Kurosawa greatly admired Jean Renoir, thought him one of the greatest masters of cinema. The two met once in the 1970s, late in Renoir’s life when Kurosawa was in Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award and was invited to have dinner with the Renoirs. Kurosawa has written that his own decision to write an autobiography was prompted by reading Renoir’s My Life and My Films “and by the terrific impression Renoir left on me when I met him—the feeling that I would like to grow old in the same way he did.”