Compound Cinematics by Shinobu Hashimoto

Compound Cinematics by Shinobu Hashimoto

Author:Shinobu Hashimoto [Hashimoto, Shinobu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-939130-58-7
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00


Mr. Kurosawa had a philosophy about scenarios.

“You cannot rest even for a day.”

According to him, the work of writing a script was like running a full marathon. You had to keep your chin down and your gaze lowered, fixed on a point just ahead, as you silently ran. If you didn’t look up and continued to do nothing but run, you eventually reached your goal.

The average daily output of Team Kurosawa was fifteen sheets. We might be seated for the same seven hours from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, but sometimes we did just five or seven pages, while on other days we’d hit a groove and get out more than twenty or thirty pages, for an average of about fifteen. So if we shut ourselves away for three weeks, or twenty days of actual work, we could finish a screenplay of three hundred pages or so.

Mr. Kurosawa liked Noh theater, and when the day’s work was done he would often talk about Noh over dinner, and he always spoke of Zeami. A historical figure of the Muromachi era who enjoyed the backing and patronage of the Ashikaga shogun, Zeami produced numerous masterpieces and established Noh as an artform continuing to the present. One day, as this Zeami crossed a river on a boat, at about the midway point another boat came from the opposite bank, and the ferrymen called out to each other: Oh, the weather’s good. Mm, I’m glad for the good weather, but I’m tired out today. Huh, why? Well, because I took a day off from work yesterday.

Zeami could not but slap his knee. That was it! That was the trick, if you rested your body you just ended up feeling tired. When it came to practice, you could not rest even for a day.

Just as Mr. Kurosawa said, scenarios were like running a marathon, and looking ahead because it was too much led to discouragement, the end … I understood in my heart that, even when things were painful, keeping your head down and persevering was the only way.

But that was for writing a scenario coming out to the usual three hundred pages, and I wondered if the mindset and law worked when the page count rose to four or five hundred. If you tell marathon runners at the 20 km point of a 42.195 km race that the goal has been pushed further to a whopping 62.195 km, the runners’ mood and performance might—can only risk extraordinary, irrevocable chaos.



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