand the technique and how it applies to the different perspectives. And I have seen the rip-offs of Rushaman, but yes, I need to watch it. So like a samurai has been murdered or found murdered in a grove by a woodcutter. and then you threw the testimony of both the bandit, the samurai's wife, and the samurai through a medium, which is really fun. That's my favorite scene. It's amazing in the whole movie.

Nice. You learn, well, actually, what you really learn is what is truth? Is there an absolute truth? Or does everybody just lie and make up their own truth? It's a little like memento in some way, right? Sure, do I tell myself a story to make the world, you know, fit me better? Here's what you need to know. Hashimoto turns in the script and he hates it. But it doesn't matter because Kurosawa was a writer too, so he rewrites it. So it chronicles this conflicting account of multiple points of view regarding the murder of a samurai in the forest. Now, the studio, Daiyei films did not love this movie.

It was very experimental in its structure and style, and it didn't really conform to, as Kurosawa would put it, the mannerisms in most Japanese pictures, end quote. It starred Toshiro Mifune, who would be Kikuchio. And it was released in August of 1950. reviews are mixed, but it did well at the box office. So Hashimoto quits his job at the munitions factory. Kurosawa tackles an adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot. He was a big Dostoevsky fan. That makes sense.

And it flops. Four and a half hours long. The studio says, absolutely not. He cuts it down to three. They cut it down more to two hours and 46 minutes. The reviews are scathing. The studio cuts ties with Kurosawa. And he literally walks home, just wallowing and sadness.

And I just imagine, all by myself as he's walking. He tries to go fishing and the line snaps. He goes home again. And then his wife bursts in and she goes, I have amazing news. Rushaman just won the top prize, the golden line at the Venice Film Festival. And Kurosawa says, who submitted our movie to the Venice Film Festival? So it was the first film entered by Japan into the Venice Film Festival.

And it went on to win the Oscar, non-competitive, as we just discussed in our Oscar coverage, for Best Foreign Language Film. At the time, it was called the Honorary Foreign Language Film Award. It was the first Japanese film to win this award. It had been around since 1947. Again, as we talked about Lizzie, it had just gone to Italian and French movies until this point in time.

And so, surely, this would turn the studio and Japanese critics around on Kurasawa and recognize him for the brilliant director that he is. Lizzie's shaking her head. Certainly not. No, they insisted that, quote, these two prizes were simply reflections of Westerners, curiosity, and taste for Oriental,

Zodacism. Kurosawa was devastated. He later wrote in his autobiography, Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan? Maybe this is why his next film had a modern setting and a universal theme. He teamed up with Hashimoto again. They also brought in another writer, Hideo Oguni, who was one of the highest paid screenwriters in Japan at the time. And they made Ikidu, which is a wonderful film. You should absolutely watch it, Lizzie. As I mentioned, terminally ill man finds meaning in the time he has left by building a playground, living with Bill Nye, also very good. I've seen that. It's wonderful. Yeah, it's really good. Again, it stars Takashi Shimura from

Seven Samurai, and it was released to critical and commercial acclaim months before the U.S. occupation of Japan comes to an end, which brings us to Seven Samurai. So during World War II, the Japanese military government promoted samurai films. The Bushido or Warrior class was consistent with this militarized state. But for that same reason, Lizzie, during the occupation, the United States suppressed samurai films. So weeks before Ikido was released, Kurosawa told Hashimoto he wanted their next project to be a period piece about samurai. Now, Kurosawa had written a couple of other samurai films that had been shot by other directors, both actually starred Toshito Mifune, but this was going to be far more ambitious. And far more controversial Lizzie, it was going to be

called a samurai's day. And that's literally what it was. Here's the description from Hashimoto. One morning, a samurai wakes up. He washes his face, shaves his paint, ties his top nut, bows to his ancestor's spirits. He has breakfast, finishes dressing with the help of his wife, wears his long and short swords, and accompanied by retainers, heads to the castle. His work at the castle proceeds without incident. But when it's nearly evening and time to leave, he makes a trivial mistake, and when he returns to his mansion, he commits Sapuku in his yard, which is ceremonial ritualistic suicide. And in the golden dusk of his garden, nearly all the cherry blossoms are in bloom, a certain samurai's day. The end. That was it. Like one day, slice of life, one

samurai and Kurosawa has one rule, Izzy, it has to be as historically accurate as possible. So Hashimoto and a team of producers and assistants all go to the library, and they're digging up every detail they can find about everyday life of a samurai during this period of time. But the information on everyday life was very thin. So they write the outline and the story hinges on a critical moment. The samurai and the guard, who will later help him commit Sapuku, get together and eat their lunches brought from their respective homes. At the end of October 1952, one of the assistants from the art department calls and says, my research is showing that Samurai's don't eat lunch.

Okay, big problem. Hashimoto freaks out. He says, forget the library, call the historians. They call up a dozen historians and writers. Nobody knows the answer. None of them can confirm if samurai ate lunch. Hashimoto freaks out further. Is he going to have to abandon the project? He spent months on it. He hasn't been paid. Plus, this project is a big deal. Kurosawa is the most internationally recognized or one of the most internationally recognized

directors from Japan. Hashimoto burns his notes and breaks the news to Kurosawa and his producer. And then Kurosawa turns to the assistants and goes apeshit on them. Says that they have failed. It's their lack of research. And Hashimoto is sitting there thinking, oh my God, this is actually my fault. It's not their fault they're getting paid. flame for it. He finally steps in and he says, Mr. Kurosa, how many meals do you eat in a day?

