Seven Samurai

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 https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:57Lizzie Bassett?

  525,600 minutes, that's how long Seven Samurai is. Just kidding, it's a great movie. We're gonna 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 how 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?

• 2:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, today we have the movie that Lizzie watches between episodes of Love is Blind and Mouthfuls of Chicken.

• 2:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't believe you're outing me.

• 2:42Chris Winterbauer?

  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 auteurs 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, or not done nearly at the rate that perhaps that we, you know, we should. And this year, as we've done our best Oscars coverage, there've been a number of wonderful foreign films, both films that have been nominated, sentimental value, The Secret Agent, et

• 3:25Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 3:41Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 3:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Galaxy Quest.

• 4:00Lizzie Bassett?

  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 it didn't look like they hurt any horses, which was nice. I hope that that's the case, but we'll find out today.

• 4:16Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 4:33Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 4:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It kind of varies by performer.

• 4:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It does, very much. And that is an interesting experience and one that I actually really enjoyed because both worked for me at different times. The man who plays Kekuchio, he is one that I think you could describe as more cartoonish and over the top, and yet.

• 5:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Toshiro Mifune.

• 5:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he's so wonderful. And that moment when he's holding the baby, you know, after the mill is burned down and he just says like, the baby is me. It's really heartbreaking and incredible. I, I think my favorite storyline I was most interested in was definitely that between Shino and Katsuro. 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.

• 5:41Lizzie Bassett?

  And maybe I'm just reading into this, but I thought at the very end, when Kame Shimada says, you know, we still lost this battle. I almost took that to mean 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 that 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 Kyuuzo. I love him in this. He is so quiet and like.

• 6:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Still and out of everyone, he and Takashi Shimura give just like really modern performances in this.

• 6:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 6:33Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 6:46Chris Winterbauer?

  But because Love is Blind was on.

• 6:47Lizzie Bassett?

  We watched one episode of Love is Blind, Chris. We didn't even get to, we don't, we haven't even left the pods, okay? We're very behind. Anyway, what about you?

• 6:57Chris Winterbauer?

  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 works. And I watched those quite often when I was in high school. By quite often, I mean a couple of times. And then as I got older, I dug into Rashomon, 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.

• 7:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 7:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It is Takashi Shimura. So Takashi Shimura, who plays Kanbe Shimada in this movie, and Toshiro Mifune, who plays Kikuchiyo, 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 Rashomon.

• 7:58Lizzie Bassett?

  They're great.

• 7:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Et cetera. So you should definitely check out some other of his movies. And if you want something that feels more contemporary, Ikiru is really beautiful. They remade it with Bill Nighy. It was called Living. It came out a couple of years ago.

• 8:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:09Chris Winterbauer?

  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, 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.

• 8:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I was least interested in the action, honestly, in this movie.

• 8:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And it has a couple, you know, like you mentioned, it's like a third. 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.

• 8:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a hangout film, man.

• 8:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Katsushido, folks saying, look, they're young, they're in love. What did you think was gonna happen?

• 9:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they're also like, we're about to get murdered.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  We're about to get murdered.

• 9:20Lizzie Bassett?

  This is not the thing to focus on.

• 9:22Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kame Shimada 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.

• 9:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love the scene where you're watching them, the samurai, become ingrained in the culture of this small town. And then you have this, they just cut to the scene where Kame 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 Ronin, 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.

• 10:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely. But that was one question I had, just in terms of like where in the history of feudal Japan we are. Cause 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 Ronin 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?

• 10:54Chris Winterbauer?

  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 underneath that, you have the shogun, the daimyo, and then the samurai.

• 11:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Which was like a military ruling class, right?

• 11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  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 like 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.

• 11:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 11:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I think that the ronin, I believe he's identified as ronin in that he is a little more rare. And also, he would be free to take on this type of freelance work.

• 11:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 11:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Unlike other samurai who are attached to, you know, the lords. But yes, samurais, 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.

