Kiyoshi Kurosawa is celebrated for making tense, methodical genre films that study the horrors of contemporary society. Defined by their unsettling atmospheres of psychological dread and dislocation, as well as by their subversive depiction of character archetypes breaking down in response to this mood of existential unease, Kurosawa’s best-known masterpieces—like the hypnotic psychological thriller “Cure” and the eerie cyber nightmare “Pulse”—have reflected the alienation and malaise of modern Japan.
But with “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” in US theaters this week from Janus Films, the 71-year-old filmmaker has made his first Japanese period drama—more specifically, his first jidaigeki, an incomparable genre of the country’s cinema engaged with the isolationist Edo period of samurai rule, which lasted 250 years. At the center of the story is Lord Murashige Araki (Motoki Masahiro), who rises against Nobunaga Oda, the ruthless warlord he once served, and is summarily besieged in his own castle. As a series of mysterious deaths threatens to turn the members of his court against one another, Murashige is forced to consult Kanbei (Masaki Suda of “Cloud”), the cunning enemy strategist he has locked in the dungeon.
In adapting Honobu Yonezawa’s bestselling, Naoki Prize–winning novel, Kurosawa is faithful to the story’s stately, classical contours while elevating it into an intellectually stimulating, formally elegant puzzle of shifting loyalties and moral conundrums. Unfolding near-entirely within the confines of its protagonist’s castle, his variation on a locked-room mystery gradually expands into something more ambitious by capturing the arrayed ideological forces warring for cultural dominance in 16th-century Japan, from the traditional warrior code to Christianity and multiple forms of Buddhism.
As Murashige questions his allegiance to an authority he might no longer believe in, influenced by Kanbei and others in his orbit to challenge the social hierarchies of his time, Kurosawa’s film emerges as a thorny philosophical consideration of power, belief, and the relative morality of our social contracts.
The morning after the film’s much-anticipated world premiere in the Cannes Premiere sidebar of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Kurosawa sat for an interview in the Grand Théâtre Lumière with the assistance of curator, producer, and translator Aiko Masubuchi. In conversation, he reflected upon working in the classical mode of Japanese period drama, how Araki Murashige emerged as another one of the filmmaker’s many protagonists defying society’s constructs, and what influence the other Kurosawa—specifically, his “Throne of Blood”—had over this latest work.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
At last night’s Cannes world premiere of “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” you had the experience of seeing the film with an international audience, as well as with two directors who consider themselves students of yours—Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and Kōji Fukada—by your side. What was that experience like for you?
Last night, it was my first opportunity to show the film to an international audience, so I was very, very nervous about how it was going to go—because ultimately this film has many proper nouns and names that even people in Japan are not familiar with. It’s also a film with a lot of dialogue, so I wasn’t sure just how much of the film would actually be communicated to and received by the audience. That’s how the screening started for me. And I’m sure there are certain details and minutiae that may not necessarily be understood by an international audience.
At the same time, I felt the main drama of the film—the change that the character of Araki goes through, what he becomes, and what happens at the end—was very much communicated. I felt that was the case because there were some parts where I didn’t expect a laugh to happen or for people to be surprised by something, but I felt that in the room. It requires an understanding of the film for that kind of reaction to occur—so I felt the core and the spine of the film was communicated.
Also, as you mentioned, there were many Japanese directors in the room last night, and this gave me quite an interesting feeling. As you mentioned, I used to see directors Fukada and Hamaguchi quite often in Tokyo, but these days I don’t see them as often as I used to. It had been a while since I’d seen them, and it’s funny to me that Cannes was the place where I could see them after all this time. I really didn’t teach them anything, I don’t believe. They are in the positions that they are because of the strength and the power that they have in themselves.
All I can do is respect the work that they have been making. It’s interesting that it was Cannes of all places where we ended up in the same room—but that’s what’s charming about film festivals as well. One realizes that we’re all working on the same grounds, that we’re all making films, even though we might be acting individually and doing work separately from each other.
Lord Murashige Araki, as played by Motoki Masahiro, is not your typical heroic samurai and instead rebels against the Bushido code, the traditional “way of the warrior” that at this time in Japanese history was considered sacrosanct. Murashige does so, like many of your characters, out of a desire to break with societal constructs and restrictions that would otherwise mandate how he must live, how he must die.
It’s just as you said. There was this original book that I adapted, but even before I came across this book, I was always interested in this historical figure of Araki Murashige, from 16th-century Japan, because he is known as this person who ran away, and he is almost seen as a villain within history for having left behind his people. I was drawn to this character because he tried to free himself from the values that were tying him down; even if it meant negative consequences, he still wanted to live away from those strict values.
That kind of character is somebody I really empathize with, because it’s very hard to do in actual life. In fact, I do believe that, with this historical figure, what he did actually reflects a rare kind of character; he was a rare kind of person. As you mentioned, within some of my other films, even those set in contemporary or modern times, the protagonist often tries to escape from what they’ve built up until then—a certain kind of peace or stability—and they still try to leave that behind, even if it’s a dangerous path, to try to go to a place that they can truly believe in. I think ultimately those are the kinds of people that I am drawn to the most.
