TOKYO (AP) — Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the Japanese director known as “the master of horror,” was a bit nervous about how viewers might react to his first samurai film.He needn’t have worried.“The Samurai and the Prisoner,” opening in New York and Los Angeles on July 31, followed by a rollout in major U.S. cities through August, received an enthusiastic response when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May.It’s turning out to be Kurosawa’s most popular film to date, if its reception in Japan, where it opened earlier this year, is any indication.That’s saying a lot for a director who counts to his credit dozens of respected works, including the 2020 Venice Film Festival ’s Silver Lion-winning “Wife of a Spy.” His 2008 “Tokyo Sonata,” about heartbreaking family conflict, won Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. “Filmmaking remains a mystery for me,” Kurosawa said.
It’s a complex undertaking that requires bringing together the real world, or what’s being filmed, and what’s not real, the story that must be depicted, he said.“I don’t understand it. And that’s why I keep making films,” he told The Associated Press in a recent online interview from New York. Why can’t I do what Yasujiro Ozu did? Why can’t I do what Alfred Hitchcock did? Those are the questions he keeps asking himself, he said.
