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Ikiru (1952)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Directed by Akira Kurosawa · Shot by Asakazu Nakai · Cut by Akira Kurosawa · Music by Fumio Hayasaka · Ratio Academy ratio · 143 min
How it was made
- Kurosawa initially told screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto only that the protagonist had 75 days to live and that his profession did not matter, saying a criminal, a homeless man or a government minister would all work equally well, before the writers settled on a low-level bureaucrat.
- The screenwriters used Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a structural basis for the story.
- Hashimoto's first draft placed Watanabe's death at the very end of the film, but co-writer Hideo Oguni restructured it to occur halfway through instead, a change significant enough that Kurosawa renamed the script from The Life of Kanji Watanabe to Ikiru, a title Hashimoto found pretentious but Oguni supported.
- For the scene of Watanabe singing on the swing, Kurosawa dictated only the opening lines of the song Gondola no Uta from memory; since none of the writers knew the rest, they had to ask their office's oldest receptionist to recall the remaining lyrics and the song's title.
- A Toho vice president wanted the office scenes after Watanabe's funeral cut as unnecessary to the story, since they sharpen the film's critique of bureaucracy, but Kurosawa refused to remove them.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Akira Kurosawa
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