• 12:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Really? Interesting.

• 12:18Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 12:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, that makes sense in like the Merchant of Venice.

• 12:30Chris Winterbauer?

  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. 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 then US occupation afterwards.

• 13:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I say one thing before we dive in?

• 13:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 13:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I know I'm gonna 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.

• 13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you should probably call it Seven Samurai, because that's the title.

• 13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Fucking A.

• 13:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Anyway, if you haven't seen Seven Samurai, that's all right. And I, you know.

• 13:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, it's all right. But watch it before you listen, maybe, because there will be some spoilers.

• 13:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I was gonna 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.

• 13:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 13:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So go watch more movies. But let's dive into the details. Seven Samurai, also known as The Seven Samurai, 1954 Jidaigaki film, which translates to period drama. And this refers to stories that take place before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. So very wide period. Many of these were Samurai films, although certainly not all.

• 14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you briefly clarify what the Meiji Restoration is, just because we keep referencing it?

• 14:25Chris Winterbauer?

  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."

• 14:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Sounds like us.

• 14:47Chris Winterbauer?

  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 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 Shimura as Kanbe Shimada, the honorable one, I'll call him. Yoshio Inaba as Gorobe Katayama, the wise one. Daishuke Kato as Shichiroji, and that's the old friend. Seiji Miyaguchi as Kyozo,

• 15:31Chris Winterbauer?

  and that is the badass quiet one, Lizzie, My fave. As you mentioned, the one you gotta look out for. Yeah. I love when he just says, "They realize they have muskets. There's snipers." And then Toshiro Mifune says, "You know, I'll go deal with it." And then the quiet one just says, "I got it." He just 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 Hayashida, the charming one. Isao Kimura as Katsuhira Okamoto, the young one. And Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchio, the wild one, the former farmer, as we learned, the man born of farmers. And many, many more and more actors we'll get into as we move through this. It was released in Japan on April 26, 1954, and it premiered in the United States

• 16:15Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Cardullo; 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

• 17:00Chris Winterbauer?

  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 of the seven samurai he's most like. So he was born in Tokyo on March 23, 1910. He had four older sisters and two older brothers, making him the seventh of seven children.

• 17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Katsushiro, the young one, lying in that bed of flowers on the mountainside. 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,

• 18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Konbetosan, aka 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 Akira Kurosawa is a crybaby.

• 19:09Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kurosawa to hear, but nobody else to hear. You little stupid son of a bitch, boy! Oh, no, no one can hear that. And then at school, if Kurosawa got picked on, his brother would appear and call Kurosawa over to save him from being picked on. But then when Kurosawa came over, his brother would just walk away and disappear 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 Kurosawa the high Highest mark a student could get.

• 19:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And all of a sudden, Kurosawa has something to look forward to. And 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 Kurosawa was a child, he had a topknot, 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 supo wrestler, so that he'd grow big and strong.

• 20:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And he grew big, but he didn't, 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.

• 20:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Relatable.

• 20:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 US 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 1915, Japan's importing foreign films in droves

• 21:29Chris Winterbauer?

  and suddenly the Japanese public's influenced by all of these Western ideas. And as Kurosawa was 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?

• 21:45Lizzie Bassett?

  A rise of fascism across Western Europe.

• 21:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Spanish Flu, World War I.

• 21:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that.

• 21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Great Depression.

• 21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  World War I, Spanish Flu, Great Depression. I was getting there.

• 21:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 21:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I knew it.

• 21:59Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kanto Earthquake, which led to widespread fires and the mass murder of thousands of Koreans and Chinese in Japan called the Kanto Massacre.

• 22:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Chris Winterbauer?

  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 is 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 Chang Sau 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's league that's kind of communist and works

• 22:57Chris Winterbauer?

  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 benji. Benji were storytellers who would sit next to the screen and narrate the films.

