Compound Cinematics Akira Kurosawa and I

Any list of Japan's greatest screenplay writers would feature Shinobu Hashimoto at or near the top. This memoir, focusing on his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa, a gifted scenarist in his own right, offers indispensable insider account for fans and students of the director's oeuvre and invaluable insights into the unique process that is writing for the screen.

The vast majority of Kurosawa works were filmed from screenplays that the director co-wrote with a stable of stellar writers, many of whom he discovered himself with his sharp eye for all things cinematic. Among these was Hashimoto, who caught the filmmaker's attention with a script that eventually turned into Rashomon. Thus joining Team Kurosawa the debutant immediately went on to play an integral part in developing and writing two of the grandmaster's most impressive achievements, Ikiru and Seven Samurai.

Shinobu Hashimoto is an award-winning screen-writer and film producer, best known across the globe for his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa. Born in 1918, in southern Japan, Hashimoto was only a middle-school graduate before he entered the world of film. His debut work was an immediate critical success in the form of the screenplay for Kurosawa's Roshamon. Through the years he went on to work on the following movies among his more than 50 films: Roshamon, Ikuru -To Live-, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and The Outrage with Paul Newman.