Ozu and Noda: Birds of a Feather

Over the course of their legendary thirty-five year creative partnership, director Yasujiro Ozu and screenwriter Kogo Noda together conceived twenty-seven films, many of them masterpieces. Their long, close collaboration—which produced such gently profound, internationally celebrated family portraits as Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953)—grew out of both a shared cinematic sensibility and a natural friendship. In the above clip—taken from a supplement on our brand-new edition of The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, the sublime marital drama Ozu and Noda made the year before Tokyo Story—filmmaker Daniel Raim examines the working relationship between the two men, whose daily habits were as simpatico as their instincts for writing dialogue. “Noda takes a morning nap, and so do I; I drink to sleep, and so does he,” said Ozu, whose words Raim reads here in voice-over. “Noda and I have the same physiological condition, which is the most important thing.”