• 23:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:16Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 23:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Takis.

• 23:28Chris Winterbauer?

  The takis 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.

• 23:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 24:15Lizzie Bassett?

  We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful, organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince, and it's all super high quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup. Now, obviously, you shouldn't stop at bedding. You should also refresh your closet with elevated everyday essentials that you will wear over and over again. Think cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at 50 bucks, cashmere scarves, responsibly sourced down jackets, and 14 karat gold jewelry. I genuinely love Quince, and I shop here for everything. I walked out the door the other day and realized

• 24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  every single thing I was wearing was Quince, down to my socks. Did I mention their socks are great, too? Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was what went wrong. It's the best way to support the show. Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween

• 25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter M&M's. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice, because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog, Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration, too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors, because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

• 26:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1935, Akira Kurosawa 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 -1, which just won an Oscar for visual effects and became the highest grossing Japanese live-action film in the US 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 Photo Chemical 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 Takis became popular, they expanded their services. They built sound stages and recording facilities.

• 27:15Chris Winterbauer?

  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 smartass, 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 Katsushiro, this is the moment when he meets his kame 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.

• 28:00Chris Winterbauer?

  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 US 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.

• 28:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Joke's on them. We don't care about our actors that much.

• 28:44Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 29:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And on December 7th, 1941, the ultranationalists got their wish when what happened, Lizzie?

• 29:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Pearl Harbor.

• 29:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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 US government felt Japanese Americans were too Japanese to be trusted. They stripped their own citizens of their inalienable rights. And in Japan, the Japanese government thought Akira Kurosawa was too American. So in 1943, they flagged his directorial debut, Sanchiro Sugata, as too Western. He says that they fixated on a scene where Sanchiro meets his rival's daughter for the first time. And the censors said, "This is a British-American love scene. You cannot have this in your movie."

• 29:49Chris Winterbauer?

  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 in It's a Wonderful Life, where they are on the phone on the staircase.

• 30:00Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't be at different heights. You have to be at eye level.

• 30:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's interesting. Maybe she was standing too tall. Kurosawa 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, Yasujiro Ozu, who was 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.

• 30:46Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 31:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you know what you can make? Virgin River on Netflix. That's, that's what you can make. Akira Kurosawa, sound good? Virgin River.

• 31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Virgin River.

• 31:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I've watched it.

• 31:30Chris Winterbauer?

  The one nice thing is that Western love scenes were suddenly being encouraged.

• 31:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 31:35Chris Winterbauer?

  The SCAP didn't like bowing, which they thought displayed feudal tendencies. So they said, let's do some on-screen kissing, to which I say-

• 31:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Do some smooches.

• 31:43Chris Winterbauer?

  You guys are all perverts. Now, not all the guidelines and interpretations were so cut and dry. And there's one interesting case we need 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 US takes over, and they say, whoa, this is too feudal and too Japanese.

• 32:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Kurosawa was just always stuck between these two.

• 32:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He is too Western for Japan and too Japanese for the West. So several film historians do note that Kurosawa seemed to have more of a problem with the Japanese censors 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 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 is a few years younger than Kurosawa. And like Kurosawa, 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.

• 32:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Which may have been a sanatorium, we're not sure. He has to spend his first week on bedrest and he forgets to bring something to pass the time. There are no iPads, there is no television. No. 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. Hashimoto 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, this, is this a real, is this really a screenplay? 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 Narita says, "No, 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."

• 33:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And Narita says, "There is, 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 gonna write a screenplay and I will send it to this Mansaku Itami." So it turns out writing a script is harder than he thought. Yeah. It took him three years to write his 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 Mansaku 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.

• 34:26Chris Winterbauer?

  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 liked 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 Kiyoshi Saihi to take over as Hashimoto's mentor.