And Kurasawa says, what? And he says, I eat three. I imagine you eat three as well, but we don't know when in Japan people started eating three meals. Nobody knows this. Japanese history is a history of incidents. When and where, what manner of incident took place is scrupulously written up in every which way, but not one line of accurate history touches on how people lived, how they ate and bathed. Our nation has a history of incidents, but we lack the histories of life. Kurisawa leaves. I think that's a really important quote because I think so much of Seven Samurai's length has to do with showing the intricacies of life as opposed to incidents. But I'm curious what you think, Lizzie. Definitely.

Yeah. I mean, that's most of this movie is kind of the day-to-day life and the intersection of the farmer's life with, you know, the samurai. And also not just the samurai, there's an enormous portion of this movie where they're on the hunt for the Seven Samurai and they're interacting with who are the people in the life? bathhouse hotel thing that they're staying in. Just ruffians, basically. But they seem to think that they are above even the farmers. Yeah, it all feels like it's extremely indicative of class structure. That's like the whole movie.

And how much it's holding the farmers back where they are, even from defending themselves. And I love that so much of it, too, is about, we need to harvest the barley now. After we're going to harvest the barley, this is how we're going to flood the It's a lot about the process as opposed to the conflict itself. And I always really like that. It's also interesting. Yeah, it's a lot about the process. It's very specific. Like, they're only eating millet. And they keep talking about like, look at them. Like, they're eating millet, not even rice. And I'm like, is that, is that bad? I don't know. But it does feel very, very specific. Yeah, I think they do a really good job of landing you in this period. And my understanding, by the way, is that

the weaponry, the clothing, many of the social hierarchies are very accurate. Although, So, Kurosawa is taking a lot of liberties with the interactions between the characters and the way that the characters are interacting, generally speaking. So a few days later, Kurosawa calls Hashimoto. And he says, I have a new idea. Why make a movie about one samurai when you can make a movie about a bunch of samurai? Perhaps seven. Yeah, well, yeah, he says, okay.

And so they says, well, let's combine the anecdotes of multiple real swordsmen. So there were a number, Bokudan Sukahara, Musashi Miyam. which actually a movie about Musashi Viamoto would go into production in parallel to seven samurai, kind of. It would come out around the same time, also played by Shoshito Mifune. And that one's actually much more expensive in a shot. It's called Samurai One. There's a samurai trilogy. It's shot in color. So Kurosawa says, we could call it the lives of Japanese swordsmen. And Hashimoto says, great, I am not fired. I am not going to let you down. I will finish this screenplay in two weeks. And Kurosawa says, it's, you don't need to write.

It's just two weeks. He says, no, it's fine. He says, no, two weeks. And he goes, I'm going to go write. And he goes and writes. And it takes him 15 days. So he is one day late in delivering his script. And he is so ashamed that he delivers it in person and sits there and watches as

Kurosawa reads all 297 half sheets between episodes of Loves Blind. And Kurosawa finishes and lets out a long sigh and says, it's not great. And Hashimoto goes out no. And basically, Hashimoto had ignored traditional narrative structure, and we'll talk about the specifics of the structure, to just write a story that was climax, climax, climax, climax, climax, the whole time. And I think he was just sitting there. Maybe this is why you don't write it in two weeks, yeah.

I know, exactly. So the traditional Japanese four-part structure for storytelling is called Kishotanketsu. And again, I think I have that pronounced more or less correctly. I believe we may have discussed this once before, Lizzie, but let's do a quick refresher. So this is a story structure that's popular in a lot of Eastern cultures, so Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese narratives. And generally speaking, it focuses less on conflict and more in situation. So conflict drives Western stories, but Kishonten Ketsu sets up kind of like a delayed reveal is the way I would describe it. So the four parts, Kiku or K, Shoku or Shoku, or Shō, Tenku or Ten, and then Keku or Ketsu,

are roughly translated to introduction, development, twist, and conclusion. And the key to Kishotanketsu is that it withholds a major story element until the third of the four acts. Now, Western storytelling kind of also does this. The version would be called the midpoint reversal. Right. But I can give you an example of a Western movie that I actually think has a Kishoteng Ketsu structure that I think you're familiar with. And that's Barbarian.

Have you seen Barbarian from the last few years ago? Yes. So quick summary to set it up. If you're going to break it down from a Kishotanketsu perspective, you have your introduction. Tess, played by Georgina Campbell, arrives at the house, and she discovers that somebody's already staying there. They set up the situation. Keith, played by one of the many brood of the Scarsguards, is there.

And they spend the night chatting, and you kind of have a hint. Maybe somebody else is here, but it's not fully explored. You have then development, right? Tess and Keith, this is the second of the four sequences. They explore the basement. They're attacked by a monster woman, and Keith is killed. And then you have twists. The twist isn't the appearance of the monster movie. I believe from a Kishotanketsu perspective and audience, you know, let us know on Patreon if I'm getting this wrong. We cut to Justin Long's AJ and Los Angeles and we have no idea how this connects to our original story. We are then revealed that he has been accused of rape by his co-star. He needs cash. And that brings him back to the property where we started our story, which it turns out he owns. And then you have conclusion, AJ and Tess connect underneath this house and they have to work together to escape the monster. until AJ reveals his true self and he dies for his sins and we have the end of our movie.

