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For many years, my favorite director has been the Japanese giant Akira Kurosawa.

Since my Japanese isn't very good, I had to have an interpreter to communicate with most of the crew.

I think Kurosawa was one of the first storytelling geniuses who began to change the narrative structure of films.

My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan.

I was assistant in Edmonton with Wayne as captain, and Kevin Lowe was the other assistant.

Kurosawa is my hero, and I've taught courses on his films, and I love what he does, and 'Rashomon' is, I think, his second greatest film after 'Ikiru.'

I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

Kurosawa is the sensei, the Shakespeare, of filmmaking.

I had lived in Fukuoka during the mid 1990s, and I was a volunteer with the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival.