Biography
Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa. After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza films.
In the early 1990s, he won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.
Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his 1997 serial killer film Cure. Also that year, Kurosawa experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child's murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.
Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999 with Charisma, which established his penchant for apocalyptic imagery and themes of identity and isolation. In 2001 Kurosawa directed Kairo, a film about ghosts invading the world of the living by way of the internet. Kurosawa has released Bright Future in 2003, starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, the first film of his shot with a 24p High-definition video camera. Kurosawa followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.
In 2005, Kurosawa returned with Loft, his first love story since Seance. Another horror film, Retribution, followed in the next year. With his 2008 film, Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa was considered to step "out of his usual horror genre and into family drama."
He has written novelizations of some of his films, as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki.
Kurosawa is set to direct The Day of the Real, Perfect Plesiosaur, which stars Takeru Sato and Haruka Ayase. In September 2012, it was announced that he will direct 1905, a film starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Shota Matsuda and Atsuko Maeda.
Read more about this topic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)