So that's like a classic, I think, Western appropriation of a Kishotanketsu story. Another version, kind of, would be something like Parasite, which I think is a little bit more of a Western slash like style, you know, Cambellion style meets Kishotanketsu. But the midpoint of Parasite, Lizzie, where we reveal that the former housekeeper's husband has been living in this house the whole time. It's like somewhere in between, you know, a midpoint reversal and Kishotanketsu, but those are just some examples of it. The point is what Hashimoto has written does not work. Hashimoto says that my mind went dead silent like a vacuum. This would be so hard. He'd ruined a samurai's day, and now he has ruined the lives of Japanese swordsmen, and he has ruined the greatest director of Japan at the time. This guy's a little hard on himself. He's very hard on himself. It's very sweet.

So Kurasawa was very interested in these traveling swordsmen, and he says, it's okay, just go do more research. And he's like, so this script is not helpful. He's like, no, this script's useless. These 297 pages will be burned. Go do more research. So Hashimoto likens the samurai to professional athletes. Like you said, Lizzie of the beginning, they lend their service to various teams, lords or villages. And so Hashimoto comes back with more on the traveling samurai. They often fed themselves without any money at all. They'd pick up a shift at a dojo, stop it off at a temple. And that's where their producer, Motoki, joins in, and she says, like, well, this was a time when crime was rampant across the country. This is true. There's a lot of upheaval. Villages needed protection. Surely, samurai took lookout jobs for rice, for example. And bingo. Curasawa says, that's it. Farmers hiring samurai. He's sold. So in mid-January of 1953, Kurosawa, Hashimoto, and Oguni hole up in a cottage to finalize the first draft. And so in Japan, Lizzie, when film studios send their writers to an inn to I isolate and write, it is called Kanzume or canning, which sounds kind of fun but also terrifying. Yeah.

Hashimoto called the inn a gilded cage. Some sources claim they took no phone calls and had no visitors with one important exception, the actor Toshiro Mifune. Now, Kurosawa, Hashimoto, and Oguni had originally planned for six samurai. Toshiro Mifune was supposed to play your favorite character, Lizzie, the silent badass. Isn't that interesting because his performance is the furthest from that character in this movie? Yeah, but I could see him doing that, totally. I could totally see him do that. He's very handsome.

He's very striking. Yeah, he's the most handsome of the bunch, for sure. I like Kambay's look a lot. He's got such gravitas. Yeah. He's so quiet, but Mifune is very handsome. So he says, come on, look, if all the samurai are serious, this movie is not going to be interesting. And he was absolutely right.

And so that is how Kikuchio is born. Karasawa tells him, this is your role. do anything you want with the character. And Mufuini says, great, I am never going to wear pants. And he said, no problem. I was just going to say that. No pants. What I want is a shirt that covers about 50% of my ass, but only the upper 50%. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's a, I think it's a traditional outfit from the time. And it's a little jarring for us, I think, at first as Western audience. But then it leads to one of the most devastating images of the whole movie, which is him dead on the bridge at the very end where he's died kind of unnecessarily. And the rain is pouring down and his legs are exposed.

and it feels like just so human in that moment. So Kurosawa, Hashimoto, and Oguni would sit and write for seven hours at a time from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And according to Hashimoto, Kurasawa's philosophy was, you cannot rest even for a day. He said the writing process is running a full marathon, that you are allowed to get drunk during. So Hashimoto said that Kurzawa and Oguni would drink whiskey with water like it was some competition, waxing eloquent and finishing off a bottle in no time. And I need to start duding this because apparently they were. were writing 15 pages a day.

How do you think they got things done in Hollywood? Now, they mapped out the story ahead of time. Also speed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're in America. Yeah, David O'Slznick is like, I'll take that whiskey, throw it aside, but I'll give you one of these speedballs, my friend. The pages were piling up, and Hashimoto has a realization.

This movie's going to be over four hours long. And he is shocked, but Kurisawa and Ogunni see nothing about it. And he keeps writing, but it sounds like he is dying inside as he's writing. Because if this was a marathon, Kurosawa was doubling. the distance. They hit 320 pages and Kurosawa collapses. So for a couple days, all he can do is sip on gruel and sleep on a futon. Oguni leaves on a business trip, and so Hashimoto's just sitting there writing alone as Kurosawa seems to be dying behind him on a futon. According to Hashimoto, even when Oguni was there, he wasn't really writing. This is his quote. Honestly, I wanted

Mr. Oguni to help to write just one word, but as always, he read his thick English book without putting down a character, only examining the few pages of final draft that Mr. Kurosawa would pass to him. So basically, it sounds like Hashimoto would write, Kurosawa would revise, and then Oguni would give feedback on the revisions, and then the cycle would continue from there. Yeah. Now, Hashimoto wasn't working from nothing because Kurosawa had brought a thick notebook with a lot of drawings of the seven samurai, which is really cool.

And he'd worked out a lot of details, like Kambay was going to be 5'5 foot 5, medium build. This is how he wears his straw sandals. This is his gait. This is how he answers other people. This is how he turns when he's called to from behind. So the final stretch of the writing process was a 175-page sprint, detailing the battle between the thieves and the samurai. And Hashimoto, by this point, is a zombie.

