SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Stray Dog I first wrote the screenplay in the form of a novel. I am fond of the work of Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime. This process took me a little less than six weeks, so I figured that I'd be able to rewrite it as a screenplay in ten days or so. Far from it. It proved to be a far more difficult task than writing a scenario from scratch, and it took me close to two months. But, as I reflect on it, it's perfectly understandable that this should have happened. A novel and a screenplay are, after all, entirely different things. The freedom for psychological description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a screenplay without using narration. But, thanks to the unexpected travail of adapting the descriptions of the novel form to a screenplay, I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. At the same time, I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expression into the script. For example, I understood that in novel-writing certain structural techniques can be employed to strengthen the impression of an event and narrow the focus upon it. What I learned was that in the editing process a film can gain similar strength through the use of comparable structural techniques. The story of STRAY DOG begins with a young police detective on his way home from marksmanship practice at the headquarters' range. He gets on a crowded bus, and in the unusually intense summer heat and crush of bodies his pistol is stolen. When I filmed this sequence and edited it according to the passage of chronological time, the effect was terrible. As an introduction to a drama it was slow, the focus was vague and it failed to grip the viewer. Troubled, I went back to look at the way I had begun the novel. I had written as follows: "It was the hottest day of that entire summer." Immediately I thought, "That's it." I used a shot of a dog with its tongue hanging out, panting. Then the narration begins, "It was unbearably hot that day." After a sign on a door indicating "Police Headquarters, First Division," I proceeded to the interior. The chief of the First Detective Division glares up from his desk. "What? Your pistol was stolen?" Before him stands the contrite young detective who is the hero of the story. This new way of editing the opening sequence gave me a very short piece of film, but it was extremely effective in drawing the viewer suddenly into the heart of the drama. However, that first shot of the panting dog with its tongue hanging out caused me immense woes. The dog's face appears under the title of the film to create the impression of heat. But I received an unprovoked complaint -- or, rather, accusation -- from an American woman who had watched the filming. She represented the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and claimed that I had had a healthy dog injected with rabies. This was a patently false charge. The dog was a stray that we had obtained from the pound, where it was about to be put away. The people in charge of props had given it affectionate care. It was a mutt, but it had a very gentle face, so we used makeup to give it a more ferocious appearance, and a man on a bicycle exercised it to make it pant. When its tongue started to hang out, we filmed it. But, no matter how carefully we explained all this, the American S.P.C.A. lady refused to believe it. Because the Japanese were barbarians, injecting a dog with rabies was just the sort of thing we would do, and she had no time for the truth. Even Yama-san came by to confirm that I was a dog-lover and would never do such a thing, but the American lady insisted that she was going to take me to court. At this point I lost all patience. I was ready to tell her that the cruelty to animals came from her side. People are animals, too, and if we are subjected to things like this, we need a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans. My colleagues did their best to calm me down. In the end, I was forced to write a deposition, and I never at any other moment experienced a stronger sense of regret over Japan's losing the war. With the exception of this one unfortunate incident, the making of STRAY DOG was most enjoyable. From SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Akira Kurosawa, translated by Audie E. Bock, copyright © 1982 by Akira Kurosawa. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. For online information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.