• 35:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And in one of the last meetings, he said, "Try an adaptation." So after Itami died, Hashimoto adapts a short story called "Anna Grove" by Ryunusuke 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 reminds you of a movie. Hashimoto finishes it in three days, and he calls it "Shiyu," which means male and female. And one day, his new mentor name drops Kurosawa in conversation, basically like, "Oh, yeah, me and Kurosawa, that Kurosawa, we're pretty good friends. It's 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.

• 35:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 35:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And somehow, nine months later, Hashimoto gets a postcard from a producer named Sojiri Motoki. It says, "Greetings. We have decided that your work, 'Shiyu,' is to be filmed by Akira Kurosawa as his next feature. To this end, you will need to meet with Kurosawa, 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 Kurosawa for the first time at his home in Tokyo. And according to Hashimoto, the meeting lasts five minutes. But according to Kurosawa, the meeting lasts hours. So we don't know who to believe. I kind of lean towards Hashimoto. I don't know.

• 36:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I do, too.

• 36:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Five minutes, right?

• 36:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Five minutes is a memorable, yes.

• 36:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Kurosawa, "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. Kurosawa told him the script for "Shiyu" 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 who to believe, but I tend to believe Hashimoto because he was the one adapting the book.

• 37:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 37:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So I would imagine he would be the one saying it. Either way, the second- Story was called Rashomon.

• 37:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 37:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And we will save the making of Rashomon for another day. But Lizzie, have you seen Rashomon? I'll just give you a brief synopsis if you've not seen it.

• 37:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No, but I understand the technique and how it applies to the different perspectives. And I have seen the rip offs of Rashomon, but yes, I need to watch it.

• 37:20Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 37:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 37:35Chris Winterbauer?

  You learn, well, actually what you really learn is what is truth? Is there an absolute truth or is 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, Daiei 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 Kikuchiyo.

• 38:18Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 38:30Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 38:31Chris Winterbauer?

  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 in sadness. And I just imagine,

• 38:51Chris Winterbauer?

  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. Rashomon just won the top prize, the Golden Lion, 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

• 39:35Chris Winterbauer?

  critics around on Kurosawa 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 exoticism." Kurosawa was devastated. He later wrote in his autobiography, "Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan?" Hmm. 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 Ikiru, 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 Nighy, also very good. I've seen that. It's wonderful.

• 40:19Chris Winterbauer?

  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 US 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 Ikiru 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 Toshiro Mifune, but this was going to be

• 41:01Chris Winterbauer?

  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 topknot, bows to his hands." Ancestor 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 seppuku 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.

• 41:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And Kurosawa has one rule, Izzy. It has to be as historically accurate as possible.

• 42:00Chris Winterbauer?

  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 seppuku, 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."

• 42:36Chris Winterbauer?

  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 gonna 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 ape shit 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 blamed for it."

• 43:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He finally steps in and he says, "Mr. Kurosawa, how many meals do you eat in a day?" And Kurosawa 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. Kurosawa 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.

• 44:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely. Yeah, that's, 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 like bathhouse hotel thing that they're staying in?

• 44:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Just ruffians, basically. Yeah.

• 44:24Lizzie Bassett?

  But they seem to think that they are above even the farmers. Yeah, it's, it all feels like it's extremely indicative of class structure. That's like the whole movie.

• 44:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And how much it's holding the farmers back where they are, even from defending themselves.

• 44:43Chris Winterbauer?

  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 fields. It's a lot about the process as opposed to the conflict itself. And I always really like that.

• 44:54Lizzie Bassett?

  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, I don't know, but it does feel very, very specific.

• 45:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they, 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 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?

• 45:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Perhaps seven.

• 45:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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, Boku Den, Tsukahara, Musashi Miyamoto, which actually, a movie about Musashi Miyamoto would go into production in parallel to Seven Samurai, kind of, it would come out around the same time, also played by Choshido Mifune. And that one's actually much more expensive and is shot, it's called Samurai One, there's Samurai Trilogy, 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 gonna 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 gonna go write.

