On a shoestring summer shoot in 1950, Akira Kurosawa's crew poured black calligraphy ink into their rain machines because plain water vanished against the gray sky. That desperate workaround opened Rashomon, a film that gave the world a psychological and legal term still in use today. This episode explores how a script rejected by Toho and reluctantly accepted by Daiei, shot on just three sets, broke the rules of cinematography and exposed the self-serving lies of the human ego.

The conversation walks through the four contradictory testimonies about a samurai's death, including one delivered by the dead man through a medium, and the woodcutter's confession that the fight was clumsy and cowardly. It then covers cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa pointing the camera into the sun, eight mirrors bouncing light into the forest, a baseball net shaken ...