When he was the guest of honor at the Asian Film Awards earlier this year, Kurosawa Kiyoshi He was in a determined mood as he talked about his craft, his influences, and his need to keep reinventing himself. Six months and lots of praise later, he’s just as determined.

“I turned 68 last year. Kurosawa said in March: I’m not sure there are many directors my age who make two films in one year.

He could be forgiven for being exhausted now. Kurosawa’s number of completed films in 2024 has increased to three: mid-length horror “Chime,” revenge-thriller remake “Path of the Serpent” and action movie “Cloud,” which has received Japan’s nod as an Oscar contender. And he’s heading to Tokyo after recently completing a series of promotional events, award speeches and a masterclass at the prestigious Busan festival. this week Tokyo International Film FestivalThis time, he will give another master class within the scope of the Asian Film Student Exchange Program.

What keeps Kurosawa, now 69, moving forward seems to be his willingness to seize opportunities that allow him to continue experimenting on the screen without getting stuck in the weeds of production or funding.

“For ‘Chime,’ a producer approached me and asked me to make a 45-minute film. “This was neither for broadcast nor for cinema,” Kurosawa said. Diversity. “Since the producer offered me absolute flexibility – that all that was required of the genre was that he wanted to make a horror film that was new and different from what had come before, that was weird and weird and in a way weird but also not avant-garde – I found this challenge interesting and said I would accept it.”

“Chime,” which opened in Berlin, is a psychological teaser that at least one critic likened to the pilot episode of a yet-to-be-produced TV series. It involves the mental deterioration of a cold-blooded and calculating cooking teacher who interacts with disruptive students and a dysfunctional family at home.

The framework is very clear. Intentions are unclear and frustrating.

Released commercially in Japan before premiering at the San Sebastian and Busan festivals, “Serpent’s Path” is a violent drama-thriller film that is a remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 film of the same name, but this time it is made in French.

“Many years ago, after a casual encounter, a French producer asked me if I had the chance to remake any of my films and which one I would do. Without hesitation, I told him, ‘I prefer The Way of the Serpent.’ It didn’t happen at the time, but last year he got in touch again and told me he had the budget and we could do it in France. It was a super opportunity and I said ‘yes’ right away,” Kurosawa said.

“One reason for remaking the movie was my friend Takahashi Hiroshi’s revenge-themed script. It was set in the Yakuza (organized crime scene) but it was completely universal. And the scenario is still valid today,” Kurosawa said. “But when we made it in 1998, it was so low-budget and the script was so strong that I couldn’t exactly call it my movie. “I wanted to take the opportunity to remake ‘The Serpent’s Path’ but in my own way.”

The remake avoids the Yakuza references and transforms the protagonist from a man to a woman who has lost her child. This required a different ending and the addition of other characters.

While preparing “The Cloud”, Kurosawa again had in mind to avoid stereotypes. “I was longing to do an action movie. Many Japanese action movies are very much about fantasy, either with Yakuza (gangsters) or serial killers. I wanted an ordinary person, someone more ordinary, who was faced with an unusual or unexpected violent situation to be the hero and the perpetrator. I don’t consider the opening scene as an action scene. “It’s just an incident of an ordinary person in an extreme situation,” he said in Busan.

“The cold and sarcastic tone you may have detected in ‘The Cloud’ was not my intention,” he said in response to a question from the audience. “I didn’t have a specific message while making the film. Rather, achieving the highest level of realism was my main focus. But this was difficult to sustain and a different approach was actually needed.”

Despite his extensive track record (Imdb lists 74 film credits and 15 TV shows) Kurosawa says many investors were not interested in financing his experiment in the action genre. However, with the participation of popular actor Suda Masaki, money followed.

Kurosawa is grateful to 30-year-old Suda for more than just financing the film. “I wanted someone a little dirty. He is very handsome and stylish in the water, but he also transforms into ordinary very well,” said Kurosawa. “Also, Suda was able to interpret my script based on minimal explanations. He didn’t ask too many questions.”

“My scripts are mostly minimal so everything can be interpreted on set. It is unlikely that I can give a detailed description of the place. Maybe I don’t even know about it. We can almost say that it is incomplete,” said Kurosawa. “This is my disclaimer. It’s like saying, ‘This is all I know for now.’ But I rarely change the lines of dialogue I write. And I don’t write about things I know absolutely nothing about. “Otherwise I would have to experience it myself.”

In Busan, many presenters and interviewers seemed to want to label Kurosawa a genre film expert. It was a label he both rejected and embraced.

“For me, the genre film is just a film,” Kurosawa said at one point. In another moment, he praised Korean filmmakers for making more genre films than their Japanese counterparts. “I’m a little jealous,” he joked onstage, explaining that Japanese filmmakers had strayed in other directions.

“We were working on 8mm when we were much younger. It was difficult to capture the sound. I made a few silent films. The dialogue was supposed to be simple. “This pushed me into genre films,” he explained. That and a diet of 1970s and 1980s ‘exploitation films’, or ‘genre titles’ to use contemporary terminology.

“There are two main groups of filmmakers in Japan today. The first group is, of course, commercial filmmakers. They mainly focus on the Japanese domestic market. There is also another group that is more sensitive, pays more attention to its own style, and wants to expand into the international market, maybe raise funds there as well,” Kurosawa told Variety. “It’s sad that there is such discrimination. Maybe I’m a mixture of both.”

In fact, Kurosawa became one of the pioneers in Japanese foreign co-production films and worked abroad at least three times. The aptly named “To the End of the World” was produced in partnership with Uzbekistan’s Uzbekkino.

Kurosawa also respects experiments performed on others. When asked who he admired most among the younger generation of Japanese filmmakers, he immediately chose “Drive My Car” director Hamaguchi Ryusuke.

“Hamaguchi is very diverse, always trying to follow different paths, making films very different from me,” Kurosawa said, then added briefly: “We talk often, but not about our work.”