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About Long Take

For years, Akira Kurosawa resisted writing about himself. The memoir he finally started serializing in 1978, Something like an Autobiography , ended with Rashomon , the film that launched him on the world's stage in 1950. Long Take , first published in Japan shortly after Kurosawa's death in 1998, at last tells the story of the rest of his life. By turns intimate, provocative, and revealing, Long Take creates a dynamic portrait of Kurosawa from his own writings; his conversations with writer Inoue Hisashi and director Yamada Yōji; and essays by his daughter and colleague Kurosawa Kazuko, who details the collaborative history of the "Kurosawa crew." It features a wealth of industry lore, cultural reference points, inside jokes with other filmmakers and writers, and backstories for his own productions, from the earliest to the last. A survey of Kurosawa's prodigious career, this book situates the visionary in the media milieu of his youth, in the literature and performing arts of twentieth-century Japan and Hollywood, and among the myriad films he loved, admired, and referenced, including Japanese silent film and comedy as well as productions from India, Iran, and Soviet-era Russia. Now available to English fans for the first time, Long Take offers a lasting picture of the peerless filmmaker in his element.