He says, I bathed upon waking eight, and then turned to the table, wrote something, and handed it to Mr. Kurosawa, wrote more, handed it over, and in the evening, I sharpened my pencils, bathed, eight, and slept. They put their pencils down in March. By the way, Hashimoto said he had burned through 12 pencils every day. Whoa. They wrote 504 pages in three months.

Hashimoto walked away thinking, well, that's the last time Akira Kurasawa ever hires me. How could either of them go through something like this again? He walks away towards freedom and Kurasawa walks into pre-production. So they have three months to prepare for battle and he needs men that he can trust. So all of the samurai except for one, Lizzie, were played by actors that he had worked with before. And the exception was Yoshio Inaba, who plays Gorobe Katayama, who's primarily a theater actor. Remember that. So most of the key farmers were by actors in Kurosawa Stock Company, but the actor who plays Rikichi. So do you remember Rikichi, Lizzie,

he's the man who when they go to... Yes, who goes after, discovers his wife in the... Yes. It's a brothel. Yeah, or something. The hideout of the bandits up in the mountains, basically. Yeah. Really tragic scene. He realizes one of the women that they've taken is his wife, and she's been living with them, and I'm sure she's just trying to survive. It's a very devastating scene. Well, yeah, and to be clear, when she sees him, she runs back into the burning building. She runs back into the burning building to die. Yeah. Now, this actor was a newcomer. So Yoshio Suchia was actually a medical student turned theater student, and this was his first film.

Wow. He said, I heard about these auditions. He says, I'd rather watch films than be in them. So he skipped the audition to go to a Pachinko parlor. And then the auditions are finished. He goes back to the studio, Toho, to use the bathroom. And there's this huge guy in the urinal next to me doing his thing. And a few days later, Toho says, come on in. Meet Mr. Kurosawa. And he meets him and he's the big guy from the urinal who was next to him the whole time. Oh, wow. So many of the smaller parts were played by non-actors and the village was played by five locations. But the main village set was located on a reclaimed field. They built 23 houses and they brought in 40 horses to shoot the attacking bandits. The original plan was to transport the horses from one location to another as needed,

but this ended up being too complicated. So we would actually just use local horses at each location that they went to, and they would paint them to look like the ones in the main village set. I think definitely more doable in black and white, I would imagine, than in color. Yes. So there's four weeks of rehearsals, and when the actors weren't rehearsing, they were expected to stay in character. So everybody is expected to be method. They stayed in costume, They ate their meals together. They called each other by their character names. And it wasn't just the Seven Samurai.

It was everybody. Even actors with one line of dialogue. Oh my God. So Toho, Curacao was back at Toho for this movie, sets the budget for Seven Samurai somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 US dollars at that time. So that's not inflation ingested. This was more than double Ikiru,

and it was triple Roshamong. But Seven Samurai was also more than twice as long, action-packed, 40 horses, dozens of speaking rolls, stunts, rain, mud. Lizzie, if you had to guess if they went over or under budget, what would you guess? Uh, I think they stayed right under. They blew through this budget. That doesn't sound like enough for this, even at the time.

Let's talk about how they blew through this budget. So, filming begins on May 27, 1953, and the original plan is to wrap by August 18th and complete post-production in a month. And then release the film at the beginning of October. Guys. Does this sound like a reasonable plan? No. So they are doing speed.

I am like, the studio must have sent this to Kurosawa, and he must have just laughed and said, like, just say yes. Yeah. But there's no way he thought this was actually happening. I don't believe he thought this was happening. No, he knows how to make movies. There's no way. He also knows how to make them the Kurosawa way, which is not the fastest way.

So as early as June, the production is behind schedule. There were some mitigating circumstances. It was the rainy season. The weather is causing delays. It's leaving the entire cast and crew sitting around waiting. But when the weather clears, the movie. is tense. Mufune later said, it was like a war. Kurosawa was shooting with a fierce expression on his face. He kept screaming the whole time. Now, Mufune, for his part, he is expected to stay in

character as Kukuchio, so he says, I'm going to drink a lot of sake to get in character for this, you know, get into this role. And he did it specifically for the vulnerable scenes. So like when he holds the baby in his arm, when the mill burns around him. So he's hammered holding the baby. Well, that's what I was saying. Like, on the way he's a way. It's a wonderful performance, but also he's like holding a baby over a river with a burning building. Over a running river. Yeah.

He's drunk. Okay. I do think like some of the more grandiose elements of his performance, which really start to, for me, they really start to work once you start to understand his character's backstory more. Yes. And then when you really understand like this guy is drinking himself to death because he feels such shame and complicated guilt and you know what I mean?

