To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes
Born in Shinagawa, Tokyo. My father was an army officer and athleticism director who believed in both martial discipline and Western cinema -- he took us to films every week. My older brother Heigo was a benshi, a silent film narrator, and his suicide in 1933 shaped my understanding of tragedy forever. I trained as a painter before entering cinema as an assistant director at PCL Studios. Tip: Edit with a razor blade and trust your instincts. If a scene feels slow, it IS slow -- cut it. I edited all my own films. Spielberg called me the Shakespeare of cinema. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped fund my later films when Japanese studios wouldn't. Toshiro Mifune was my instrument for sixteen films -- I composed, he performed. Seven Samurai took a year to shoot and nearly bankrupted Toho. It became the most influential action film ever made. Every heist movie, every team-assembles story, every last-stand battle owes me a drink.
Film Directing
Art · 55y
Film Editing
Art · 55y
Painting & Storyboarding
Art · 60y
Screenwriting
Art · 50y
I teach directing the way I learned painting -- through composition. Where is the eye drawn? What is the relationship between foreground and background? We use storyboards, not shot lists. Every frame...
€35 per_session
I painted full-color storyboards for every scene in my later films -- Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams. They're works of art on their own. You don't need to be a great painter. You need to THINK visually. We wo...
€28 per_session
Editing is where the film is truly made. I'll show you how a two-second cut changes everything -- mood, pace, meaning. We work with actual footage. I cut on a Moviola for forty years. Digital is faste...
€25 per_session
Professional watercolor set, sumi ink, and 50 sheets of storyboard paper with the frame templates I used. This is the exact setup for the Ran storyboards now in museums. Tip: Use big brushes. Small br...
€6 per_day
Twenty-five films on Blu-ray. Rashomon through Madadayo. Every film has commentary tracks and my own notes. Watch them in order and you'll see an artist evolve over fifty years. Start with Stray Dog i...
€5 per_day
Exported from BorrowHood · 2026-03-10