Miyazaki and Kurosawa Fireside Chat

Miyazaki and Kurosawa Fireside Chat (映画に恋して愛して生きて黒澤明と宮崎駿, Eiga ni Koishite Aishite Ikite, Kurosawa Akira to Miyazaki Hayao) is a documentary that aired on Nippon Television in 1993. The TV special was expanded into a book entitled, Nani ga Eiga ka (What is a movie?) centering around the making of Seven Samurai (1954) and Madadayo (1993)."

This documentary, initially broadcast on TV, accompanies the home video release of the compilation films for the Sherlock Hound series.

Overview
The 1993 TV special is about a conversation between Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa about cinema. In that same year, their conversation was published as a book entitled Nani ga Eiga ka? (What is a movie?) which includes an additional interview with Miyazaki. Miyazaki had great respect for Kurosawa, and elaborated his feelings in a follow-up interview a few days after their meeting which appears on the book, "Kurosawa is a director with an era unto himself, and I had to show him the proper respect. Because of that, I expected to feel nervous while talking to him, and during our conversation I was every bit as nervous as I’d imagined.

During the interview, Kurosawa recommended that Miyazaki create a jidai-geki (a film about medieval Japanese history) and the latter took the opportunity to talk about his upcoming project called Princess Mononoke.

However, Miyazaki wasn’t permanently starstruck by Kurosawa. In the same interview in which Miyazaki recounts being nervous while talking to him, the interviewer shares a hope Kurosawa had for the Ghibli founder.

Interviewer: “This is something I heard from Kurosawa on a separate occasion, but he said ‘I want Miyazaki to make a live-action film.’”

Miyazaki: “I don’t know if he’s serious or just being diplomatic, but if he actually said that, I think it’s rude of him. That’s as unconnected to reality as if I were to say ‘I want Kurosawa to direct animation.’ They're different genres. And if he's saying that because he thinks that live-action is comparatively a higher artform than animation, I'd like to formally state that I object.”

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Miyazaki and Kurosawa Fireside Chat