All of these things. Feelings of abandonment is I really love the reveals of his character. Yeah, me too. Now, it sounds like Yoshi. Inaba had it the worst. Out of everybody, as I mentioned, Lizzie, he was a theater actor and the qualities that Kurosawa liked in him. His maturity, his humility came at a cost, which is, quote, as it turned out, he didn't have a lot of guts. Now, I think the problem was actually Kurosawa. So Inaba wasn't used to being on a film set with a director who yelled all the time. And this made him very nervous. And that caused him to look very pale. And Kurosawa's like, you're supposed to be a samurai. You know, supposed to be a tough guy. You're not supposed to be this pale guy. You're screaming at it. me. Which is so funny because this also feels like Kurosawa getting yelled at by his gym teacher, you know what I mean, like 30 years earlier. You're not going to do better. Well, like a gym teacher, Kurosawa says, go run a lap and he would make him run laps or sing traditional Japanese coal mining

songs to try to, I believe, get some color into his face and get him into character. Now, Inaba wasn't the only one who was having to work very hard physically. And by mid-July, 1953, Kurosawa had worked himself sick again. He has sent to the hospital in the middle of the middle of production for exhaustion and roundworm, which he had caught from eating infested beef. He comes to set a couple of weeks later, and it's three weeks until they are supposed to wrap. They have shot less than a third of the script. Yeah. Now, Yoshio Suchia, who plays Rikishi, was confused.

He had asked a theater friend, hey, how long does it take him to shoot a movie? And the friend goes, a month, maybe two. After three months of shooting, he goes, oh, my God, we have shot so little of this script. I need to take a break. He says, can I please take a break? Yes, the head of the actors. Can I please take a 10-day break? I want to go mountain climbing. I have just been sitting on the set and the head of the acting section panics. He tells the studio who tells Kurosawa and Kurosawa says, what are you doing? This is not professional. And then he feels bad. So he says, come stay at my house. You can eat at my house. We'll go to set together. Suchia reluctantly agrees and ends up living with Kurosawa for two years.

Oh, wow. Kind of a fun turn in their relationship. But don't worry, Lizzie. It didn't take quite that long to finish this movie. Okay. Because they ran out of money. Yeah. Going into September of 1953, Kurosawa had $19,000 of the budget left to spend. And he is not feeling confident. In fact, he thought Toho was going to replace him with Kunio Watanabe, who was much faster than Kurosawa and who was kind of known for shooting B movies at a really fast pace. And the studio was really nervous because they're making a couple of other movies at this time that are also risky. So Kurosawa's burning through his budget like a fire through a farmhouse, and Toho's financing, as I mentioned, Musashi Miyamoto, this other samurai film,

which is more expensive, by the way. It's a much bigger movie. And what movie, Lizzie, what monster movie would Toho make around this time? Gojira. That's right, Godzilla, Ishido Honda's Godzilla, which was inspired by, I believe, the beast from 20,000 fathoms. So there's this persistent rumor that the combination of seven samurai and Godzilla nearly drove Toho bankrupt. I think this is just a rumor. this studio is making between 60 and 100 films a year at this point.

But regardless, they are not happy with the fact that Kurosawa is just straight up burning through the budget. So when he burns through the budget in September of 1953, Toho says, that's it. You're done. We're cutting you off. We're sorry. We can't just keep giving you money. And Kurosawa says, no problem.

And he goes fishing because he knows they're going to just keep funding my movies as long as they make money. That's right. And he's right. And filming resumes on October 3, 1953. And I'm sure Toho thought maybe he'll work faster now. And Kurosawa says, nope, we're going to go at the same pace as before. Producers sent multiple telegrams to him while he's on location.

Hurry up. Come back. His response, let me continue or fire me. So they let him continue. At this point, it's a sunk cost. Like, you have to. Yeah, you have to. So he's filming the battle at the Bandit's Fort and reporters arrive on set.

The Toho Publicity Department had invited them to watch. And apparently, Kurosawa flipped. You idiots! Show them the completed picture! You're not supposed to show it to them while we're making it. I'm going home. And then he threw down his script and went home. He walked off the set and went home.

Comes back the next day, the weather's taken a turn. It's very, very dry. Lizzie, what happens to the fort that the bandits are living in during this scene? It burns. It burns. So the cameras roll. the fort goes up in flames, and all of a sudden, the fire starts to spread very quickly, very quickly. Yeah, you can see it happening.

Before they can finish the scene, Suchia, who plays Prakichi, starts crying and jumps in the pond. Then he realizes he's ruined the take, and he starts crying even more because he's feeling guilty for ruining the take. Kurosawa pulls him out, tries to comfort him, and all of a sudden, Sucia's face starts to swell. He had been too close to the fire, and he was covered in burns. Oh, my God. I do think he would end up being okay, but these actors were dedicated to Kurosawa and his vision, and he expected it. Kurosawa expected the cast and crew to eat dinner together every night, and he'd regularly keep them up until midnight.

Some people loved it, and others just wanted to go to bed early and were apparently criticized if they left dinner early. Dude, I would fail so hard at this. There's no way I could do it. He reminds me of Michael Cortiz in Casablanca. Yeah. You lunch bum, you know, when somebody actually takes lunch. on a film production. Yeah, it was really brutal. And they were going literally months and months over schedule. So by January of 1954, they're finally nearing the end of the script. Oh, my God. The 10-week shoot had stretched to nearly nine months. And they still have to shoot the climax of

the movie Lizzie, which is the final battle, which takes place in what conditions? It's raining. It's raining. Rain just because, I mean, it looks amazing. But can you imagine shooting that scene in the rain and how cold and muddy and resetting? No, that's the thing that blew my mind throughout all of this is like, you can see their breath in almost every scene. You can tell it's fucking cold. And they're out there not wearing a lot of clothes. It looks so uncomfortable. I mean, Kukuchio's not wearing anything.

Like, it's crazy. Yeah. Let's talk about how cold it was. So Kurosawa had purposely waited until the end of the shoot to shoot the climax, this final battle, because he knew if he shot the ending too early, Toho might be able to cut the production, excise the unshot portions and say you're done. And say you're done and just tack an ending on, right?

