Teruyo Nogami on Working with Akira Kurosawa
A dazzling mix of folklore, myth, and the director’s own nighttime visions, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams represents a late-career burst of creativity from one of the masters of Japanese cinema. Over the course of the film’s eight surreal episodes, Kurosawa moves between glimpses of natural beauty and nightmarish images of a world on the brink of apocalypse. One of the collaborators instrumental in mounting the film’s spectacular set pieces was production manager Teruyo Nogami, who began her career as a script supervisor on 1950’s Rashomon and went on to contribute to Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and several other Kurosawa masterpieces.
In a new interview on our release, Nogami offered some fascinating insights into her relationship with Kurosawa. In the clip above, she recalls the process of developing the makeup and choreography for the film’s opening sequence.
