Akira Kurosawa’s love of Iranian cinema: “A film must be made with the heart, not the mind”
Few—if any—filmmakers have amassed a body of work like Akira Kurosawa, who made a habit of crafting masterpieces that are destined to stand the test of time as cinema classics.
Francis Ford Coppola believes he made at least eight features worthy of the term, and even that feels like it might be selling him short. Everyone from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Martin Scorsese and James Cameron via Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky celebrated him as an influence and inspiration, with the shadow of Kurosawa looming just as largely over cinema as ever.
His career may have been spent working in his native Japan, but Kurosawa never had the blinders on when it came to appreciating films from all over the globe. He didn’t necessarily like what he saw on every occasion, but it was the decline of an invitation to a festival that initially opened his eyes to another towering figure in the medium’s history.
Per Beyond Cinephilia, Kurosawa may have turned down the chance to visit the country, but that’s how he ended up discovering Abbas Kiarostami. “The first film I saw was a Kiarostami film. During the Shah’s regime, I was invited to Iran to judge in the Tehran Film Festival which I declined since it was a huge responsibility,” he said. “After the revolution, I saw Mr. Kiarostami’s film, and was quite amazed at how well it was made.”
The movie he referred to was 1987’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, which quickly went down as one of Kurosawa’s all-time favourites. The director behind Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood, and countless more would then look at the socio-economic and thematic similarities between Kiarostami’s classic and his own 1993 effort Madadayo, which turned out to be the last of his career.
“The screen is like a major square in which everyone can gather and talk to each other,” he mused. “For example, I bring to the screen my own country’s problems and Kiarostami his. The actors voice our words and touch everyone’s heart, and this is the role of cinema; talk to each other. And that’s the responsibility of the cinema.”
They may have been separated in age by 30 years, but Kurosawa saw Kiarostami – and the impact he had on ushering in a new age of Iranian cinema – as a kindred spirit who used local backdrops to tell local stories that reflected the feeling of the nation at the time they were made. He didn’t feel that way about the Japanese scene at the time, though, voicing his dissatisfaction with what it was becoming.
“A film must be made with the heart, not the mind,” he explained. “I think today’s young filmmakers have forgotten this and instead they make films through their calculations. That is why Japanese films no longer have an audience. In all honesty, films must be made to target the hearts.”
Kiarostami’s films came straight from the heart, which illustrates why he was given the seal of approval from one of the all-time greats.
