Where to watch Rashomon (1950)

Trivia & production notes

• Toho and its financing company Toyoko refused to produce Rashomon, with Toyoko fearing it would be an unprofitable venture, before Daiei eventually took on the project.
• Kurosawa wrote the screenplay while staying at a ryokan in Atami alongside filmmaker Ishirō Honda, who was working on The Blue Pearl, with the two writers starting at 9 a.m. daily and critiquing each other's progress every twenty pages.
• Assistant director Tai Kato disagreed so strongly with the script that he clashed with Kurosawa on set, after which Kurosawa reassigned him to create the film's trailer.
• Setsuko Hara was not cast as the wife because her brother-in-law, filmmaker Hisatora Kumagai, opposed the decision, leading to Machiko Kyō being cast instead.
• Kurosawa agreed to cast Machiko Kyō after witnessing her enthusiasm by shaving her eyebrows before her makeup test.
• The production used only three sets due to its small budget: the gate, the forest scene, and the police courtyard.
• Rain in the gate scenes had to be tinted with black ink because camera lenses could not capture water being sprayed through hoses.
• Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa used inferior Fujifilm stock instead of Kodak because it produced the sharp contrasts between light and dark tones that Kurosawa and Miyagawa wanted.
• For forest sequences where electrical lights could not be used, Miyagawa employed eight mirrors to reflect natural sunlight onto the actors.
• The film contains 407 separate shots, more than twice the number typical in films of that era, yet they blend together so seamlessly that viewers rarely notice the editing.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Rashomon, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.