Akira Kurosawa's assistant for almost four decades, Teruyo Nogami discusses the master filmmaker's genius, and his weaknesses

No one, perhaps not even Akira Kurosawa's immediate family, knew him better. Teruyo Nogami worked with the legendary director for nearly four decades, beginning with "Rashomon" (1950), the film that launched him -- and the Japanese film industry -- internationally when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

After starting as a script supervisor, Nogami became Kurosawa's production assistant and production manager, but whatever her title on the credits, she was usually by Kurosawa's side from the beginning of the shoot to the end. She was on the set of "Ikiru" (1952), "The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai)" (1954) and "Yojimbo" (1961) -- classics that made Kurosawa one of the world's most acclaimed filmmakers -- and influenced everyone from Sergio Leone, who remade "Yojimbo" as "A Fistful of Dollars," to Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, who not only acknowledged their artistic debt to Kurosawa, but supported his work as producers, promoters and, in Scorsese's case, as an actor. (He played Vincent Van Gogh in the 1990 film "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams [Yume].") Nogami was also with him at a low point of his career in the early and mid-1970s, when his professional problems and personal demons, including suicidal depression, threatened to overwhelm him.