Great directors, once dead, inevitably attract biographers, memoirists and critics in large numbers who chronicle and critique every aspect of their subject's work, as well as detail his (much more rarely, her) personal history and dissect his personality. But what this crowd so often skimps or ignores, as Teruyo Nogami's "Waiting on the Weather -- Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa" makes so absorbingly clear, is what it was like to actually be with the master on and off the set, year in and year out.
Nogami worked with Kurosawa on 19 films, beginning in 1950 with "Rashomon" and ending in 1993 with "Madadayo," his last film as a director. Her work often required her to either be with Kurosawa or do his biding nearly every hour of every day of a shoot. At the same time, Kurosawa's drive for perfection -- including the perfect cloud formation -- also often meant that Nogami and other crew members had much time to lounge and chat until the elements aligned for the next shot, hence the book's title.
Nogami also attended the many dinners with cast and crew where Kurosawa -- a gregarious man -- told stories and led everyone in group singalongs. He was, Nogami writes, a fan of singing rounds, an activity ordinarily more associated with a primary school music class than the director of "The Seven Samurai." She spent more time with the workaholic director (he was often an absent husband and father) than anyone else in the professional "Kurosawa family." Nogami was also no mere factotum, drudging mindlessly away. Though she did not keep a journal for most of her years with the director, she was a keen observer of Kurosawa in his dealings with everything from egocentric stars to unruly ants. She knew all his weaknesses and strengths, from his raging temper to his almost uncanny ability to remember all of the hundreds of shots he made in the course of a filming. Her reminiscences, first published in a video sales company newsletter, starting in 1991, and then in book form in 2001, are valuable not because they are so rare -- books about Kurosawa now fill a long, groaning shelf -- but because they are so insightful, human and thorough. Nogami may not write in chronological order, skipping freely back and forth between the decades, but she covers nearly every facet of Kurosawa's career, with affection and gentle humor, but also with a clear, critical eye.