4 ideas
After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, Kurosawa's older brother Heigo walked the 13-year-old through burned Tokyo and made him look at piles of corpses. When Akira tried to turn away, Heigo told him that if you shut your eyes to frightening things you end up frightened by them, but if you look at everything straight on there is nothing to fear. Kurosawa presents this as the origin of his habit of confronting horror directly.
Kurosawa, following his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto, holds that anyone who wants to direct must first write scripts. The discipline is arithmetic rather than inspiration: writing even one page a day produces a full script within a year. Endurance in doing the boring work of writing is what separates working directors from people who only talk about films.
When editing, the effort, cost, or hardship behind a shot is irrelevant. Only what actually works on screen counts. Kurosawa learned this when Yamamoto cut scenes he had fought to shoot, and he concluded that a director must edit as if a stranger had shot the material. Emotional attachment to footage is the main obstacle to a good cut.
Kurosawa explains Rashomon as a study of human beings who cannot talk about themselves honestly without embellishing. Each witness, even the dead samurai speaking through a medium, tells a version that protects his or her self-image. Seen this way, conflicting testimony is not mainly a puzzle about objective truth. It is evidence that ego rewrites memory, and people need these flattering lies in order to live.