So he said, I'm not going to shoot this until the very end. Now, this was smart in that he got to shoot everything he wanted, but it was not smart because it was now winter. Yeah. And there was snow everywhere. So the cast and crew would have to clear the snow, risk frostbite shooting in the cold with artificial rain, and then somehow figure out how to run and do sword play while they're doing this.

According to Mufune, it took two months to shoot that final battle sequence. After the wrap, he spent two weeks in the hospital recovering. Oh, my God. A typical production in Japan at this time, and the Japanese film industry is booming at this time. There are hundreds of pictures released every year would be shot in four to six weeks. Seven samurai took nearly a year to film. Wow. It totaled 148 shooting days.

The cost had jumped to nearly $560,000 or $210 million, which made it the most expensive Japanese feature yet. Do you know about what that would be in today's money? $6.7 million. Oh. I think you also have to adjust for the fact that it was much more affordable to shoot in Japan than it was in the United States at that time. That's true. Okay. So I think some perspective that is helpful is that one sort of,

said that this was roughly five times as expensive as a typical Japanese production at this time. And unlike movies today, I think, in which budgets very wildly, this was an era, both in the United States and I think in Japan and otherwise, where movies were more made on an assembly line, and so costs were a little bit more uniform from picture to picture. But the point was, for a Japanese film, this was incredibly expensive at the time. So Kurosawa edited the film, and Fumio Hayasaka composed the music. Now, his first feature film credit in an interesting turn is called Snow Trail from 1947, and one source claims that it was at a pre-screening of Snow Trail where Akira Kurosawa first met Toshiro Mifune, the actor who would

play Kikuchio, and who would be in a number of his movies. Now, Hayasaka had scored a number of Kurosawa films, Stray Dog, Rashomon, and Ikidu, but by 1954, he was really sick Lizzie with, again, tuberculosis. It's coming for everybody in this one. While he was writing the orchestral sketches for this movie, he would often lay down. and hook himself up to an oxygen tank. Oh, God. Now, despite his health, he prepared a stack of possible themes for the samurai, and he played them for Kurosawa one by one.

And every time Kurosawa said no, until they finished the entire stack. Now, according to Kurosawa, Humio said, I have one more, and it was in a waste basket, torn to pieces. And he had to pull it out of the waistbasket and tape it back together before he could play it. Oh, my God. He then played it for Kurosawa, and that became the theme for Seven Samurai. It is great.

It's really good. When the music was finally being reported, Hayasaka came out to Toho. The music department told everybody in the recording booth that this was officially a non-smoking area to accommodate Hayasaka in particular who had tuberculosis. And apparently, Kurosawa was obliviously chain smoking throughout the entire recording.

Oh, my God. Sir, I know you're a genius, but come on. Seven Samurai was released in Japan on April 26, The original version, Lizzie, that I believe is more or less a version you can watch now on HBO Max, was 207 minutes, making it the longest Japanese film ever made at the time that it was released. So it was, I believe, the longest film shoot in Japan, it was the longest actual film in Japan, and it was the most expensive film in Japan. And Chris always just said, this is going to be the most movie anybody in Japan has ever seen.

Which is interesting, because by far not the longest movie in terms of American Western cinema. There had been much longer and blockbusters. Yeah, I mean, the road show theatrical release format was really popular in the United States through the 1950s, or at least the early 50s. There were, I mean, three hours was pretty common, I think. Yeah. What are some week, you know, Ben Hur we talked about. Gone with the Wind is like over four hours.

Yeah, we did. The Sound of Music is three hours, I believe. Yeah, it's a lot of hours. It is. Now, a shorter version of Seven Samurai was screened for its second and third runs, and rural theaters were actually booking the movie in two, parts. So the reviews were good, but not great. And some film historians believed that because it was actually so popular amongst the common moviegoer, that critics kind of said, well, it can't be

that good because, you know, people like it a lot. Sure. And Seven Samurai was popular. It grossed roughly $290 million in within its first 12 months, making it the second highest grossing Japanese movie in Japan in 1954. And this was an era of, as I mentioned, massive movie production and attendance in Japan. So a couple of numbers. One source claims, I believe this was Stuart Galbraith, a blog post I found, that 370 feature films were released that year in Japan across 7,000 theaters, total box office receipts in excess of 20 billion yen. So this was a very thriving industry at this point in time. But the running time, Lizzie, as you mentioned, was a thorn in Kurosawa's side. So Kurosawa later claimed that critics didn't understand it because the first half of the film

had been cut down much more by the studio. And so critics found it. confusing, whereas the second half of the film was not as fudged with, and so it was easier to understand. And I actually still feel that the first half of the film feels much more disjointed than the second half. I agree. I would actually just argue, once we get into the village with the samurai, things really start making sense. A hundred percent. Before that, it's a little, it's a little tough to stick with. And then from that point forward, it's pretty great. I agree. Now, Toho was apparently anticipating criticism for the length. A New York Times reporter saw the movie in Japan, and he wrote,

the film's running time is three and a half hours, much too long for the plot. Mr. Kurosawa could have told his story just as well in half the time, but his intense desire to recreate life rather than create an illusion has, as in his past pictures, got in the way of his cutting room scissors. Again, I don't agree with the conclusion necessarily, but I do think he has diagnosed something, which is Kurosawa's interest in creating the life that Japanese history perhaps ignored.