• 46:24Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Love is Blind. And Kurosawa finishes and lets out a long sigh and says, it's not great! And Hashimoto goes, oh, 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, the whole time. And I think he was just sitting there.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  This is why you don't write it in two weeks, yeah.

• 47:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, exactly. So, the traditional Japanese four-part structure for storytelling is called kishotenketsu. And I, 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 on situation. So, conflict drives western stories, but kishotenketsu sets up kind of like a delayed reveal, is the way I would describe it. So the four parts, kiku, or key, shoku, or show, tenku, or ten, and then keku, or ketsu, are roughly translated to introduction, development, twist, and conclusion.

• 47:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And the key to kishotenketsu 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 Kisho Tenketsu 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 gonna break it down from a Kisho Tenketsu 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 Scars Guards, is there and they spend

• 48:30Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kisho Tenketsu perspective, and audience, you know, let us know on Patreon if I'm getting this wrong, we cut to Justin Long's AJ in 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

• 49:15Chris Winterbauer?

  his sins and we have the end of our movie. So that's like a classic, I think, western appropriation of a Kisho Tenketsu 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, Cambellian style meets Kisho Tenketsu, 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 Kisho Tenketsu, 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." I just, this would be so hard. He'd ruined a samurai's day, and now he has ruined the lives of Japanese swordsmen,

• 49:59Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kurosawa 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, at 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, you know, 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.

• 50:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Villages needed protection. Surely, samurai took lookout jobs for rice, for example." And bingo, Kurosawa 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 isolate and write, it is called konzume, 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.

• 51:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Kurosawa, Hashimoto, and Oguni had originally planned for six samurai. Toshiro Mifune was supposed to play your favorite character, Lizzie. Oh. 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 Kanbe'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 gonna be interesting." And he was absolutely... Right. And so that is how Kikuchio is born. Kurosawa tells him, this is your role. You can do anything you want with the character.

• 52:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And Mufune says, great, I am never gonna wear pants. And he said, no.

• 52:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I was just gonna say that. No pants. What I want is a shirt that covers about 50% of my ass, but only the upper 50%.

• 52:19Chris Winterbauer?

  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 10am to 5pm. And according to Hashimoto, Kurosawa'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 Kurosawa and Oguni would drink whiskey with water, like it was some competition, waxing eloquent and finishing off a bottle in no time.

• 53:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And I need to start doing this because apparently they were writing 15 pages a day.

• 53:08Lizzie Bassett?

  How do you think they got things done in Hollywood?

• 53:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, they mapped out the story ahead of time.

• 53:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Also speed.

• 53:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 53:14Lizzie Bassett?

  If you're in America.

• 53:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. David O. Selznick 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 gonna be over four hours long. And he is shocked, but Kurosawa and Oguni say 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 of 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.

• 54:00Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kame was going to be five foot five, 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 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, ate and slept. They put their pencils down in March. By the way, Hashimoto said he had burned through 12 pencils every day.

• 55:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 55:02Chris Winterbauer?

  They wrote 504 pages in three months. Hashimoto walked away thinking, well, that's the last time Akira Kurosawa ever hires me.

• 55:12Chris Winterbauer?

  How could either of them go through something like this again? He walks away towards freedom and Kurosawa 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 Gorobbe Katayama, who's primarily a theater actor. Remember that. So most of the key farmers were played by actors in Kurosawa's stock company. But the actor who plays Rikichi, so do you remember Rikichi, Lizzie? He's the man who, when they go to-

• 55:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, who goes after, discovers his wife in the-

• 55:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 55:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a brothel.

• 55:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Or something.

• 55:49Chris Winterbauer?

  The hideout of the bandits up in the mountains, basically.

• 55:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 56:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, yeah. And to be clear, when she sees him, she runs back into the burning building.

• 56:06Chris Winterbauer?

  She runs back into the burning building to die.

