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Rhapsody in August (1991)
Rhapsody in August is a 1991 Japanese drama film by Akira Kurosawa based on the novel Nabe no Naka by Kiyoko Murata. Starring Sachiko Murase, Hidetaka Yoshioka, and Richard Gere, the story centers on an elderly hibakusha, who lost her husband in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, as she cares for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to…
Directed by Akira Kurosawa · Shot by Takao Saito · Cut by Akira Kurosawa · Music by Shinichiro Ikebe · 98 min
How it was made
- Kurosawa wrote the screenplay alone in about fifteen days, relocating the story to the outskirts of Nagasaki and turning the protagonist's late husband into a victim of the 1945 atomic bombing.
- To film ants marching in a straight line to Richard Gere's feet, Kurosawa brought in a professor from the Kyoto Institute of Technology to lay a pheromone trail; when the ants kept fanning out because the soil absorbed the pheromones too quickly, the crew dried and remixed the soil with cement to fix it.
- A separate shot of ants climbing a rose bush took assistant director Toru Tanaka three days of effort and could only be completed after the crew moved the entire shoot from Gotemba to sea-level Kyoto because the original location's altitude was wrong for the ants.
- Richard Gere initially had prosthetics made to look half-Japanese for the role of Clark, but Kurosawa decided on simple makeup instead, and Gere practiced his Japanese dialogue using a tape given to him by a bilingual friend.
- Nearly 100 crew members travelled across Japan for location shooting during the Obon holiday period, creating accommodation and transport problems for the production.
Elsewhere
More by Akira Kurosawa
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