Ozu once said of Noda: "When a director works with a scriptwriter they must have some characteristics and habits in common; otherwise, they won't get along. My daily life—what time I get up, how much sake I drink and so on—is in almost complete agreement with that of . When I work with Noda, we collaborate even on short bits of dialogue. Although we never discuss the details of the sets or costumes, his mental image of these things is always in accord with mine; our ideas never criss cross or go awry. We even agree on whether a dialogue should end with "wa" or "yo"." From "Late Spring" on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu’s characters would be comfortably middle class and thus, unlike the characters in, for example, "Record of a Tenement Gentleman" or "A Hen in the Wind", beyond immediate physical want and necessity.