• 56:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, this actor was a newcomer. So Yoshio Souchia was actually a medical student turned theater student, and this was his first film.

• 56:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 56:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He said, I heard about these auditions. He says, I'd rather watch films than be- And 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.

• 57:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So it 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, Kurosawa 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 it's not inflation adjusted.

• 57:44Chris Winterbauer?

  This was more than double Ikiru and it was triple Rashomon. But Seven Samurai was also more than twice as long, action-packed, 40 horses, dozens of speaking roles, stunts, rain, mud. Lizzie, if you had to guess if they went over or under budget, what would you guess? Uh, go in, 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 27th, 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.

• 58:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I am like, the studio must have sent this to Kurosawa and he must have just laughed and said, like, just say yes. Yeah. There's no way he thought this was actually hap- I don't believe he thought this was happening. No, he knows how to make movies.

• 58:36Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no way.

• 58:37Chris Winterbauer?

  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 mood 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 gonna 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.

• 59:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So he's hammered, holding the baby.

• 59:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that's what I was saying, like, on the way, it's a wonderful performance. But also, he's like, holding a baby over a river with a burning building.

• 59:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Over a running river, yeah.

• 59:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He's drunk.

• 59:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 59:31Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 59:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 59:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 59:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, me too.

• 59:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it sounds like Yoshio 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.

• 1:00:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And that caused him to look very pale. And Kurosawa was like, "You're supposed to be a samurai. You know, be supposed to be a tough guy. You're not supposed to be this pale guy."

• 1:00:22Lizzie Bassett?

  You're screaming at me.

• 1:00:23Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:00:30Lizzie Bassett?

  You're not gonna do better.

• 1:00:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, like a gym teacher, Kurosawa says, "Go run a lap." 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 is sent to the hospital in 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.

• 1:01:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Yoshio Sutsuya, 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?" He asks 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 this 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." Sutsuya reluctantly agrees and ends up living with Kurosawa for two years.

• 1:01:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of a fun turn in their relationship. But don't worry, Lizzie, it didn't take quite that long to finish this movie.

• 1:01:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Because they ran out of money.

• 1:01:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

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• 1:03:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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 was 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,

• 1:03:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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 gonna just keep funding my movies as long as they make money. That's right. And he's right. And filming resumes on October 3rd, 1953. And I'm sure Toho thought, "Maybe he'll work faster now."

• 1:04:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And Kurosawa says, "No, we're gonna 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, you have to. Yeah, you have to. So he's filming the battle at the bandits' 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.

• 1:05:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, what happens to the fort that the bandits are living in during this scene?

• 1:05:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It burns.

• 1:05:28Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:05:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can see it happening.

• 1:05:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Before they can finish the scene, Sutsuya, who plays Pukichi, 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, Sutsuya's face starts to swell. He had been too close to the fire and he was covered in burns.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:06:00Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:06:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Dude, I would fail so hard at this. There's no way I could do it.

• 1:06:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He reminds me of Michael Curtis in Casablanca.

• 1:06:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Chris Winterbauer?

  You lunch bum, you know, when somebody actually takes lunch on a film production. Yeah, it was really brutal and they are going literally months and months over schedule. So by January of 1954, they're finally nearing the end of the script.

• 1:06:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:06:41Chris Winterbauer?

  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

• 1:06:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No big deal.

• 1:06:52Chris Winterbauer?

  In what conditions?

• 1:06:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's raining.

• 1:06:54Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:07:07Lizzie Bassett?

  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, you know, they're out there not wearing a lot of clothes. It looks so uncomfortable.

• 1:07:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, Kukuchi is not wearing anything. Like, it's crazy.

• 1:07:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:07:36Lizzie Bassett?

  And say you're done.

• 1:07:37Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:07:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 swordplay while they're doing this. According to Mifune, it took two months to shoot that final battle sequence. After the wrap, he spent two weeks in the hospital recovering.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:12Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:08:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:08:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It totaled 148 shooting days. The cost had jumped to nearly $560,000 or 210 million yen, which made it the most expensive Japanese feature yet.

