Rain first. On the Rashomon set the water came out of the pipes too clear to photograph, so the story goes they mixed ink into it, and then the actors stood in it and worked. Twenty-eight years ago today, on 6 September 1998, Akira Kurosawa died in Tokyo at eighty-eight, and the thing I always come back to is his weather. Most films have weather the way a room has wallpaper. His had weather with an agent and a dressing room: rain that hammers the gate, mud in the last battle of Seven Samurai, the clouds over Ran doing half the acting.

Thirty features across six decades, and he was in all of it — writing, producing, cutting. Which means somebody was up on a gantry with a hose for hours to make thirty seconds read on screen, and somebody else was drying costumes overnight so it could all be soaked again at seven.

I have run those reels to a house that went very still. You can hear a downpour land on an audience. They lean in slightly, as if they might get wet, and they stay leaning until the curtains close.