Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
wasn’t the stereotypical Japanese employee blindly serving his company. Honda saw the director’s role as a collaborative one, as a team leader rather than an author. “There is a great deal of discussion during the writing of the script,” he said. “But once filming starts, the discussions are ended. Once I became part of Toho, I no longer had reason to complain [to] my employer. One may have objections before joining a company, but once you are inside, you really cannot. That is my opinion. [But] if I have the least objection to a script, I certainly do not make the film.”8
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With hindsight, Honda would express misgivings about his place in the film hierarchy. “The best way to make a film is … how Chaplin did,” he said, after retiring. “You have your own money, you direct, and act and cast it by yourself. That is a real moviemaker. [People] like us, we get money from the company and make whatever film they want. Well, that is not quite a real moviemaker.”9
For Honda’s generation, the studio was the only path to directing. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that Kurosawa and a handful of directors would begin to challenge the status quo and pave the way for independent cinema to come later. And it’s not difficult to understand Honda’s allegiance to the system, for he entered Toho during the 1930s, when by one measure, film output, the Japanese movie business was the biggest in the world, a position it would regain during the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding with the peak of Honda’s career. Japan’s system was modeled after Hollywood, with each studio cultivating its own contracted stars, directors, and writers, and building audience loyalty by focusing on key genres. Just as Warner Bros. became famous for gangster pictures, or MGM for musicals, Toho became known for big war epics during the 1930s and 1940s, and later it would excel in white-collar comedies, lavish musicals, film noir-type thrillers, women’s dramas—and science fiction films, most directed by Honda. Japan’s apprenticeship program was, by some accounts, better than Hollywood’s, with fledgling directors being assigned a mentor, who taught them the techniques of the craft and the politics of the business. Each studio was a tight-knit family of highly talented creative types.
Inuhiko Yomota, perhaps Japan’s most highly respected film historian, believes Honda was “regarded as an artisan filmmaker capable of making various types of movies ranging from highbrow films to ‘teen pics’ within the restrictions of the Japanese studio system.” Honda was among those studio-based directors who did not possess the truly individualistic style of an auteur, yet succeeded because of their ability to use genre conventions as guidelines to be embellished and blended, rather than strict rules. To that end, Honda improvised: Mothra is part fantasy, King Kong vs. Godzilla incorporates salaryman comedy, Atragon contrasts a lost-civilization fantasy with Japan’s lost wartime empire, The H-Man combines monsters with gangsters, All Monsters Attack turns its genre inside out, and so on. Often the theme was a reflection of Honda himself. He would describe making films as the culmination of a lifelong process of observing and studying the world around him. “Only if you have your own [point-of-view] can you see things when you direct or create something,” he would say. “Seeing things through my own eyes, making films, and living my life in my own way … I try to gradually create the new me. That is what it is all about.”10
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Honda’s personality was evident in his approach to filmmaking and in his self-assessment. In a preface to a memoir published posthumously, he wrote, “Ishiro Honda, the individual, is nothing amusing or interesting. He is really just an ordinary, regular old person and a regular movie fan.” In the same text, he said, “I am probably a filmmaker who least looks like one.” And still later, he described himself as “A weed in the flower garden … Never the main flower.” He preferred not to command the spotlight, but to be noticed for his achievements. “People who come to see the main flower will notice [me]. ‘Hmm, look at this flower here.’”
In outlining his directing philosophy, Honda emphasized collaboration and cooperation. “The most hated word is ‘fight,’” he said. Dialogue and understanding were keys to successful filmmaking: “Talk to each other. That’s the way to get an agreement.”
Like Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and John Ford, Honda had his de facto stock company of performers, many of whom called themselves the “Honda family.” There were major Toho actors such as Ryo Ikebe and Akira Takarada, and sirens such as Kumi Mizuno, Mie Hama, and Akiko Wakabayashi, plus a host of character players. They became the faces of Honda’s body of work, appearing in both genre and nongenre films. Without exception, they would describe Honda as quiet and even tempered. He rarely coached actors directly about their performance; his direction consisted of subtle course correction rather than instruction.
“Actors have many ‘drawers,’ with many things inside, and he was good at pulling open the exact drawer he needed each time,” said Koji Kajita, Honda’s longtime assistant director. “He always suggested what to do, but he never demanded, so he could pull the best out of each actor. I’m sure the actors have no memories of being yelled at or anything like that. That wasn’t his way.
“The biggest thing for him was how to maintain the concept that he had for the script,” Kajita continued. “He had this concept in his head, and when the filming would start to stray from it, he didn’t yell. Instead he very calmly spoke up. It was very firm.
“He had his own style, this way of thinking … he never got mad, didn’t rush, but he still expressed his thoughts and made it clear when something was different from what he wanted, and he corrected things quietly. He persevered. That was his style. I was with him for seventeen films, and I never saw him get mad. His facial expression and manner was gentle and calm … He was that kind of director … He made each film as he wanted, like rolling the actors around in the palm of his hand.”
“[Honda] never forced anything on the actors,” said actor Hiroshi Koizumi. “If there was something he didn’t like or that needed to be changed, he had this soft manner to let us know what he really wanted. He didn’t like it when there was a prearranged result … he always wanted to discuss things and then decide how to do something.”
To those who worked for him, he was Honda-san—literally, Mr. Honda; to those who knew him well, he was the more familiar Ino-san (derived from inoshishi, the first Kanji in his name), or Honda-kun. Whether on the film set, out in public, or at home, he treated everyone as equals, just as his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto had taught him.
“Everything I do is based on humanism, or love towards people,” Honda would say. “My way of life is all about love towards people. I look at others that way … what is their idea of human love? When I make films, it is the same thing …
“Making people obey me is not my idea [of directing]. The entire staff understands what we are doing, and they direct all their energy and skill towards the screen. The director should put all those people together … that is how a good film [is made]. I really believe that my Honda group had lots of fun, always. When people have fun, they enjoy their work. When they enjoy their work … they try their best. I think my workplace was always that way. Maybe each person had personal likes and dislikes each time, but once the camera started rolling, everybody tried their best. There may be some other directors who have a really strong personality and show that through their films … That’s why all movies come out differently … That’s the process of creation.”11
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Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster” brought science fiction cinema to the intellectual fore, and was one of the first American writings to critique Honda’s body of work in a serious manner. Sontag wrote, “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale. But the scale, particularly in the widescreen color films (of which the ones by the Japanese director Inoshiro [sic] Honda and the American director George Pal are technically the most convincing and visually the most exciting), does raise the matter to another level.”12
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