Knights production company with three other Japanese directors; Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa. It was their first and only production. It marks a stylistic departure from Kurosawa's previous works. It has no central story and no protagonist. Instead it weaves together the stories of a group of characters living in a slum as a series of anecdotes. It was his first color film, and he had only ever worked with a few of the actors previously; Kamatari Fujiwara, Atsushi Watanabe, Kunie Tanaka, and Yoshitaka Zushi. It marks the first time Kurosawa had used Takao Saito as principal cinematographer, and Saito became his "cinematographer of choice" for the rest of his career. Nogami said that Kurosawa told the crew that this time he wanted to make a film that is "sunny, light, and endearing." She speculated that Dodes'ka-den was his rebuttal to what went wrong on Tora! Tora! Tora!. The script supervisor of the film opined that the director was still recuperating from the shock of what happened on that Hollywood film, and was not operating at full strength. Nogami said that she gets choked up whenever she watches the scene where Rokuchan is called "trolley crazy" by children, because she imagines Kurosawa as the boy, with people yelling "Movie-crazy" at him. Kurosawa said that he wanted to show younger filmmakers that it did not need to cost a lot of money to make a movie. David A. Conrad wrote that an influence of the surging Japanese New Wave can be felt in this impulse and in the decision to focus on outcasts in contemporary society. Filming In contrast to Red Beard, which was in production for two years, filming for Dodes'ka-den began on April 23, 1970, and was finished in only 27 days, two months ahead of schedule. According to Stephen Prince, it was shot for standard-ratio 35 mm movie film rather than the anamorphic widescreen that Kurosawa had used since The Hidden Fortress (1958). Prince writes that this was because the director did not like how anamorphic lenses handled color information. As a result, it marks a return to the 1.33:1 aspect ratio he used regularly in the 1940s and early 1950s. Prince also states that Dodes'ka-den marks the first time the director used zoom lenses; a sign of the "speed and economy" with which he made the film. Nogami stated that she had never seen Kurosawa