The Filmmaker in Forest Park by Derrick Martin-Campbell
““You gotta piss?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.”
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1.
So you know how people say stuff like, “I just think that, if we met in real life, me and Jennifer Lawrence/Drake/Mumford & Sons would be best friends forever?” Well I think that, if we met in real life, me and celebrated Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, would best friends forever. Definitely. Almost certainly.
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2.
I get that it might take a while. I get that. I get that, alive, Akira Kurosawa didn’t really speak a ton of English, and now, though his situation is clearly less cut and dry, like the characters in his films, I get that a certain disdain for spoken communication may remain. I get that he was stoic, remote, and uncomplaining, that he halted the filming of Ran just one day to mourn the death of his wife of thirty-nine years, that he was a hard guy to know. And that he may still be.
I get that new friends often need something to do, a puzzle or a meal or a beleaguered village to defend, something to distract them from all the reasons two people already have in this world not to be Best Friends Forever. I get this, and my solution is to take us on a bunch of hikes in Forest Park, something I happen to already very much enjoy myself. Mud heavy in our boot treads, I play host on mine and Akira Kurosawa’s long prowls together, up and down the fire lanes of the west hills in waterfall-season, the filmmaker broad but light-footed, nearly as tall as me but hunched, vaguely aged, and coincidentally sporting the same iconic mao hat and wool jacket of his many “Akira Kurosawa” google image-search returns. He ambles slowly along the trail, unspeaking, easily confounds my quick steps and eager talk with the stubborn two paces he lags behind. He is cautious, a guest yet unsure why he was invited, or even that he is a guest at all and not, in fact, a hostage.
Luckily, I’m kind of an enthusiastic person. Patient too. My plan is to lean on time, let it erode us, exposing over the course of our many wanders the roots I hunch to lie between us, roots deep and indistinct as those of the trees that around us sway and groan, hoisting the lush canopy above us. It’s still early on in our BFFship and, frankly, things aren’t going great yet. Akira Kurosawa has yet to speak aloud to me, in fact. Unless that’s just how he is with everyone. I don’t know, really, because, admittedly, I only know the man from his movies, and from books I’ve read by and about him, from things that are not real-life, walking-(un)talking, cranky, visionary auteurs, beautiful things, but things that are not people and never will be.
But the forest, our forest, it sympathizes in its way, encourages us, and I am grateful for this; it glows green beneath the gray bed sheet sky, mists barely receding from our ankles. I talk without stopping as we hike, my go-to move, the obligation to fill every void heavy on my shoulders because, even as I am drawn to silence -- the silence of the filmmaker, of nature, of death -- it also makes me super uncomfortable. I lecture him on geology for some reason, am telling him about the million-year-old basalt flow that made this place, my home, authored the old growth ecosystem still evident all around us (“not unlike Japan,” I say, “which, I’m sure you know, is really just a series of volcanic islands. It straddles about the same longitude as us, too, actually ...”) when I notice his soft gate slow, then halt, the still air about us suddenly pregnant. I hold my breath, a Kitsune wedding obviously imminent. We stand there.
“I really like your movies,” I say.
Akira Kurosawa says nothing, seems to wince and shrug at once. He unscrews and then re-screws the cap of his dented World War II canteen, taps his foot and looks around.
“You gotta piss?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Me too.”
We stand there in a grove of ferns, look around for someplace to piss.
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3.
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4.
I’ve always wanted very much to be liked by certain, sometimes random, people, and have done some weird things pursuant of this, things that, ironically, often make it hard for those same people to like me. But only at first. I know that I am actually a very likeable person. Like most tall, good-looking white men, this is a very easy thing for me to know.
And it’s not even just brilliant geniuses whose approval I chase either, but, in particular, the quiet geniuses, the sexy loners most fans are too polite/wise to bother, to request more of than just their works. And it’s not just because quiet people give me more time to talk, though I do like that. Saying “I enjoy the challenge,” also feels dumb, but gets closer to what I mean. I often brag that many of my closest friends are introverts who hated me when they first met me. Sometimes I say things to these friends like, “But I’m an introvert, too!” causing them to laugh kindly but heartily, to shake their heads, say nothing as the leaves shiver in the wind, murmurations throbbing and knotting as they do, pregnant with all the mysterious stuff I do not know how keep from trying to say.