You’re known for films set in contemporary times, but this film is set in feudal Japan, specifically Osaka circa 1578; that makes it your first Japanese period drama, or jidaigeki. I’m curious what you’d say about how this classical style of filmmaking has influenced you—and what was required for you to embark down this path of making your own contribution to this genre, both logistically and also creatively.
This is something that I really had to think deeply about, because I had always had the desire to do jidaigeki period pieces and samurai films, but what I had in mind then was the chanbara style, which is the sword-fighting style of action cinema. But, as you saw with the film, this one is actually a conversational film, and a mystery, and most of the conversation happens inside. It’s not an action-filled samurai film in any way.
That left me wondering how I was going to do this, so I went back to the cinema from the 1950s. At its peak, that period saw lots of masterpieces made in Japan that were jidaigeki but were also quieter and not so action-filled. I had seen these masterpieces before, but I went back to many of them to rewatch them and realize that wonderful movies could be made without action, while being more drama-driven in this way. I was able to relearn from the past jidaigeki and decide that’s the direction I wanted to go in.
To add to that, most of the 1950s jidaigeki films—of which there are many masterpieces—were also shot in a standard-sized frame, and they were all made in black-and-white. I really couldn’t make a decision until the very end about whether I was going to make this a black-and-white film. Ultimately, I wanted to make sure that this story has a connection with our contemporary times, and so I decided not to do that; but, again, the frame, as you saw, is not so wide, and it’s closer to a standard-sized frame. The colors in the frame, I also kept rather subdued, instead of incredibly vibrant, and so in that way I tried to get the picture closer to some older jidaigeki films.
As I watched “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” your film brought to mind one jidaigeki in particular: Akira Kurosawa’s epic “Throne of Blood,” regarding not only the intense, claustrophobic nature of its dialogue between warlords, and between a samurai and his wife, but also the Shakespearean nature of the Warring States period—the sengoku jidai—in which your film is set. In drawing upon those earlier films, tell me about finding the style of blocking and framing that you wanted alongside Yasuyuki Sasaki, your director of photography. It feels highly intentional how various characters move through their surroundings, where they are and how they interact relative to one another at any given time.
“Throne of Blood” was a major reference point; again, I was working in the tradition of a samurai drama that’s set in the 16th century, and what that means is that there was fundamentally, within the way people moved, a very clear hierarchy that existed. If somebody is standing and talking to someone, there is somebody who is on their knees, looking up and talking to that person. In the way their gazes would interact, sometimes they would meet, but a lot of the time somebody would be looking up or somebody would be looking down, because the hierarchy was so strict at that time. You see that in the films of Akira Kurosawa as well as the films of Kenji Mizoguchi.
I wanted to make sure that we were working with the right kind of gaze, and that the gazes would sometimes shift from top to bottom, from looking up to looking down. That was something that I was really thinking about when I was directing. Something I told our DP, Yasuyuki Sasaki, is that, when people stand and sit down, we still have to think about the gazes—but just because somebody has suddenly stood up, I don’t want the framing to be awkward and suddenly change. So, I always asked him for an angle or a frame that would make that transition happen in a more natural way.
“Throne of Blood” was also a black-and-white film. The changes that happen in time, and in location or setting, are not shown through color but through changes in lighting, and that’s something that I brought into my film as well. I tried to show how time has passed, or how the place or setting has changed, by thinking about the amount or the direction of the lighting. This is something I was very strict about myself.
I wanted to ask about this Buddhist teaching—“advance to paradise, retreat to hell”—that became a Sengoku-period battle slogan and sits at the core of this film’s moral argument, as framed by the character of Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), Araki Murashige’s wife. It has modern resonances in the teachings of late capitalism, the concept of the entrepreneurial work ethic or “grindset,” that you should spend your entire life as an appendage of a productive organism. Tell me about deciding to place this dialogue at the core of the conversations between these characters.
I almost want to say that the answer that I would like to give is already present in your question, in the sense that, yes, I was working off an original story, and of course this is fiction, and there is the key phrase that Chiyoko utters: “Advance to paradise, retreat into hell.” It is a very old Buddhist teaching that might be difficult to understand in today’s times, in a way. But I do believe that these words are also the impetus behind her rebellion. That’s coming from her, these old Buddhist teachings.
I wanted to make sure that this connects with how the change in Murashige is expressed as well: maybe there can still be paradise, even if he decides to stop chasing power and vying to be the top samurai. He can still find paradise in that decision to leave. I figured that, if I could link his change properly to those words, then something about the way Murashige lived his life could truthfully be expressed.
Once we bridge this to our contemporary times, it is hard not to start thinking about the forces and structures and ideas that we are today bound by. What can we actually let go of? What can we throw away? In throwing those ideas away, where can we still find happiness? Can we find happiness? Whether we can feel that way, I think, was the big question I was trying to throw out in the world with this particular film.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “The Samurai and the Prisoner” opens in US theaters July 31, via Janus Films.