The great master Kurosawa started to inspire me very late in my life. Partly because of my own ignorance and partly because of my ability to comprehend the master through his creations. I still find it very hard to understand him, his approach and his methods.
However, I completely took his advice when I intended to get back into fine art photography again in 2020, after a gap of almost 11 years. And I experimented with his only advice to new film directors – write, write, write.
For his immediate students it was about screen play. For me, it was putting on paper a vague concept and crunching through each & every word to make that project write up relevant, to the point and simultaneously be very mindful of extravaganza of words that so much infiltrates everyone who attempts to write.
This single advice has the immense merit of perfection. At the same time, when I started to put my so-thought perfect write up into practice, I found that it was not! I faced several challenges with coherence, (mis)-interpretation and a certain amount of diversity in between the lines.
The reason I think this advice has the merit of perfection is because when I started my projects, even with the incoherence and broadness of the topic, it allowed me to look back quickly into my pictures and evaluate quite rationally if they all tied together in the same spirit in which the project was written. In cases where I found a particular image to be beautiful but not relevant, it started to make me think of being able to conceive a whole new project out of it. This is certainly one advantage for a photographer but for a film maker it could mean a big failure of the entire film.
This is part of an ongoing series of my articles on Opium of Art.