And which director left the most abiding impression?
The one that stands out most for me is A Story from Chikamatsu. Mizoguchi wouldn’t give us much direction on set: when we arrived he would just say, ‘Okay, go ahead, do it’ and that was it. It would be test after test after test until we finally got it right, so that was very tough. But I do feel that, by doing this, Mizoguchi taught me the basics of what acting actually is. Ozu was quite the opposite: he was very meticulous and detailed in his direction. He had his camera at a low angle on set and he would direct the actors and actresses to sit in very specific places. He had a very different style.
As for Kurosawa, he was a lot like Mizoguchi. They say that Kurosawa didn’t depict women very often in his films, so as an actress I found that to be very difficult – how to approach my characters, I mean. Again, he wouldn’t explain a lot: for example, in High and Low, I played a parent whose child was kidnapped, and my husband was played by Toshiro Mifune. I would sit there in silence, reacting to what other people said: if Mifune said something, I would have to act off that; if my child said something, I would have to act off that. I was in a constant state of tension, just thinking, ‘I have to react, I have to react.’ And the first person who taught me that was Mizoguchi. ‘Are you acting off each other?’ he would often say. ‘Reaction, reaction!’ When I appeared in Kurosawa’s films, I would keep reminding myself the same thing – so I think Mizoguchi left the most lasting impression on me. ..read more
January 02, 2012, 10:16pm
