Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

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СКАЧАТЬ Toho system, within the parameters set by the company. Honda’s reserved nature was a great asset, the reason he was so beloved by colleagues, but also a liability.

      While Kurosawa reinterpreted Shakespeare and Dostoevsky in a postwar Japanese context, Honda was similarly inspired by Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong (1933), George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953)—two films he frequently cited as influences—and the productions of Walt Disney to create his world of tragedy and fantasy, resembling the Hollywood prototypes but distinctly Japanese in viewpoint. Honda considered himself an entertainment filmmaker, and he admired fellow travelers; in later years, he would prefer the works of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was unabashedly populist, putting the viewer’s experience before his agenda behind the camera.

      “No matter how artistic a film can be, if no one can appreciate it, it is no good,” he said late in life. “Maybe that was my weak point, that I never thought that pursuing my theme was absolute. That is the way I live. I was never actually in the position where I could say or push my idea on everybody … like, ‘No matter who says what, this is my movie.’ After all, I grew up in the film studio system … I had to make my movies in that system. That’s one reason why I wasn’t completely strict about my theme, but at least I tried to show what I wanted to say, as best I could under the circumstances.

      “I have a really strong [connection] with the audience. It’s not about treating the audience just as my customer … I always thought about how [I could make them] feel what I was thinking about. I always tried to be very honest with myself. I tried to show my feelings directly and have the audience feel my excitement. That’s how I tried to make my films.”⁷

      Honda’s loyalty showed in many aspects of life. He remained loyal to his country even when war pulled him away from the job he loved, and even when he was unfairly, unofficially punished for an act of treason with which he had no involvement and was forced to serve much longer than usual. He was a reluctant soldier who avoided fighting unless necessary, but he carried out his duties, motivated to survive the war and return to his family and his work. He remained loyal to the studio even when it nearly fell apart, while others were revolting and defecting, and while younger men were promoted before him. He resolved to continue making feature films even as colleagues joined the rise of television. And he stayed with the studio even after it pigeonholed him as a sci-fi man.

      Still, he wasn’t the stereotypical Japanese employee blindly serving his company. Honda saw the director’s role as a collaborative one, as a team leader rather than an author. “There is a great deal of discussion during the writing of the script,” he said. “But once filming starts, the discussions are ended. Once I became part of Toho, I no longer had reason to complain [to] my employer. One may have objections before joining a company, but once you are inside, you really cannot. That is my opinion. [But] if I have the least objection to a script, I certainly do not make the film.”⁸

      ———

      With hindsight, Honda would express misgivings about his place in the film hierarchy. “The best way to make a film is … how Chaplin did,” he said, after retiring. “You have your own money, you direct, and act and cast it by yourself. That is a real moviemaker. [People] like us, we get money from the company and make whatever film they want. Well, that is not quite a real moviemaker.”⁹

      For Honda’s generation, the studio was the only path to directing. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that Kurosawa and a handful of directors would begin to challenge the status quo and pave the way for independent cinema to come later. And it’s not difficult to understand Honda’s allegiance to the system, for he entered Toho during the 1930s, when by one measure, film output, the Japanese movie business was the biggest in the world, a position it would regain during the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding with the peak of Honda’s career. Japan’s system was modeled after Hollywood, with each studio cultivating its own contracted stars, directors, and writers, and building audience loyalty by focusing on key genres. Just as Warner Bros. became famous for gangster pictures, or MGM for musicals, Toho became known for big war epics during the 1930s and 1940s, and later it would excel in white-collar comedies, lavish musicals, film noir-type thrillers, women’s dramas—and science fiction films, most directed by Honda. Japan’s apprenticeship program was, by some accounts, better than Hollywood’s, with fledgling directors being assigned a mentor, who taught them the techniques of the craft and the politics of the business. Each studio was a tight-knit family of highly talented creative types.

      Inuhiko Yomota, perhaps Japan’s most highly respected film historian, believes Honda was “regarded as an artisan filmmaker capable of making various types of movies ranging from highbrow films to ‘teen pics’ within the restrictions of the Japanese studio system.” Honda was among those studio-based directors who did not possess the truly individualistic style of an auteur, yet succeeded because of their ability to use genre conventions as guidelines to be embellished and blended, rather than strict rules. To that end, Honda improvised: Mothra is part fantasy, King Kong vs. Godzilla incorporates salaryman comedy, Atragon contrasts a lost-civilization fantasy with Japan’s lost wartime empire, The H-Man combines monsters with gangsters, All Monsters Attack turns its genre inside out, and so on. Often the theme was a reflection of Honda himself. He would describe making films as the culmination of a lifelong process of observing and studying the world around him. “Only if you have your own [point-of-view] can you see things when you direct or create something,” he would say. “Seeing things through my own eyes, making films, and living my life in my own way … I try to gradually create the new me. That is what it is all about.”¹⁰

      ———

      Honda’s personality was evident in his approach to filmmaking and in his self-assessment. In a preface to a memoir published posthumously, he wrote, “Ishiro Honda, the individual, is nothing amusing or interesting. He is really just an ordinary, regular old person and a regular movie fan.” In the same text, he said, “I am probably a filmmaker who least looks like one.” And still later, he described himself as “A weed in the flower garden … Never the main flower.” He preferred not to command the spotlight, but to be noticed for his achievements. “People who come to see the main flower will notice [me]. ‘Hmm, look at this flower here.’”

      In outlining his directing philosophy, Honda emphasized collaboration and cooperation. “The most hated word is ‘fight,’” he said. Dialogue and understanding were keys to successful filmmaking: “Talk to each other. That’s the way to get an agreement.”

      Like Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and John Ford, Honda had his de facto stock company of performers, many of whom called themselves the “Honda family.” There were major Toho actors such as Ryo Ikebe and Akira Takarada, and sirens such as Kumi Mizuno, Mie Hama, and Akiko Wakabayashi, plus a host of character players. They became the faces of Honda’s body of work, appearing in both genre and nongenre films. Without exception, they would describe Honda as quiet and even tempered. He rarely coached actors directly about their performance; his direction consisted of subtle course correction rather than instruction.

      “Actors have many ‘drawers,’ with many things inside, and he was good at pulling open the exact drawer he needed each time,” said Koji Kajita, Honda’s longtime assistant director. “He always suggested what to do, but he never demanded, so he could pull the best out of each actor. I’m sure the actors have no memories of being yelled at or anything like that. That wasn’t his way.

      “The biggest thing for him was how to maintain the concept that he had for the script,” Kajita continued. “He had this concept in his head, and when the filming would start to stray from it, he didn’t yell. Instead he very calmly spoke up. It was very firm.

      “He had his own style, this way of thinking … he never got mad, didn’t rush, but he still expressed СКАЧАТЬ