When it comes to filmmakers, James Hepler just can't get enough of Akira Kurosawa.
The 36-year-old Durham native and drummer for Chapel Hill band I Was Totally Destroying It has been down with Kurosawa since his '90s days as a film student at UNC-CH (where he works as a general support technician).
"His approach to filmmaking kind of is one of the things that I try to apply to everything, from music and other stuff," says Hepler. "He was the king of having to rely on ingenuity to get stuff done. These days, you can rely on a lot of aftereffects and things like that, and the post-production process. But he always tried to achieve his goals, you know, right there, like using telephoto lenses and stuff to make the backgrounds flatter, and things like that."
Hepler will most likely be relishing the late Japanese filmmaker's ingenuity when the Akira Kurosawa 100th Anniversary Film Retrospective starts today at the Carolina Theatre in Durham. For the next two weeks, the theater will play 35mm prints of eight films from the influential, Oscar-winning filmmaker's 30-film, 57-year career.
Carolina Theatre senior director Jim Carl is psyched that his theater is just one of the many venues in the U.S. and Canada (and the only one in North Carolina) to be holding its own distinctive, centennial retrospective.
"Each venue that's gonna do this doesn't actually do the same retrospective," Carl says. "There are so many films, and you can actually cherry-pick from what's available."
Carl chose eight films, starting with Kurosawa's classic, samurai-heavy, period pieces: "Seven Samurai" (1954), "Throne of Blood" (1957), "The Hidden Fortress" (1958), and "Yojimbo" (1961). But he also threw in some of the lesser-known, present-day films, like the 1949 detective story "Stray Dog," the 1955 paranoid drama "I Live in Fear" and the 1963 thriller "High and Low."
Says Carl, "I tried to balance it so that you had a mixture of some of his better-known works ... but I wanted to balance the series with some of his lesser-known works. And then, also do a good counterbalance between the samurai films and the dramas."
As for Kurosawa's later work, the Carolina will show a new print of "Ran," Kurosawa's epic take on Shakespeare's "King Lear" from 1985. Carl says he wanted to kick off the series with it. But because it's in such high demand - with the film doing a 25th-anniversary lap in theaters across North America - he could screen it only for three days beginning next Friday.
Carl says, "It has to come offscreen on Sunday night, and it must ship out Monday morning to its next screening."
More revivals
The Kurosawa retrospective won't be the only major revival event popping off this summer at the theater. Next month, the Carolina will start up the Classic Crime Noir Film Series, a weeklong program that will feature four classic, stylish crime thrillers: "The Third Man," "Diabolique," "Elevator to the Gallows" and "Diva."
At the end of June, the theater will begin another round of films for its Summer Repertory Film Series. Following the success the theater had with the series last summer, two throwback films will be shown weekly at the theater. This year's six-week rundown will include films from Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard.
And on the first Friday of every month, the already-popular Retrofantasma series will get an old-school, six-month spinoff with Retrofantasma Classics. It starts in July with a double bill of William Castle features: "13 Ghosts" and "Homicidal."
While this may be a heavy repertory lineup for one theater to hold for an entire season, Carl thinks that he's answering the call of all those older local moviegoers who would rather not spend their money at the multiplexes this summer.
"People our age, who grew up in the '80s and early '90s, or even in the '70s and '60s, just don't really care for today's movies," he says. "They wanna go see things that they remember seeing when they were growing up."
He's already found a definite ticket holder in Hepler, who hopes to get his friends out of the house for Kurosawa. "This should be a group event, as far as I'm concerned," Hepler says. "People should experience these things together."
