In 1923, a 13-year-old Akira Kurosawa walked through the smoldering aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake while his older brother forced him to look directly at the devastation rather than turn away. This episode traces how that mandate to never look away from darkness shaped one of the most influential filmmakers in history, from his early years as a painter in a left-wing art movement to his entry into the film industry through a cynical essay that caught the eye of director Kajiro Yamamoto.

We follow Kurosawa through wartime Japanese censors who found his style too Western, American occupation censors who banned the same story as too feudal, the volcanic partnership with Toshiro Mifune that began with Drunken Angel, and the surprise Venice win for Rashomon that opened Western eyes to Japanese cinema. The conversation also covers the collapse of the studio system, his firing from a Hollywood Pearl Harbor production, his 1971 suicide attempt, and the Soviet-backed comeback with Dersu Uzala that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

• The benshi silent-film narrators, and how the arrival of sound destroyed his brother Heigo’s profession and preceded his suicide
• Why Kurosawa forced actresses to live in a real optical factory during a wartime propaganda shoot
• Learning to smuggle philosophical themes past censors inside samurai action and historical drama
• The multi-camera, telephoto-lens method that kept actors from performing for the lens
• How Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and his screen wipes reshaped the American blockbuster directors who studied him