• 1:08:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you know about what that would be in today's money?

• 1:08:41Chris Winterbauer?

  $6.7 million.

• 1:08:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:08:44Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:08:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. Okay.

• 1:08:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think some perspective that is helpful is that one source 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 vary 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.

• 1:09:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:09:19Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kikuchiyo and who would be in a number of his movies. Now, Hayasaka had scored a number of Kurosawa films, Stray Dog, Rashomon, and Ikido. But by 1954, he was really sick, Lizzie, with, again,

• 1:09:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Tuberculosis. It's coming for everybody in this one.

• 1:09:51Chris Winterbauer?

  While he was writing the orchestral sketches for this movie, he would often lay down and hook himself up to an oxygen tank.

• 1:09:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 1:09:58Chris Winterbauer?

  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, Humeo said, "I have one more." And it was in a wastebasket, torn to pieces. And he had to pull it out of the wastebasket and tape it back together before he could play it.

• 1:10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He then played it for Kurosawa, and that became the theme for Seven Samurai.

• 1:10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That is great.

• 1:10:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really good. When the music was finally being recorded, 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.

• 1:10:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. Sir, I know you're a genius, but come on.

• 1:10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Seven Samurai was released in Japan on April 26, 1954. 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 Kurosawa just said, "This is gonna be the most movie anybody in Japan has ever seen."

• 1:11:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is interesting, because by far not the longest movie in terms of American Western cinema. There'd been much longer and blockbusters.

• 1:11:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, the roadshow 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.

• 1:11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Chris Winterbauer?

  What are some, we, you know, Ben-Hur, we talked about.

• 1:11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Gone with the Wind is like over four hours.

• 1:11:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, we did. The Sound of Music is three hours, I believe.

• 1:11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a lot of hours.

• 1:11:45Chris Winterbauer?

  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 believe 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.

• 1:12:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:12:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And Seven Samurai was popular. It grossed roughly 290 million yen 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

• 1:12:49Chris Winterbauer?

  so critics found it confusing. Whereas the second half of the film was not as futzed 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.

• 1:13:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I would actually just argue, once we get into the village with the samurai, things really start making sense.

• 1:13:07Lizzie Bassett?

  100%. Before that, it's a little, it's a little tough to stick with. And then from that point forward, it's pretty great.

• 1:13:13Chris Winterbauer?

  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, gotten in the way of his cutting room scissors." Again, I don't agree with the conclusion necessarily.

• 1:13:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Fire 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.

• 1:14:11Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:14:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it was 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.

• 1:14:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Of all of Akira Kurosawa's cigarettes that he was smoking next to him in the Yeah. Probably didn't help.

• 1:14:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So in July of 1956, Seven Samurai screened for six days at a theater in LA 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.

• 1:15:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's The Magnificent Seven.

• 1:15:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good. It was nominated for two Academy Awards. Art Direction: Black and White, Takashi Matsuyama. Costume Design: Black and White, Kohei Izaki. We could not find much about these two and their contributions to the film. If anybody out there, you know, knows something about them, feel free to send us an email at [email protected]. I love the art direction and costume design in this movie.

• 1:15:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 1:15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Andre 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.

• 1:16:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Which we should also cover. We absolutely need to cover it. That's the one with Yul Brynner. 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 Kurosawa 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 Yojimbo and High and Low, Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide

• 1:17:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh no. after the release of Dodes Kaden in 1970. Some sources claim that this movie was the first Kurosawa 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, Tora, 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.

• 1:17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  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'd inspired, including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven 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,

• 1:18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:18:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Chris Winterbauer?

  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. Belize, I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Japanese cinema Akira Kurosawa and Seven Samurai.

• 1:18:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I loved it.

