Samurai... just like this wind, but it is just blowing from the earth, sweeping away... and the earth, never moving... Those peasants are always with the earth and live forever!
- "Seven Samurai Movie Script"
The movie analysis of " Seven Samurai " has been loaded with loads. Today we analyze the behind-the-scenes movie story of "Seven Samurai" and why it became the number one movie in Japanese film history.
Script
After finishing the 1952 movie "Desire for Life", Akira Kurosawa and the famous screenwriter Hashimoto Shinobu wanted to shoot a period drama "A Day of the Samurai", wanting to show the samurai in every detail How to spend a day, and finally committed suicide at night because of a trivial mistake, but because the historical facts to be verified are too complicated and trivial, this story was later abandoned. After that, Akira Kurosawa was going to make another "Biography of Japanese Swordsmen". He wanted to tell about seven or eight swordsmen in Japanese history. As a result, he wrote it and found that this is a movie that is full of climax from beginning to end, and the script is not necessary. In the end, it was also rejected. It's a bit frustrating that the two scripts have been scrapped in a row. Once, producer Shojiro Bengi said: During the "Warring States" period in Japan, samurai often willing to keep vigil for farmers in exchange for room and board. Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto thought that this would be a good story, so they incorporated "A Day of the Samurai" and "Biography of Japanese Swordsmen" into "Seven Samurai", and put the data and story collection for textual research into use. , let Hashimoto Shinobu "freedom", and then wrote a huge 500-page first draft of the film.
Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa
The script for "Seven Samurai" took 45 days to write. Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, the hero of the small country reviewed and revised, and Akira Kurosawa devoted himself to writing biography. The writing process started with Akira Kurosawa, who first wrote the beginning of each scene on paper, then worked with Shinobu Hashimoto to study and write the rest of the plot, and then handed over the finished manuscript to the hero of the small country for review, comment, and Control the direction of the script. If the hero of the small country thinks it is good, he will continue to write the next scene, otherwise he will rewrite it. After many repetitions, the script of "Seven Samurai" gradually took shape, and the hero of the small country also played a pivotal role as the helmsman of the screenwriting team.
Akira Kurosawa found historical prototypes for six of the samurai. For example, Kanbei, the samurai leader among the Seven Samurai, came from Ise Shouzuna in Kamizumi, Gorobei referred to the legend of Tsukahara, and Kuzang referred to the sword Holy Miyamoto Musashi, which gives the characters a solid foundation.
Kurosawa also wrote a full profile of the seven characters, including the clothes they wear, their favorite foods, their past histories, how they speak, how they react in battle and every detail he can think of.
But the role between samurai and peasant - Kikuchiyo has no historical basis. Kikuchiyo's earliest character setting is a villain with a dark past named "Shanbei", a product of the violence of the Warring States Period. But with the revision of the script, Zenbei became Kikuchiyo, and the dark samurai became a boyish, warm-blooded man who was savage, rude, and unruly, but had a strong sense of justice and blood in his heart. When Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto wrote the script, they believed that only a character like Kikuchiyo could connect farmers and samurai, two classes with profound barriers.
Kikuchiyo is the most bohemian and the most impressive among the seven samurai. Akira Kurosawa appointed Mifune Toshiro to play the role, thinking that his performance can give this character a soul. And Mifune did it perfectly.
Akira Kurosawa is known on set as a tyrant, but Toshiro Mifune was allowed to improvise when he created the character, so we can see that flying off, the play's comedic role as Kikuchiyo.
Kurosawa even designed a roster for the village's 101 residents and created a family tree to help the extras build their characters' relationships to each other. No one had ever done this in the Japanese film industry at the time.
