Page 12 - Pastiche Vol 1 Edition 1 January 2019

at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival, as well as an Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film.

American director George Lucas who revered Kurosawa as his role model, came to know
came to know his condition. After a met at San Francisco in July 1978 about Kagemusha,
Lucas leveraged his influence over 20th Century Fox to produce Kagemusha, and recruited
fellow fan Francis Ford Coppola as co-producer. Production began the following April, with
shooting lasted from June 1979 through March 1980, but was plagued with problems. The
film was completed only a few weeks behind schedule and opened in Tokyo in April 1980. It
quickly became a massive hit in Japan. The film was also a critical and box office success
abroad, winning the coveted Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival in May.

The international success of Kagemusha allowed Kurosawa to
proceed with Ran. Starting in December 1983 and lasted more than
a year, the production halted in January 1985, as Kurosawa's 64-
year-old wife Yōko fell ill and died on February 1. Kurosawa
returned to finish his film and Ran premiered at the Tokyo Film
Festival on 31 May, with a wide release the next day. Ran won
several awards in Japan, but was not quite as honored there as Mieko Harada as
many of the director's best films of the 1950s and 1960s had been. Lady Kaede i n Ran (1985)
Emi Wada won Oscar as the movie's costume designer.

U Unlike Kurosawa’s previous pictures, Dreams was entirely based upon the director's own
dreams. For the first time in over forty years, he wrote the screenplay alone. Japanese
studios being unwilling to back his productions, Kurosawa turned to another famous
American fan, Steven Spielberg, who convinced Warner Bros. to buy the international rights
to the completed film. This made it easier for Kurosawa's son, Hisao, as co-producer for the
film. Dreams got premiered at Cannes in May 1990 and Kurosawa accepted the Academy
Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Rhapsody in August - adapted from a Kiyoko Murata novel, it explored the scars of the
nuclear bombing which destroyed Nagasaki at the very end of World War II. This was his
only movie to include a role for an American movie star: Richard Gere. Shooting took place in
early 1991, with the film opening on 25 May that year to a largely negative critical reaction,
especially in the United States, for promulgating naïvely anti-American sentiments, though
Kurosawa rejected these accusations. Kurosawa’s next project, Madadayo, or Not Yet - an
autobiographical essay by Hyakken Uchida was release on April 17, 1993, was greeted by
disappointed reactions.

Kurosawa shifted to writing screenplays The Sea is Watching in 1993 and After the Rain in
1995. While putting finishing touches on the latter work in 1995, Kurosawa slipped and
broke the base of his spine, which forced him to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life,
putting an end to any hopes of him directing another film. While his mind remained sharp
and lively, his body began to deteriorate, and on September 6, 1998, Kurosawa, aged 88 died
of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo. One of his grandchildren, the actor Takayuki Kato, became a
supporting actor in two films posthumously developed from screenplays written by
Kurosawa, Takashi Koizumi's After the Rain (1999) and Kei Kumai's The Sea is Watching
(2002).

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