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5.
Stood pissing then, together, into the steaming gray-green quiet, quiet but for the birds and wind. There is a moment when the filmmaker and I, turned half-away from one another as we piss, accidentally brush elbows. It is an accident (obviously), but that is all it takes. On cue, the clouds just part above us, losing a single column of sunlight, a beam that pierces our canopy like the dawn through stained glass, striking the forest floor almost audibly, and suddenly it is impossible to miss that we are, in fact, standing there pissing in the very grove in which Tajomaru the bandit, Takehiro the samurai, and Takehiro’s wife, Masako, famously shared their elusive afternoon. Dick still dripping in my hand, I look excited from Akira Kurosawa to the light, to Akira Kurosawa, watch as his eyes silently track this change in our environs over his shoulder, his mouth just open, golden column aswarm with mist and dust.
In many ways, ours is a very different grove than the one in his film, it’s true. But in other ways, important ways, I believe, it is also the same grove. Because I have orchestrated this moment, you see, my plan to crack the stoic filmmaker and spill his goodwill across my homage to his home staged here in mine. And for a moment, I’m actually quietly overjoyed as my gambit threatens to succeed, a gambit that is a sort of cinema itself, I’m proud to say. I watch him close his mouth, swallow, eyes wide and dancing. Awed, he seems about to speak, to part the curtain of his mysterious heart for me, until two loud men round the corner of our trail and pass chatting as they jog between us, lawyers likely, or salesmen, men who are obviously not artists (who are not like us at all, Akira), each utterly absorbed by their hard-breathing convo about the quality and price of the jogging gear they wear. They talk over each other, unbothered. We freeze, Akira Kurosawa and I, remain frozen still as they approach, pass, then grow distant. The filmmaker frowns.
“I disdain joggers,” he says, gently shaking off his final drops.
“OMG me too!” I say, so eager I almost zip my own dick up back in my pants.
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6.
Something not everyone believes right away when I say it is that I really do prefer being alone, prefer this to nearly any crowd, no matter how impressed they are by the smart stuff I say. It’s part of the reason that, in addition to enjoying it, I think myself somewhat suited to be a writer. And yet, my art-heroes suspiciously remain mostly film directors, women and men drawn instead to that most collaborative of all storytelling disciplines.
“When I get together with writers I know, we don't talk about books,” writes the famously solitary novelist, Don Delillo, “we talk about movies.” It’s an observation I’m enough impressed with that I more than once attempt to share it with my friend, Akira Kurosawa, in the feigned casual conversation of our hikes.
“You already told me that,” he says, “and I told you then: I don’t know who Don Delillo is, nor do I care. I do not care for American novels.”
I do not care for American novels -- ha! That really is a sentiment Akira Kurosawa expressed once, or wrote anyway, something that made me laugh out loud when I read it in his autobiography. His book which, when translated into English, is actually called Something Like An Autobiography. LOL at the audacity of this, of specifying that the book he wrote about his life is actually just something like an autobiography, and should not be confused with one. Make no mistake, it is certainly not a novel. If there is a quality I uncritically admire as much as stoicism, I think it is audacity. I admire the audacity it must have taken to cap one’s Macbeth adaptation off with a scene where you shoot real arrows (half of them were pulled by ropes, okay -- but half of them weren’t!) at your good friend slash favorite actor for a full two and half minutes, for instance; I admire the audacity it took to fill the never-opened cabinets in the hospital you built for your doctor-movie with actual medicine; I admire the audacity of dyeing an entire town’s water supply black to make it look better on film.
Audacity, I think, is referring to your own 1971 suicide attempt in your near-autobiography in nothing but the briefest and most depersonalized terms, an important reminder, perhaps, that most audacious personalities cultivate their audacity for a reason.
In addition to stoicism and audacity, the third thing I most admire in a hero, strangely, is rudeness, or at least a willingness to be rude to me. I’m comfortable admitting that I am neither stoic nor audacious and am, in fact, both transparent and painfully polite.
The fourth thing I admire is good art-making. Great even, if possible. Great art is the best. It gives me solace when life is hard. I might compare it to church, a comparison likely to make my said hero’s eyes roll, rude and unspeaking.
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7.
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8.
