The self-penned Steven Seagal screenplay he said “reminds me of a Kurosawa movie”
Confidence and ego are two sides of a coin that everyone needs to carry in their pocket at all times if they’ve got dreams of making it in the ruthless world of cinema, with Steven Seagal capable of opening his own mint looking at the way he holds himself in such high esteem.
Even though countless tales he’s told of his past have either been debunked or remain entirely unproven, the aikido practitioner continues to enshroud himself in a legend that’s largely been of his own making, which has had the adverse effect of allowing him to buy into his own hype a little too much.
Seagal is a bad actor who makes bad movies, and yet he takes himself very seriously at all times. As a result, he might worship the ground that he walks on, but there is no shortage of industry figures who wouldn’t even piss on him if he was on fire. Not that he cares, though, especially when he was secretly a modern-day Akira Kurosawa all along.
One of the greatest and most influential directors that’s ever going to step behind the camera, by Francis Ford Coppola’s estimation, the Japanese icon made at least eight masterpieces. Looking back through Seagal’s filmography, he’s been in maybe one movie that could be called good-to-great, so they’re not exactly two peas in the same pod.
Among the many hilarious anecdotes to have followed Seagal throughout his career came from mixed martial artist Urijah Faber, who used to have the same representation as the star. Their shared manager once told him that Seagal was brought to tears after reading an “unbelievable” screenplay that had left him misty-eyed and blubbering. Who was the writer in question of such an emotional script? Himself, of course.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that Seagal would name another self-penned exercise as being comparable to the work of an all-time auteur, because he probably believes it. In an interview with JoBlo, the teller of tall tales said his own writing on Attrition “kind of reminds me of a Kurosawa movie”.
He doesn’t name any specifically, but with the 2018 straight-to-video dud placing Seagal as an ex-special forces solider making a quiet life for himself in the jungles of Thailand before being drawn back into the fray to kill a bunch of henchmen and rescue the kidnapped daughter of his friend, it’s hard to single out which Kurosawa picture he could possibly be referring to.
Not to say that he’s misguided in that belief, but there definitely isn’t an entry in Kurosawa’s filmography that features a military operator-turned-acupuncturist putting together a crack team to take down a cabal of nefarious villains, which culminates in the protagonist murdering a trafficker with a broadsword and then delivering a monologue on the corruption of martial arts.
