Did the Hagakure serve as a similar kind of catalyst for Ghost Dog?
Very similar, because I was already in the process of writing the script when I discovered it. I had already read a lot about bushido and Samurai culture – not in preparation for the film, but in the past, out of a sort of dilettantish interest. And the Hagakure was the perfect thing to read. – it gave me a map for the character and also a structural map for the film, in a way. The book is composed of little aphorisms, each separated by a monsho, as a breathing space. And somehow it formally opened things up. Would you consider either film to be an ‘adaptation’ of sorts, since both relate back to specific texts? It was more that I was open to their influence – they both walked in the writing and affected me deeply, but without me having calculated or even expected that. So the texts got woven into the fabric of the film, rather than the stories of the film being adapted from them. Ghost Dog was a big breakthrough for me. Though I refer to Chaucer or to Walt Whitman or things in passing
