Francis Ford Coppola’s favourite Akira Kurosawa movies
Forever entwined into the fabric of 20th-century cinema, the names Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa ought to ring true in the minds and hearts of anyone daring enough to consider themselves cinephiles. The respective Hollywood and Japanese cinema icons have their names attached to countless masterpiece movies, and they will continue to be household names in the realm of film.
With such iconic movies as The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now to his name, Coppola is a true visionary of the cinematic medium. The five-time Academy Award winner’s contributions to the movie industry have been well recognised, and his stories have helped craft American cinema’s very shape and history.
What Coppola has done for American cinema, Kurosawa did for Japan, having directed countless epic movies, including Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Throne of Blood. Like Coppola, Kurosawa was a true master of the narrative arts, and he managed to cross the bridge to find an adoring audience in both the Western and Eastern worlds.
Coppola once revealed himself to be a tremendous fan of Kurosawa, joining a long list of directors who had been influenced by his brilliant works. He noted: “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn’t just make a masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made eight masterpieces.”
When Coppola named his ten favourite movies of all time, he didn’t quite say that all of Kurosawa’s eight efforts were up there as the above quotation might suggest, but he did give his Japanese counterpart the honour of being one of only two directors with more than one feature on the list – alongside Martin Scorsese and his films The King of Comedy and Raging Bull.
When it comes to Kurosawa, there are two films that seem to stand out for Coppola. The first is his 1960 film noir movie The Bad Sleep Well, which explores the difficulties of morality and revenge. Loosely based on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the film focuses on a young executive in post-war corporate Japan as he fights for justice against the businessmen who killed his father.
A year later, Kurosawa released Coppola’s other favourite movie of the Japanese film icon – Yojimbo. Starring Kurosawa’s frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the classic samurai film sees the actor play a wandering ronin who arrives in a small town where two crime lords are battling one another for its rule, and both try to hire the masterless samurai. Yojimbo was unofficially made into A Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone.
Check out the trailers for Francis Ford Coppola’s favourite Akira Kurosawa movies below.