• 1:18:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Which brings us to What Went Right.

• 1:18:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Man, I mean, so much, there's a reason that this has been remade over and over again. I have to say, I'm gonna go What Went Right is Toshiro Mifune and his addition of The Wild One. I think without that, this would be quite a slog.

• 1:19:13Chris Winterbauer?

  A little stiff, right?

• 1:19:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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've loved learning about the whole thing.

• 1:19:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think the casting is pretty impeccable generally in this movie. They're all so good, but I think you make a great point, which is the stoicism of a number of the characters. Kanbe Shimada, for example, but also Kyozo, played by Seiji Miyaguchi. That works if you have the contrast of Kekuchio there, you know, to play against them.

• 1:19:56Lizzie Bassett?

  They also then, some of their stoicism, as you mentioned, plays as humor, because I think of the addition of-

• 1:20:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. He wonder like, oh, they're taking themselves a little seriously. It's funny, you know, that sort of thing. But then also, they speak to the humanity of Kekuchio, 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 chutzpah 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 sending, "Uh, yeah, can you get me Aaron Sorkin's email address?" Let me just send him something right now.

• 1:20:45Lizzie Bassett?

  You never know. Maybe he'd read it.

• 1:20:46Chris Winterbauer?

  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 even did. And I'm sure that that was not the healthiest thing necessarily, but I also, I admire it deeply. And I, 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.

• 1:21:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Lovely.

• 1:21:16Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 1:21:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Certainly. You can always tell a friend or family member about the show. You can leave us a rating or 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, uh, occasional polls there on Patreon. Or for $50, you can get all that, plus a shout out from Chris, just like these.

• 1:22:03Chris Winterbauer?

  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 I, my understanding is, was out of fashion, uh, 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.

• 1:22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  But fifty brave souls, unto the breach stepped forward. We honor these few, and the sacrifice they've made. Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Korea, Good Ben Schindelman, and Angeline Renee Cook, Brittany Morris, with Brooke and Cameron Smith, We See, See Grace Be, Chris of Liel and Zaka Two, MX Odea, and David Friscolanti. Don Schiabel fought well, Darren and Dale Conkling fell, Galen and Miguel, the revered Broken Glass Kids. Film it yourself, with Evan Downey by their side.

• 1:23:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Felicia G., Frankenstein James McAvoy. Sing it, Grace Potter, Our Hearts Are Full, Half Grey Hound. Jared Ugg stayed strong, Jason Frankel, My Brother, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Our Rogue, Jose Emilon, Oh, I Had to Split Your Name, Salto del Giorgio. Matthew Jacobson, with Karina Kanaba, Rosemary Southward, Kate Ellington, Mark Bertha, Our Amy McCoy. Don't forget Olga Schlogger, Oh Lazy Freddy, Kathleen Olson, Nate the Knife, Lana LJ

• 1:24:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Anne, Lydia Howes, Howes Our Hearts, Somon Chinani, Rural Juror, Mike McGrath, Sadie, Just Sadie, and the Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's. With Merry Poses Humans, Steve Winterbauer, we come to Scott Oshita and Suzanne Johnson. And to our newest member, the cast and the crew, of Win a Trip to Brown Town, 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.

• 1:24:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, we got a doozy coming next week.

• 1:25:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a

• 1:25:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Thanks.

• 1:25:02Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't know if you've watched it yet, but it's gonna be, it's gonna be, I'm excited to talk about it, but

• 1:25:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I know one or two things about this, like the highest level things and it's gonna be, I'm really excited. It's very interesting.

• 1:25:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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

• 1:25:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:25:33Lizzie Bassett?

  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 re-watched it recently before we jump into that episode.

• 1:25:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:25:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not gonna be fun, but we will see you there.

• 1:25:47Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kirakura Sawa film? And until next time, this has been What Went Wrong. Thanks for listening.

• 1:26:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  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, whatwentwrongpod.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 Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.