The Academy Awards lumber toward us, and Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is up for some big ones. In this week’s Guardian, Taro Goto, Assistant Director of the fast approaching San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, writes about the reactions to Eastwood’s film in Japan. Goto also recently interviewed the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure; the Japanese version of Pulse; Bright Future) about Eastwood. While Kurosawa’s love of the films of Don Siegel is well-known, fewer movie maniacs might be aware that he’s also a great admirer of Siegel student (and star) Eastwood. When I interviewed Kurosawa around the time of Bright Future‘s release, he cited Mystic River as the most fascinating film he’d seen in some time, and confessed he’d only glimpsed Eastwood from “a ten-meter distance” when both directors had films premiering in the Official Section at Cannes, because he’d “been a fan of his for such a long time” that he “didn’t feel like changing that.”
In this written exchange, translated into English by Goto, both he and Kurosawa and Goto make some great points about cinema and how it relates to the world.