Movie characters set
The movie took place in 1586. According to the family tree that Kikuchiyo picked up, Kikuchiyo was born in the second year of Tensho (1574), and he is now "13" years old (Japanese traditionally think that children are Birth is "one year old"). This year is the 14th year of Tianzheng. Hideyoshi Yuchai has just been appointed as the Minister of the Imperial Government. The emperor bestowed the surname "Toyotomi". By 1588, Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued the "Knife Hunting Order" to seize the weapons that were left in the village. It was combined with the later appearance of samurai equipment in the village and the hint that the villagers had intercepted the lonely samurai before. At this time, the Warring States period is about to pass, but the Shogunate period has not yet come. At the beginning of the world, the lords that the warriors were loyal to were gone, and they also had no salaries. They became wandering "ronmen", and bandits were rampant, which also made it possible for farmers to recruit "samurai" to fight off the bandits for themselves. , the fate lines of the village and each samurai are thus intertwined.
Seven Samurai group like
Although the samurai are just "tool people", they are still composed of specific people, of course, there is no lack of real sympathy and sense of justice for farmers. In "Seven Samurai", each samurai represents a kind of character: Kanbei - leadership, Shichiroji - loyalty, Gorobei - wise, Kuzang - martial arts, Heihachi - optimistic, Katsujiro - Hope, Kikuchiyo - A sense of justice. This arrangement shows the samurai group in a multi-dimensional and all-round way, reflecting Akira Kurosawa's profound excavation of the film's ideology.
Akira Kurosawa refused to shoot the mountain village in the Toho studio and made the full set on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka. Although Toho Films had protested that this increased production costs, Kurosawa insisted that "the quality of the set affects the quality of the actor's performance... So I made the set exactly like the real thing. It limited shooting, but encouraged This sense of authenticity."
Details control
Akira Kurosawa is known as "the tyrant of the studio", and it is his typical style to keep improving the details in his work. For example, in the emotional scene between Katsushiro and Shino, Akira Kurosawa wanted Shino's eyes to "glow". To this end, a slanted mirror on the ground was used to reflect light onto Shino's face. Because of repeated reshoots, Tsushima Keiko , who played Shino in the end, suffered injuries from excessive light stimulation.
"Seven Samurai" is so rich in film value that there is one scene that is rarely mentioned. But in fact, its groundbreaking may be more reference for future generations than other shots: Katsushiro thought that Shi was a boy, and later he touched Shino's chest during the tearing and realized that she was actually a woman. This shot was unprecedented in , Hollywood, and Japanese movies at the time, and it was perhaps the most used by later generations in "Seven Samurai".
Yoshio Tsuchiya, who played Liji, later said that when shooting the scene where the samurai squad attacked and burned down the thief's nest, Akira Kurosawa asked the staff to spray gasoline on the thief's nest to ensure that the nest could be completely burned. The car is on standby. However, when filming actually started, the fire burned faster and more violently than expected, and Akira Kurosawa shouted "Go on!" Tsuchiya's Riki had to approach the gate of the thief's nest to save his wife, but the roof collapsed at this time. The heat burned his windpipe. Because of the fire, the grass on the cliff above the set was burned. When watching the demo, I found that the actors who played the killed robbers were all lying on the ground, moving slowly like earthworms, and staying away from the burning house. The people who saw the scene tried their best to hold back because of this funny scene. laugh.
In another scene where the mill was burned down by bandits, the mill was rebuilt and burned down three times to get the ideal shot Kurosawa needed.
The film was originally scheduled to take more than a month to shoot, but the shooting time was four times longer, from summer to late winter. Especially when we were shooting the last battle in the rain, which was famous in the history of the film, it was already February, and it was snowing not long before the shooting started, so that the crew had to water the set to melt the snow, and the whole venue was muddy. it is saidKurosawa was happy to see a layer of water and mud on the ground, but it also meant the actors had to work in thick, deep mud. Because it was summer in the play, but the mud often froze, making it difficult for the actors to pull their legs in the sandals at that time, and had to rely on fighting movements to maintain their balance. Mifune later recalled: He has never been so cold in his life. Akira Kurosawa also paid a heavy price for this: he stood in the mud for hours, and finally one of his toes became black and necrotic, and he was ill for life.
stood in the mud and directed the shooting of Akira Kurosawa
, who played the role of Jiuzang and represented martial arts, said that he is completely new to kendo , and has never learned any swordsmanship. But Kurosawa said that the swordsmanship could be reflected through camera angles and editing, so Miyaguchi agreed. He also participated in the two-day swordsmanship "hell special training" and was exhausted, but what he showed in the movie was an invincible swordsman master.
