Is Kurosawa Ready to Stop Making Films? Not Yet . . . : Movies: After 30 films and 50 years, the director has made peace with Japanese studios and is working on his $12-million ‘Madadayo.’

Legendary director Akira Kurosawa has earned the nom de guerre “Emperor” for his imperious manner and tyrannical outbursts during shooting.

But he kept his cool one recent day as three busloads of Japanese reporters, including six television camera crews and 50 photographers, crawled over his set of burnt rubble and twisted steel at the foot of Mt. Fuji to watch him in action.

Kurosawa was shooting “Madadayo,” a movie about Hyakken Uchida, a real-life professor and eccentric essayist, and the strong ties that bind him to his students long after they have left school. (The title, which translates as “Not Yet,” refers to a term children use when playing hide-and-seek and is the name of an association Uchida’s students created to celebrate the professor’s birthday.)

The once-reclusive Kurosawa, wearing his characteristic fisherman’s hat, sunglasses and jeans, later surprised studio executives and publicists by volunteering to lead reporters on a personal tour of his more elaborate sets on a 15-minute bus ride up the slope of Mt. Fuji, about 90 miles west of Tokyo.

The sets depict a bombed-out Tokyo at World War II’s end. All that is left standing above the rubble are a few telephone poles and the chimney of a public bath.

Smiling and relaxed, the 6-foot Kurosawa played up his role as a cinematic master, directing his assistants to reduce the height of some of the telephone poles for more depth and to shrink the tin shanties to provide a flatter feel to the blackened scene.

The director’s visitors were taken aback by his accessibility, and some seemed in awe of him. But that sense also was mixed with more than a touch of cynicism.

“He’s become more aware of the importance of marketing, of making money,” said Yuichiro Nishimura, a reporter who has followed Kurosawa’s career for two decades and written two books on him.

Kurosawa was frozen out of film financing between 1970 and 1990 because local studios regarded him as a risk. Kurosawa recalled bitterly at a news conference that he produced just three films during those two decades because “I had to run all around the world with my scripts to raise money.”

Thirty films and 50 years after launching his directing career, 82-year-old Kurosawa appears to have made his peace with the Japanese film Establishment and to be back on track.

When “Madadayo” is released next spring, it will the third film he has directed since 1990 and the second in decades to be largely financed by Japanese money. It is the first film Kurosawa has directed for Daiei Co., one of Japan’s largest studios, since he filmed “Rashomon,” the 1950 film that established his reputation worldwide. Daiei is negotiating with potential buyers for the worldwide distribution rights for “Madadayo”; approximately 40% of the film’s revenue is expected from U.S. and other overseas markets. Toho will distribute the film in Japan.

While Kurosawa may be more relaxed and more attuned to the realities of marketing his films, he hasn’t loosened his exacting standards when shooting them.

A simple one-minute scene in which a group of students walk through the rain to the tiny wood shed where the professor lives had to be repeated eight times, even though it had been fully rehearsed.

Kurosawa complained that artificial raindrops falling from the sprinklers were too large. During a real cloudburst, filming had to be halted. When the rain stopped, the director judged the sky too bright; he thought the actors walked too fast or too slow or held their umbrellas at the wrong height. When Kurosawa finally said, “OK, OK,” to end the day’s shooting, everybody broke into applause.

The day’s scenes were critical, Kurosawa said later, because they had to establish the desolation, poverty and melancholy of Japan right after the war. The atmosphere helps underscore the wit and optimism shown by the professor (played by Tatsuo Matsumura, well known in Japan for his roles in the “Tora-san” movies) in the face of difficult times.

As for the director and his sets, Kurosawa is upholding his reputation for taking meticulous care. He is spending $12 million on what arguably could be filmed more cheaply, given the cast of six and the limited action.

In comparison, Kurosawa spent $11 million on “Ran,” the 1985 epic with complex action scenes and a cast of hundreds. The biggest action scene in “Madadayo,” according to a studio synopsis, occurs when the loyal students search desperately for the professor’s beloved stray cat.

Yet, for this modest film, Kurosawa has built sets at three locations. At a studio lot near Tokyo, he had constructed a replica of an entire prewar Tokyo street. Here in Gotemba, a resort town where Kurosawa has a summer house and has filmed such works as “Ran,” he had the professor’s postwar home built. It is a shed on the estate of a former baron. He picked a narrow river valley for the shed because he wanted the backdrop of a large forest.

But the site also was supposed to allow for the shooting of a flattened Tokyo. To hide the mountains and the steep slope beside the shed, Kurosawa ordered the structure built on a 40-foot steel platform below the hill and the ruins of the baron’s large, Western-style mansion.

“He wouldn’t even let us use plywood for the house,” said Yoshiro Muraki, an art director who has worked with Kurosawa for more than 40 years. The mansion is only used as a backdrop, and the foreground had to be covered in rubble and melted, cast-iron fences so Kurosawa could employ his favorite technique, shooting from a distance with telephoto lenses to compress the image.

For scenes to be shot from the other side of the hut, Kurosawa wanted to be able to pan across an expansive, demolished Tokyo. That would be impossible in the forested valley. So Kurosawa ordered a second set built on a large, level field of burnt sand halfway up the slope of Mt. Fuji.

“Madadayo” represents a second step toward his Japanese roots for Kurosawa, who many believe was once so popular because of his Western sensibilities. His last film, “Rhapsody in August,” did well in Japan but not in the United States, in part because it reflected a narrower, Japanese ethos--that of a nation victimized by the atomic bomb.

“Madadayo,” like his last film, is sentimental, a nostalgic reflection on the days of close ties between students and teachers; this is a favorite Japanese topic.

“We used to visit our teachers at their homes,” Kurosawa said at a news conference. “What we’ve lost in education today is the importance of the teacher as a human being quite apart from what he teaches.” The movie is well-timed, coming when many Japanese are raising serious questions about the quality of their education, Kurosawa said.

He said he wants to maintain his current filmmaking pace; he is already thinking about his next project.

Although Kurosawa won’t comment, Muraki says the next work will likely be a jidaigeki, a period piece. That could mean a samurai tale of the sort that Kurosawa is known for in the West. But Muraki said Kurosawa will never again make a movie on the scale of “Seven Samurai,” his 1954 classic, or “Ran.”

“Kurosawa doesn’t have the energy to do something like that again,” Muraki said.

Still, those close to him hint that Kurosawa, with his current movie, is sending out a personal message--that it is too early to count him out.

At the film’s end, the professor dreams of a child playing hide-and-seek and calling, “Are you ready?”

The children’s cry?

“Madadayo.” Not yet.

So, too, is the case for him.

Said Kurosawa: “I still have so many projects I want to do.”