When I started getting into Akira Kurosawa's films, somebody bought me his autobiography and said I needed to read it. I didn't know much about the guy apart from attempting suicide and kinda getting fucked over by Hollywood, so I read it and it's genuinely fascinating.
He explores his childhood fascination for silent films (he has a complete reference in the book for most of the films he saw as a kid and teenager and they're mostly wonderful films), the tragedy of his older brother who used to be a silent film narrator with theatre expertise but who later committed suicide, Kurosawa's experience with Toho and screenwriting (it's genuinely interesting to see how early japanese film studios used to operate) as well as quirky little stories about how he met his wife on the set of one of his films, how he let one of his colleagues sleep on set by hiding him (i hope i remember that correctly) and a weird fucking story about hearing a child scream, sneaking into the apartment to find the kid tied to a chair and then the kid is swearing at Kurosawa to fuck off. The stuff about the American occupation and Japanese censorship laws is interesting too, I swear it's not as dry as it sounds. He genuinely manages to make this engaging.
One of my favourite stories from the book is about how Kurosawa and one of his friends were seen as "slow" in school, but one of their teachers saw their potential and encouraged their creativity in art classes. Eventually Kurosawa and his buddy became screenwriters and invited their teacher - now an old man - to the screening of one of their films and their teacher just cried with how happy he was they succeeded. That genuinely made me feel quite emotional as I could relate to similar experiences in school and that there were definitely teachers who encouraged me.
It's a pretty short read, you could probably get through it on a weekend, but if you like Kurosawa or early cinema (he details his films up to the early 1950s), then it's great.
