The Color of Dreams

Our technical director, Lee Kline, is currently in Tokyo beginning work on Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams, and today he sent us a couple of photos, along with this dispatch from the field, which we found too delightful not to share.

This is a photo of Shoji Ueda, who shot Dreams, Kagemusha, and Ran, among many others. He’s seventy-eight years old but seems like he’s fifty. Ueda had a folder of hundreds of Kurosawa’s original drawings from Dreams that he used to shoot the film. These drawings/storyboards were used as references for the colors of the costumes, sets, and photography. It was like a gift to us, because we could basically refer to the drawings to see exactly what Kurosawa intended for a specific blue or red. This was the first time we’ve had someone from a Kurosawa film supervise the color correction of one of his movies, and it was almost like having Kurosawa there with us.