‘Throne of Blood’: The Akira Kurosawa movie that “didn’t impress” Andrei Tarkovsky
In the contrasting worlds of Japanese and Russian film, Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky reign proud as the cinematic custodians of their respective native countries. Having committed some genuine masterpieces to the medium – Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, just for starters – the duo’s position in the history of film is eternally assured.
Kurosawa famously visited the set of Tarkovsky’s Solaris to see the master director at work, and after being blown away by the legendary science fiction movie, the two ended the day getting drunk together, showing a deep friendship that lay beneath the mutual admiration for one another’s creative work.
Tarkovsky once admitted that he loved the work of Kurosawa, but he pointed out one film from the Japanese cinema icon’s back catalogue that didn’t land in the way that his others did. “I love Kurosawa, but I don’t like Throne of Blood; its finale didn’t impress me at all,” he said.
Throne of Blood is Kurosawa’s 1957 film based on William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, with the action from Medieval Scotland transposed to feudal era Japan. The film is considered one of Kurosawa’s best movies, but Tarkovsky found an issue with its production. “The arrow that penetrates [Toshiro] Mifune’s throat is badly done,” he said. “You can see it’s glued from both sides. It ruins the impression. Cinema doesn’t permit any such faults.”
Tarkovsky’s comments are interesting here because, according to the set decorator and prop master of Throne of Blood, Koichi Hamamura, the arrows fired at Mifune, who played the equivalent of Macbeth in the film, were all real. “Arrows rained on him,” Hamamura had once explained. “All the arrows that struck him were my work. There were much thicker needles, like needles for antique phonographs. I showed the rigged arrows to Mifune and explained how they would be used.”
The scene in question is one of Kurosawa’s most acclaimed, especially considering the genuine fear in Toshiro Mifune’s eyes as real arrows rained down on him, so it appears that perhaps Tarkovsky got the details of the production wrong. Still, there were other facets of Throne of Blood that the Soviet director took issue with, like its Shakespearean adaptive quality.
“I think he copied Shakespeare’s plot in a superficial manner and transferred it to Japanese history, without really succeeding,” Tarkovsky said. “Shakespeare’s Macbeth is much more profound, both in the character of its protagonist and in the tragedy that penetrates the action.”
Again, Tarkovsky seems to negate the brilliance that Kurosawa possessed in transposing the works of The Bard into different eras and settings. Perhaps the Russian filmmaker’s words came down to the fact that he was comparing Throne of Blood to the Kurosawa works he considered to be “remarkable pictures”, namely Seven Samurai and Sanjuro.
Tarkovsky seemed to enjoy the beginning of Throne of Blood, including the scene “where the protagonists are lost in the fog”, which he said was “shot incredibly”, but its finale was one that left him feeling disappointed. Still, even though Tarkovsky found issues with the Japanese director’s 1957 jidaigeki film, it did not impact his overall impression of the man himself. “I still love Kurosawa a lot,” Tarkovsky signed off, “in the historical genre he has achieved more than anyone.”
Check out the trailer for Andrei Tarkovsky’s least favourite Akira Kurosawa movie, Throne of Blood, below.
