Your Local Furry Loser

Through a Glass Darkly || Såsom i en spegel (1961, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

The Bling Ring (2013, dir. Sofia Coppola)

Horses are okay, they do you what you tell them - but fish are a different story. We were on location at a spot called Aitsubo, Nagaoka, on the Izu Peninsula, shooting the scene where the samurai are eating rice balls on the boulders above the waterfall and Kikuchiyo, who has nothing to eat, jumps in and grabs a fish. We had to shoot from where he leaps in the river to where he emerges with the fish in a single cut, which meant that I had to carry the fish with me when I entered the water. The problem was, I was half-naked, and the only place I could hide it was in my loincloth. I was supposed to pull the fish from the river, shout, “Caught it!” and laugh madly as I waved it in front of the samurai. The propman warned me to hold the little funa carp we were using gently - if I squeezed them too tight, he said, they would fight their way free. I was too gentle, though, and the first two fish slipped through my fingers. So I grabbed the next one good and hard, and sure enough, it thrashed once or twice and was gone, just like that. Since these were the only three fish we had brought, we had to stop filming. “To hell with this,” I said. I grabbed a fishing pole and started waving it about, feverishly trying to catch one of the ones that got away. But hooking a fish is not that easy. Then in the midst of all the confusion, the propman raced back from Numazu with some more live fish that he’d bought, trout this time, since he hadn’t been able to lay his hands on more funa. Well, quicker is better, we decided. If the funa thought they’d be headed back inside my loincloth, there was no way they’d let themselves be hooked!

The things the love of a mad man can do.

Happy birthday to four time Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan!