Best Kurosawa Quotes

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

I want to be able to make westerns like Akira Kurosawa makes westerns.

The term ‘giant’ is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.

I was influenced by European movies, old Fellini, old Kurosawa – any sort of foreign film.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I’ve done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ movies.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

I’ve wanted to work with [Kairo aka Pulse director] Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but he has not been making horror movies recently.

I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa’s crew.

I’m a huge fan of Akira Kurosawa, a big Hitchcock fan.

I’m not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write…He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I’m not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West – say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase – are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation.

For many years, my favorite director has been the Japanese giant Akira Kurosawa.

Most directors have one masterpiece by which they are known. Kurosawa has at least eight or nine.

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I’d never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I’ve always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.

Kurosawa was one of film’s true greats. His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled.

[Akiro] Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman.

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.

I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn’t know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country.

Being a kid growing up with Kurosawa films and watching Sergio Leone movies just made me love what it could do to you, and how it could influence you – make you dream.