But why, specifically, Akira Kurosawa? I don’t know. Honestly, bullshit aside, because he is useful to me; because he performs my strange and excellent taste when I announce my love for his movies at parties, alienating and impressing just the right people.
“You are so cynical,” says Akira Kurosawa, “and pretentious besides. I’m sure the people you wish to impress see this about you. If they are worthy of your admiration, they will see through you.”
“Maybe,” I admit, unbothered, shameless, aware that shamelessness, unlike audacity, really is one of my virtues.
“It’s as though you have tried to make my films about you. They’re not, though,” he says, but he does not look completely convinced of this. We sit a little ways apart, resting on a mossy trunk of decomposing cedar. The filmmaker spreads his fingers, tests the spongy give of the wood, frowning. “Not everything is about you,” he says.
His observation is such a cliche that it causes me to laugh out loud.
If shamelessness and audacity are not the same thing, I think that they are maybe at least cousins.
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9.
“Come on, though,” I say, “cut me some slack,” and I say it while grinning, happy just to finally be having this conversation, a real conversation. Like friends. Almost.
“I get that being someone’s fan is embarrassing,” I say, “it’s undignified, sure. I get that. But you’ve gotta understand, I am not burdened by the need to be ‘dignified’ in the way that you and so many of the men of your generation are.
“There is also something sincere about fandom, something perfect,” I say, “something pure in the way that I think you must secretly relate to, maybe even admire, like that beam of light back there, something that can’t be explained at a cocktail party, but only shared in that silent reverential moment of excited nodding and recognition, when you finally do find someone else, someone awkward in the corner who, nursing their drink, shares your fandom -- your gratitude really -- someone who gets it, laughing aloud as you each sputter fragments, quotes, laughing and shaking your heads.”
The filmmaker is once again quiet. He looks away and up toward the trees, looks all around pointedly everywhere but at me.
“Do you know what else these woods remind me of? What other movie?” I say to the back of his head. “Have you ever seen the film Stalker? By Andrei Tarkov-”
Brow furrowed, his gaze is immediately upon me. I smile, happy with the reaction. He looks away.
“You’re pronouncing his name wrong,” says Akira Kurosawa.
I laugh. “I’m probably pronouncing your name wrong, too,” I say, smile unwavering.
We are quiet for a very long time, sitting there on that tree. He handles the cap of his canteen again, but does not drink.
“Once,” he says, then takes a deep breath. I catch the corners of his mouth twitching up and then flat, then up again, trying not to smile as he remembers. It takes all his effort.
“Do you know I was once permitted to spend an entire afternoon alone on the set of Solaris, another film you may know? If you really are a fan of Tarkovsky, that is.”
I say nothing, do not tell him that of course I know Solaris.
“I walked the halls of the space station in that movie, a set built to Andrei’s precise specifications, did this for several hours. I did this and was permitted to do so alone,” he says, “because Andrei and I were friends.”
“‘Best friends?’” I say.
His gaze remains turned up, but away. Still he does not smile. Not quite. “This is a stupid expression,” he says.
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10.
The moment is very fragile and there are so many things I want to say, to fill it with. I am enthusiastic. But I am also patient, thankfully, a virtue often ascribed to Kurosawa’s movies. I thank the void above us for my patience, and the warm Earth below.
“There is an image in that movie,” says the filmmaker, gaze ever-raised; he is not quite speaking to me anymore, though he is not quite alone. It is unclear to whom he speaks, the dead man I imagine here. “In Solaris, there is several times repeated the image of reeds, reeds that sway green below the water ... and when he pulls back, Andrei, the filmmaker, slowly, he reveals to you the man who watches the reeds ...”
“I know that scene,” I say, speaking quietly. “If I’m not mistaken [I know I’m not mistaken], the man in that scene, watching the reeds, he has lost his wife. That film--”
But then the waterfalls are all around us. Because it is a waterfall season in Forest Park, as I have written. It is a made-up season. The waterfalls pour beautiful all around us, flowing flowing flowing out to the sea.
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Derrick Martin-Campbell is a writer living in Portland, OR. His work has previously appeared in Metazen and Thought Catalog. More information and links about Derrick Martin-Campbell can be found here.
If you liked reading "The Filmmaker in Forest Park" by Derrick Martin-Campbell, you might also enjoy reading his short fiction entitled "Blading the Dog Goddess," here.