Mention Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s name and the mind tends to drift towards psychological horror: empty rooms, inexplicable behaviour, ordinary spaces that seem to know more than the people inside them. Cure and Pulse remain his most widely recognised films, and their influence has fixed a particular version of the Japanese director in the popular imagination. So when the announcement broke that his latest film would be a samurai movie — a traditional jidaigeki no less — it understandably raised an eyebrow or two.
Fortunately, the surprise wears off quickly. The Samurai and the Prisoner may take place during Japan’s Sengoku period, but it remains occupied by enclosed rooms, unseen pressures, and relationships that change before the people involved fully understand how. Kurosawa has left contemporary Tokyo behind, though the unease remains unmistakably his.
During our conversation over Zoom through an interpreter, his answers are, suitably, anything but hurried. A practical question about acting, blocking, or camera placement would gradually open into a broader thought about cinema, and that deliberateness exists everywhere in the finished film. Here, a change in posture can carry as much dramatic weight as anything spoken aloud.
I begin by asking how he guides the actors between the formal behaviour of a classical period drama and the private emotions of its central characters, the rebel lord, Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), and his prisoner, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda). Kurosawa responds that the project is his attempt at an extremely orthodox jidaigeki, and that he wants to pursue “a realism that might have existed in 16th century Japan.” That means observing the language, customs, and physical conventions of the time without allowing historical fidelity to trap the performances inside traditional ceremony.
“Even though the actors are using an old form of Japanese, old words, the confrontations between the characters felt quite contemporary,” he adds, noting that modern themes run through the drama. The cast has to respect the older forms while drawing on what they carry from the present, imbuing their characters with, as he puts it, “modern sensibilities that come from their own experience.”
In The Samurai and the Prisoner, Murashige and Kanbei never behave like contemporary men who have wandered into a costume drama. Their speech, rank, and movements remain governed by the expectations of their time. Pride, dependence, suspicion, and the desire to be understood work beneath those conventions, however, giving their relationship an immediacy that needs little historical translation. That relationship is concentrated in the dungeon beneath Arioka Castle. Murashige repeatedly returns there to consult Kanbei, yet each encounter carries a different pressure despite involving the same two men in the same cramped room. Sometimes he arrives with the authority of an interrogator. During other visits, the prisoner becomes an adviser, reluctant confidant, or the one person capable of seeing through him.
I ask how the director keeps those conversations from assuming the same dramatic and visual shape. He smiles, before confirming that the progression I notice is deliberate.
“I’m very glad that you received those scenes in that way, because those are scenes that repeatedly happen in the same place with only two characters,” he says. “That area, that space, is frankly the most important place in the entire film.”
The dungeon is among the film’s smallest locations, but everything keeps returning to it. Murashige commands a castle and its soldiers, yet he repeatedly descends into this room to seek the judgement of a man whose freedom he has taken away. With little opportunity to alter the setting, the director instead rearranges the relationship inside it. “At the time, the hierarchies were very clear among people,” Kurosawa explains. “People in power would typically be standing while those not in power would be kneeling.”
Initially, that distinction is unmistakable: Murashige stands while Kanbei is “basically crawling on the floor,” Kurosawa describes. The chains restrict the prisoner’s range and the amount of the room he can claim. Murashige looks down at him, asks his questions, and leaves whenever he chooses.
Then the arrangement starts to shift.
“Slowly, we see that Kanbei can sometimes stand while Murashige is kneeling,” the filmmaker continues. “Towards the end, they’re finally sitting and seeing eye to eye.”
The phrase applies literally before it acquires any psychological meaning. Rather than announce that the balance between the men has changed, Kurosawa adjusts their height, proximity, and eye line. A rigid hierarchy loosens through simple physical choices, while Kanbei gradually gains what the director describes as “a kind of movement and freedom in positioning.”
That freedom remains relative. Kanbei is still chained, and the change may amount to only a few additional feet in which to sit, stand, or turn. Even so, Murashige must begin adjusting around him. A seemingly static arrangement becomes a succession of quiet reversals.
The filmmaker says these choices allow him to depict the changing balance between them and show how Kanbei gradually manipulates Murashige through conversation. The tension, then, doesn’t rest on dialogue alone. It also depends on who stands, who kneels, who moves first, and who must follow. Kanbei lacks physical authority, but his command of each exchange steadily grows. Murashige can leave the dungeon whenever he pleases; he can’t stop carrying the prisoner’s words upstairs.
Kurosawa’s pleasure at how I read the scenes confirms that this progression isn’t incidental decoration around the performances. It is one of their clearest expressions. Their relationship changes because their bodies do.
I follow his answer by asking what comes first when he plans the scenes: the actors’ positions or the camera. “Trying to find the most advantageous spot to place the camera opposite the actors is very important,” he replies. “That’s how I direct my scenes.”
He considers blocking and camera placement together. However convincing a gesture may be in performance, it has little value onscreen if the camera can’t register it. The actors therefore have to be arranged in relation to the angle from which their distance, posture, and changes in height read most clearly. The camera doesn’t arrive after the performers settle on a scene and simply record the result. Composition and acting develop alongside each other. The slightly narrowed 1.66:1 image makes those vertical relationships especially pronounced, from Murashige looming over Kanbei to the moment both men finally share the same eye line.
That attention to change within fixed boundaries extends beyond the dungeon. The Samurai and the Prisoner passes through four seasons while remaining largely confined to Arioka Castle. Weather, light, clothing, and the condition of the surroundings allow time to move through familiar rooms. The characters remain caught in the same political crisis, but the world around them refuses to stand still. In Kurosawa’s hands, the visible world stays restricted while everything outside it continues to press inward.
When I ask what challenges or surprises him most about making his first samurai film, Kurosawa contrasts the production with his usual experience of shooting present-day Tokyo. In a contemporary setting, he explains, he can trust that the city continues beyond whatever portion the camera selects. The historical world, on the other hand, offers no such reassurance.
“In 16th century Japan, there’s no such thing outside of the frame,” he says. “We were instantly confronted with contemporary Japan. So I felt a lot of hesitation around working within that constraint.”
Beyond the crew’s carefully controlled view aren’t more castles, soldiers, or traces of the warring-states era. Modern Japan waits just outside, ready to break the illusion. The past exists only within the area they can build, dress, and photograph. Rather than let that restriction defeat him, Kurosawa begins testing how much the image can hold.
“I tried to find freedom within that limited space of the frame, and that was a very interesting challenge,” he says. The process makes him consider every corner and edge, encouraging him to believe that he can do anything as long as it remains within the camera’s boundaries.
Since historical Japan can’t simply be assumed to continue beyond the image, Kurosawa explains, changes in time, power, and atmosphere have to register within it. A different quality of light, a body standing where it once knelt, or a prisoner gaining enough room to reposition himself can suggest a much larger world without requiring the camera to leave the castle.
“It was a very exciting new challenge,” the director closes, “to build a world within that frame alongside my staff and actors.”
Perhaps a samurai film isn’t such an unlikely destination for Kurosawa after all. He may have exchanged modern Tokyo for the warring-states era, but The Samurai and the Prisoner still finds him studying people inside places whose boundaries they can’t fully control. Sometimes that place is a besieged castle passing through four seasons. Sometimes it’s a dungeon occupied by two men. In either case, freedom begins with learning how to move inside it.
