Forbearance

March 28, 2017 2:21 AM

Akira Kurosawa's great advice to aspiring filmmakers (6:40 slyt)
posted by timshel (7 comments total)

And yet Hollywood still treats screenplays like an afterthought, routinely starting filming with half-written or under-written screenplays that were thrown together in three weeks or cobbled together from three different inconsistent drafts.
posted by octothorpe at 5:25 AM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

Kurosawa had excellent scriptwriters, some of whom stayed with him for decades. And he worked from superb primary material: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Akutagawa, etc.
posted by homerica at 7:06 AM on March 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Amazing: aspiring directors come to him because they know he's one of the greatest directors who ever lived and they're desperate to know the secrets he can reveal, and he tells them what they need to do is write screenplays, and they won't do it! Because, as he says, "Writing is hard." Also, now when I encourage people to read Russian literature I can say "Akira Kurosawa says you should."
posted by languagehat at 7:07 AM on March 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

Keep your day job?
posted by IndigoJones at 7:11 AM on March 28, 2017

What A. Kurosawa said there about the daily grind of the script writer, and what he said about Balzac reminded me of this Tobias Wolff interview (I think it was posted before on the blue, but I can't find it) wherein he parallels the work of the writer with the unfolding of life itself as a palimpsest : "our life is a draft that's constantly in revision - and we can make it better - maybe we can even bring it close to something beautiful if we allow ourselves the room to do it".
Thanks for the link !
posted by nicolin at 7:38 AM on March 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

Thanks, this helped me make up my mind about what to read next. I've enjoyed Dostoevsky's shorter works but have yet to grapple with his tomes or those of Tolstoy.

R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E
posted by Taft at 12:16 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, to fellow screenwriters I recommend Robert McKee's Story. Read it slowly, take notes, internalize it.
posted by Taft at 12:27 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]