So on August 25, 1954, a shortened version, of the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival. It won the Silver Lion, but it left without a buyer for international markets, specifically the United States. Now, Hashimoto later said that he wished that he and Kurosawa had considered dubbing the film instead of just using English subtitles, because he thinks it might have been more widely accepted and shown in bigger theaters. I'm not sure. I know dubbing was more accepted at that point in time. I don't like dubbing. They did do it a lot. I don't either, but I believe when, I could be wrong, I believe when Godzilla was released, that's all dubbed.

entirely dubbed. Yeah, all of those Toho films were dubbed. So Toho did cut 50 minutes from the film, reportedly, before showing it to American distributors, which it did in early 1955. But no one was interested. And it wasn't until August of 1955 that Columbia stepped in with an offer. Now, Seven Samurai wouldn't reach the United States for over a year because of how this distribution deal worked. And in the meantime, composer Fumio Hayasaka died of tuberculosis in 1955. Of all of Akira Kurasawa's cigarettes that he was smoking next to him in the... Yeah. Probably didn't help.

So in July of 1956, Seven Samurai screened for six days at a theater in L.A. to qualify for Oscar consideration. It was released in the United States in November of 1956 under a different title. Lizzie, do you have any guesses as to what title was used for the release in the United States of Seven Samurai? It's a movie you've already referenced today. It's The Magnificent Seven. Very good.

It was nominated for two Academy Awards, Art DeRour, Art Direction Black and White, Takashi Matsuyama, costume design, black and white, Kohay, Izaki. We could not find much about these two and their contributions to the film. If anybody out there, you know, know something about them, feel free to send us an email at what went wrong pot at gmail.com. I love the art direction and costume design in this movie. Yeah, it's beautiful. But few could have predicted the influence that Kurosawa and Seven Samurai would have on Western

filmmaking. So Seven Samurai Lizzie was the first Kurosawa film that George Lucas ever saw. He pulled inspiration from Kurosawa's 1958 film Hidden Fortress, which I'm not sure if you've seen when writing Star Wars. There's a mission to return royalty over enemy borders. Very much the Princess Leia, you know, rescue element of it is very similar. And it's not hard to see the shape of something like Rashomon in Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. And Kurosawa says that Andrei Tarkovsky, the renowned Soviet director, told him that he always watched Seven Samurai before shooting his own films. And Lizzie, as you mentioned, Seven Samurai was remade really quickly.

in the United States. John Sturgis' The Magnificent Seven was released in 1960, which we should also cover. We absolutely need to cover it. That's the one with Yolt Brenner, and there's another version made in 2016, and they just announced Amazon MGM

is making another version with Matt Dillon in the lead role. Hmm. Very interesting. Okay. As you mentioned, the format of Seven Samurai can be seen in so many movies.

Yeah, tons. Like A Bug's Life. We just talked about Galaxy Quest, many more. Shinobu Hashimoto wrote, dozens of more films, he teamed up with Kurisawa again for Throne of Blood and Hidden Fortress. He died in July of 2018 at the age of 100. Oh, damn. Good for him. Now, despite a successful run through the 1960s, with some true classic films like Yozimbo and

high and low, Akira Kurisawa attempted suicide after the release of Dodeus Kadin in 1970. Some sources claim that this movie was the first Kurisawa film to actually lose money. His health was also slipping. He was losing his eyesight. He had suffered from gallstones. He'd been in physical pain for a number of years. He'd struggled through an attempt to work with a Hollywood production, which would seem like a no-brainer, considering how influential he was on Western film and how much his films felt a little Western. But he had been fired in 1968 from his half of the American-Japanese co-production of Tora, Torah, Torah, Tora. Oh, wow. And I think that this weighed really heavily on him. Yeah, his name was actually scrubbed from it. I think he has a story by credit on it. He later said of the suicide attempt,

I was very foolish. Letters and telegrams came from all over the world. There were offers from children to help finance my films. I realized I had committed a terrible error. He would go on to make six more films, some of them with the help of those in the West that he had inspired, including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, Alan Ladd Jr.

So in 1990, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg presented him with an honorary Oscar. And in one of his last interviews, Kurosawa spoke of plans to make a movie about Vincent Van Gogh that would never reach fruition. He was asked, what finally does cinema mean to you? And Kurosawa replied, it's simple. Take myself, subtract movies, and the result is zero. Wow. And I think perhaps that explains the contradictions of Kurosawa, a man. who seems endlessly patient to find the humanist connections in all of his movies,

and yet seems endlessly impatient with the humans he's making them with. Yeah. And I'm really excited to cover more of his films, and I think there's a lot more that we can learn about him and learn from him. But Lizzie, I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, and Seven Samurai. I loved it. Which brings us to What Went Right.

Man, I mean, so much, there's a reason that this has been reman. over and over again. I have to say, I'm going to go, what went right, is Toshiro Mufune and his addition of The Wild One. I think without that, this would be quite a slog. A little stiff, right? A little stiff. Yeah. And the addition of that character, both his addition in the writer's room, and then his addition, in terms of his performance, I think is really essential to this movie being what it is. And he becomes the heart of the movie in so many ways. So I think that's my what went right. but I loved learning about the whole thing. Yeah, I think the casting is pretty impeccable generally in this movie.

