On June 24th Maya and I attended an evening with Tatsuya Nakadai at Film Forum. Nakadai is one of Japan's premier film actors and, according to the presenters, the premier theater actor there. In the sixties and seventies he worked with most of the great Japanese directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, and Hiroshi Teshigahara (probably half his films have been put out by the Criterion Collection). He was interviewed by Michael Jeck for a good two hours and change, through an interpreter. Clips were shown from each stage of his career and he told many stories in a deep, authoritative voice. He was funny and frequently self-deprecating. Some of the things he said:

• His first role, while he was still in film school, was a two-second walk-on in Seven Samurai. He is only onscreen momentarily, in one of several shots of people walking through a crowded town square. It took six hours to get the shot right. Kurosawa kept yelling at him for walking too much like a modern man, and not the way samurai walked when they had swords in their belts.
• In A Woman Ascends the Stairs, one scene calls for him to slap his co-star Hideko Takamine. After shooting it, she told him that he slapped better than he acted.
• In the climactic scene of Yojimbo, he and Toshiro Mifune stare each other down for an extended period from only a foot or so apart before drawing their swords and quickly ending the duel. They had each trained separately for this scene for months. Each of them had to draw their sword in a very particular way, and neither of them was told how the other would be drawing. They could only do the scene once because Kurosawa wanted their genuine surprise to be evident. When they shot it, the cartoonish stream of blood that shot out of a pipe against the loser's chest was so powerful that it nearly knocked the actor backward off his feet.
• When they filmed the sequence on the bullet train in High and Low, which included a lot of fast-paced dialogue, it would have cost them ten million yen, on the order of a hundred thousand dollars, if they needed to rent the train again for a second take.
• Nakadai was in a spaghetti western. He'd always liked westerns and thought it would be fun. The movie was written by Dario Argento. When he asked the director about the plausibility of a Japanese person in the old west, he said that Nakadai would be playing a half-Mexican half-Native American.
• Usually the swordfighting in chanbara films is done with bamboo swords that have foil tape affixed to them. But when filming Harakiri they used real swords because the director wanted them to have the proper weight. But as Nakadai said, "Even with bamboo you have to be careful, because the Japanese word for bamboo is takemitsu, but the composer's name was also takemitsu" (that would be the legendary Toru Takemitsu).
• Nakadai told of the filming a scene in Ran in which a castle burns down while Nakadai's character staggers around in a daze before slowly emerging. The castle was really burned down in the scene, and only Nakadai and the cameramen were inside. Kurosawa spoke to them in an earpiece to tell him when to start moving. He waited and waited for the signal, lying down inside a burning building, not knowing if something had gone wrong. Finally he heard it. He was very afraid that he would stumble, as once again (see a pattern here?) there would be no chance for a second take. Fortunately he carried it off, and the scene is incredibly intense--talk about self-control!

Before the event we had watched Harakiri, A Woman Ascends the Stairs and High and Low and they are all excellent in their own very different ways. I've also seen Sword of Doom and it's awesome as well. I still have a lot more to catch up on as Nakadai-san has had a truly amazing career.