Hiroshi Tasogawa

When 20th Century Fox planned its blockbuster portrayal of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, it looked to Akira Kurosawa – a man whose mastery of the cinema led to his nickname "the Emperor" – to direct the Japanese sequences. Yet a matter of three weeks after he began shooting the film in December 1968, Kurosawa was summarily dismissed and expelled from the studio. The tabloids trumpeted scandal: Kurosawa had himself gone mad; his associates had...