They're also good, but I think you make a great point, which is the stoicism of a number of the characters, Kambeshima Shimada, for example, but also Kiyozo, played by Seiji Miyaguchi. That works if you have the contrast of Kukuchio there, you know, to play against them. They also then, some of their stoicism, as you mentioned, plays as humor because I think of the addition of... Right. He wonder like, oh, they're taking themselves a little seriously. It's funny. Right. You know, that sort of thing. But then also, they speak to the humanity of Kukuchio because when they express sadness at the realization that he was the son of a farmer, for example,

or these other things, we take those considerations very seriously because we've learned to take their characters seriously. I agree. I just, I guess there are so many I could give it to. I love the casting of this movie, but I will give it to Shinobu Hashimoto, who I think is the main screenwriter on this movie. I love that he had the hutspah to just say, I can do this. And then he wrote a screenplay and he sent it to the most famous screenwriter. It would be like me saying, uh, yeah, can you get me Aaron Sorkens email address? Let me just send him something right now. You never know. Maybe he'd read it. And I like that it worked. But he also, he was confident, and I admire that. But he was also so driven to create something of quality. And it seems like

held himself to such a high standard. I mean, he held himself to a higher standard than Kurosawa. I even did. And I'm sure that that was not the healthiest thing necessarily, but I also, I admire it deeply. And I do think he wrote a great movie. And he wrote a number of great movies across his career, not obviously just this one. So I'll give mine to Shinobu Hashimoto. Lovely. Yeah, I love this movie. Thank you guys so much for listening. Lizzie, if the folks at home are enjoying this show, can you let them know how they can support us? Certainly. You can always tell a friend or family member about the show. You can leave us a rating a review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. If you want to take it one step further, you can subscribe. You can subscribe either in Apple or

Spotify and you will get at least one bonus episode every month for $5 or for $5, you can join our Patreon where you get all of that plus an ad-free feed as well as some musings, you know, newsletters, occasional polls there on Patreon. Or for $50, you can get all that. Plus, a shout-out from Chris, just like these. Okay, so for this week's full stops, I thought we could do something that at least hints at honoring Seven Samurai. And so I thought we could do it in the form of the Choka poetry style, which my understanding is was out of fashion by the time Seven Samurai is set,

but we're going to go with it anyway because it was the only form I could find that really allowed this many names. So it goes alternating five, then seven syllable lines, kind of like a haiku, and it ends with two repeated seven-syllable lines. Let's see if I got this right. At the veggie grill, three samurai heard the call, helpless movies trapped under Tomatoes Rotten. Alone they would fail, cynicism would prevail,

but 50 brave souls unto the breach stepped forward. We honor these few and the sacrifice they've made. Brian Donahue, Adrian Donahue, Adrian and Pang Korea, Good Ben Shindleman, and Angeline Renee Cook, Brittany Morris, with Brooke and Cameron Smith, We See C Grace B, Chris of Leal and Zaka, 2, MX Odea, and David Friscollante, Don Schibel thought well, Darren and Dale Conkling fell, Galen and Miguel, the revered Broken Glass Kids, film it yourself with Evan Downey by their side. Now Felicia G. Frankenstein James McAvoy.

Sing it, Grace Potter. Our hearts are full, half-gray hound. Jared Ugg stayed strong. Jason Frankel, my brother. J.J. Rapido. Jory Hilpiper, our rogue. Jose Emilon. Oh, I had to split your name. Salto del Giorgio.

Matthew Jacobson. With Karina Kanaba, Rosemary Southward, Kate Elrington, Mark Bertha, Our Amy McCoy. Don't forget Olga Schlager. Oh, Lazy Freddie, Kathleen Olson, Nate the Knife. Lena L.J. Anne, Lydia Howes, How's Our Hearts? Somon Chianani, Rural Juror, Mike McGrath, Sadie, Just Sadie, and the Provost family. The O's sound like O. With Mary Posa's Humans, Steve Winterbauer, we come to Scott O'Shita and Suzanne Johnson.

And to our newest member, the cast and the crew of Win a Trip to Browntown, we have reached the end. While it's true, there is no spoon. This show exists thanks to you. Thank you so much for your support, guys. I think I got that right. It was much harder than I expected it to be. Lizzie, we got a doozy coming next week. It's a...

Thanks? No, I don't know if you've watched it yet, but it's going to be... I'm excited to talk about it, but... I know one or two things about this, like, the highest-level things, and it's going to be... I'm really excited. It's very interesting. Yeah, so next week, we are covering American History X, which is... It's fascinating. It is fascinating behind the scenes in terms of what went wrong, because so, so much went wrong. but it's also, unfortunately, a very fascinating and disturbing movie to watch today.

So I very much recommend that anybody who's going to listen to that episode watch the movie. It's going to be, I think, even more important than usual that you have rewatched it recently before we jump into that episode. I agree. It's not going to be fun, but we will see you there. All right, guys. Thanks so much for tuning in. You can head to our Patreon if you would like to leave any comments about Seven Samurai. Let us know what you think about this movie. what's your favorite of Kira Kurosawa film.

And until next time, this has been What Went Wrong. Thanks for listening. Bye. To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, What Went Wrong Pod.com, for more info.

What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer, post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jess Wittenberg and edited by Karen Krupsaw.