Many "Seven Samurai" film critics said that Dongbao Film Company almost went bankrupt because of the long filming cycle and overspending, but in fact, in 1954, Dongbao Films produced dozens of films, and it is still the famous " Gothic". The first year of "La " was born. There is no evidence that Toho ever nearly went bankrupt because of "Seven Samurai", and "Seven Samurai", "Samurai I: Miyamoto Musashi" and "Godzilla" released by Toho this year have all received huge box office hits. To this day, Toho is also a leader in the Japanese film industry.
Other tidbits you may not know about
Kikuchiyo was born in a farmer's family. So in terms of character setting, the sword he is holding is a big sword . This big sword is too long and is not conducive to combat, and is generally only used in honor guards, so Kikuchiyo walking with it looks funny and stands out. The contradiction of this image.
There are 40 thieves in the whole film. The director explained each thief who was annihilated with the camera lens, but the last thief ran away in fright and disappeared, and became a small bug. Maybe Akira Kurosawa was in Show: Bandits are inexhaustible?
After filming the last battle in the mud, the actors were standing in the mud and shivering, Toshiro Mifune gritted his teeth and said: I'm still young, I can bear it, but don't do it again. Akira Kurosawa said: Even if you beg me now, I will not do it again.
The camera crew in the last rainy battle, we can see that the weather is really cold
Among the seven samurai players, the three surviving samurai: Kanbei ( Shimura Joe died in 82), Shichiroji (Kato) Daisuke died in 1975), Katsushiro ( Kimura Gong died in 81), and all died in 82 years; and the four samurai who died in the film: Goro Bingwei (Inaba Yoshio died in 1998), Kuzang (Miyaguchi Jing) Died in 285), Kikuchiyo (died Toshiro Mifune in 1997) and Heihachi (died in 1998 of Chiaki Shi) all lived to 85 years later. Heihachi, the first samurai who died in the play, was the last to die in real life. of.
This film won the first place in the top 100 Japanese movies selected by Japan's "Movie Xunbao". In 2018, it reached the top of BBC's top 100 foreign language films. Currently, the authoritative movie website IMDb TOP250 No. 20 (the first Japanese film). Therefore, "Seven Samurai" is the greatest movie in the history of Japanese cinema, bar none.
did not show lines
In the end, all four samurai were killed by musket , none of them were killed by sword, bow or arrow, which heralded the decline of the samurai class. When the musket gradually replaced the samurai sword , the pursuit of martial arts and the arrogant ideals that the samurai insisted on seemed so powerless and pale. Just like the last scene in the film:
The three lonely samurai look at the village that is happily planting seeds, and face the high graves of the four samurai in front of them (Kikuchiyo's grave is his tachi that is only half left) ), they alsoI finally understood that I was like this rootless wind blowing by, my class would also be this fate, and only the peasants who were like the earth could survive for a longer time.
Originally, there was such a line in the script, which directly stated the metaphor of the samurai and the peasant. The samurai is the wind, and the peasant is the deep earth, but this line is absent in the film and becomes a metaphor. Akira Kurosawa has achieved the artistic effect of "everything is said, but the meaning is endless, and the feeling is all in the words".
"Seven Samurai" script
This is also the value of "Seven Samurai", because as an audience, from any angle, any detail and any level, you can feel the ingenuity of the director, actors and the entire crew throughout the film, Experience the kind of artistic charm that transcends time, technology and aesthetics.
