“Not a lot of laughs!”: Martin Scorsese recalls being directed by Akira Kurosawa
The old saying suggests that it’s not always the wisest idea for anyone to meet their heroes never mind work with them, but Martin Scorsese was never going to pass up the opportunity to take part in an Akira Kurosawa movie.
There are few filmmakers in history to be held in higher regard than the Japanese maestro, with Scorsese just one of the giants who followed in his wake to worship the ground he walks on. That’s entirely fair when his back catalogue is bursting at the seams with greatness, so it was a chance that was far too good to turn down.
Francis Ford Coppola famously said that whereas any director would kill for a single masterpiece, Kurosawa had at least eight, but it also wouldn’t be unfair to say 1990’s Dreams wasn’t one of them. It was an ambitious experiment, and while it’s a million miles away from being a disaster, the anthology of magical realism isn’t remembered as being among his finest work.
Still, when Kurosawa called up somebody who’d been enthralled by his work for decades and floated the idea of having them play Vincent Van Gogh, it was a no-brainer. Scorsese appears in the ‘Crows’ segment, which follows an art student who finds themselves entering the world of the artist’s work and embarks upon a surrealist odyssey through many of his most well-known paintings.
Nobody wants to keep one of the all-time great directors waiting, but Scorsese had to put the finishing touches on a little film of his called Goodfellas, which had taken more time than anticipated. “We went over schedule, about 15 days over, and the studio was furious,” he admitted to Empire. “We were treated very badly. They even refused to give us a little wrap party.”
Once the last day of principal photography on his gangster classic was in the can, Scorsese almost immediately boarded a plane to Hokkaido, where the director had spent more than two weeks waiting for his Van Gogh to arrive. “I was 15 days over, Kurosawa was waiting, all these angry guys are visiting the set, and everyone’s mad at me,” he said. “I was so nervous that my doctor told me I had to stop drinking coffee.”
It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment for Scorsese to work on the same set as Kurosawa, having idolised him for his entire professional life, so it must have been a real pinch-me moment for the auteur, right? Well, not quite, with Scorsese being asked what it was like to be directed by one of the best to ever do it. His response? “Not a lot of laughs!” It was not the ideal outcome, then, but it was hardly surprising when he was 15 days late for his big moment.
