The unlikely friendship of Gabriel García Márquez and Akira Kurosawa: “I have this great curiosity to know many other things about you”
The crossover between books and film is deeply entrenched, and it isn’t limited to filmmakers adapting novels for the screen. Ernest Hemingway was known to pal around with Hollywood directors and stars, and many out-of-work novelists in the early 20th century fled west to seek their fortunes in the industry.
But when it came to the great Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian author who penned such modern masterpieces as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, it boiled down to his great admiration for one of the medium’s greatest artists.
In 1990, Marquez travelled to Tokyo to meet director Akira Kurosawa, who was shooting his second-to-last film, Rhapsody In August. They hit it off, and if their six-hour interview was any indication, they found common ground over their philosophies on storytelling and creative processes.
In addition to their own work, they also touched on topics such as poetry, truth, and the devastating fallout of the American bombing of Nagasaki.
Márquez is invariably identified as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Born in a small town in northern Colombia, he began his career as a journalist and culture critic and published his first novella in 1955 at the age of 28. Known for being masterful at both short stories and sweeping novels, he is a towering figure in literary history.
His most famous work is 1967’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which traces multiple generations of the Buendía family with deviations into magical realism. It has been translated into 46 languages, sold over 50 million copies, and is considered to be his magnum opus.
In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” It was not awarded for a specific work, but One Hundred Years of Solitude was certainly a primary contributing factor.
Even though one of them was a storied South American author and the other was a Japanese auteur who shaped the future of cinema, Márquez and Kurosawa hit it off immediately. In fact, the former couldn’t hide his combination of admiration and curiosity to find out more about the legendary director.
“I don’t want this conversation between friends to seem like a press interview, but I just have this great curiosity to know a great many other things about you and your work,” Márquez said. “You have made stupendous adaptations of great literary works, and I have many doubts about the adaptations that have been made or could be made of mine.”
During that six-hour interview, Márquez rhapsodised about Kurosawa’s work and revealed that he had seen the director’s 1965 drama Red Beard six times over the course of 20 years. “I talked about it to my children almost every day until they were able to see it,” he said. “So not only is it the one among your films best liked by my family and me, but also one of my favourites in the whole history of cinema.”
Although Red Beard is not as well known as Rashomon or Seven Samurai, it remains one of the director’s crowning achievements. Based on a short story collection by Shūgorō Yamamoto and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Humiliated and Insulted, it tells the story of a doctor and his trainee in rural 19th-century Japan and focuses on the development of the young intern: from ambitious and callous to caring and responsible.
According to Kurosawa, Yamamoto had resisted having his book adapted into a film but finally relented. When he saw it, he declared it more interesting than his source material.
