The Akira Kurosawa movie that inspired ‘Star Wars’
Any movie buff from the last 70 years will be familiar with the work of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, even if they’ve never seen one of his films. How could this be possible? Well, Kurosawa’s work in the 1950s and ’60s was so influential on successive generations of Western filmmakers that his fingerprints can be felt all over their movies. The likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and yes, George Lucas, all worshipped at the altar of Kurosawa.
These New Hollywood heavyweights weren’t the first directors to take inspiration from Kurosawa, though. In fact, some earlier directors effectively remade his films and created undisputed classics in the process. Sergio Leone watched 1961’s Yojimbo, about a wayward samurai who finds himself in a small town caught between two warring crime lords, and reworked it as A Fistful of Dollars. John Sturges watched Seven Samurai, about a group of warriors hired by a village to protect them from bandits, and turned it into The Magnificent Seven.
Interestingly, when it came time for Lucas to make his magnum opus Star Wars in 1977, he wasn’t above leaning heavily on a Kurosawa film, too. This time it was The Hidden Fortress, a 1958 adventure about two peasants who are paid to escort a man and a woman across enemy lines, without realising the man is a military general and the woman royalty. This is extremely reminiscent of R2-D2 and C-3PO escorting Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia to the rebel base in Star Wars, and there are a host of other direct parallels in the movie.
According to Lucas, the main thing that struck him about The Hidden Fortress was the perspective Kurosawa chose for his story. “I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story,” he explained in 2001, “Which was to take the two lowest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view, which in the Star Wars case is the two droids.”
Over the years, Lucas has been open and honest about how significant a debt he owes to The Hidden Fortress. Amusingly, though, while recording a video interview for the Criterion Blu-Ray release of the film, he revealed that it isn’t actually his favourite Kurosawa movie. Instead, that honour goes to the one countless other filmmakers also cite as the top of the pile.
“My favourite of all time is Seven Samurai,” Lucas confirmed, seemingly oblivious to the fact he was supposed to be praising the movie that most inspired his galaxy far, far away. “Then maybe Yojimbo and Ikiru, and Hidden Fortress.” Lucas then threw some faint praise The Hidden Fortress’ way by saying, “It’s not at the very top of my list, but I was impressed and I liked it. It’s really his visual style to me that is so strong and unique, and again, a very powerful element of how he tells his stories.”
Indeed, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that Seven Samurai is Lucas’ true Kurosawa favourite, because he first saw it as an impressionable USC film student desperate to learn everything he could about making movies. “Seven Samurai made an extraordinary impact on me,” he acknowledged in 2004. “I had never seen anything that powerful or cinematographic.”
For Lucas, Kurosawa’s samurai epic, which many critics believe formed the very foundation of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, was a movie that transcended cultural boundaries. He felt the emotion, breathtaking pacing, and kinetic action sequences were all so strong that “it didn’t matter that I did not understand the culture or the traditions.”
From that point on, Kurosawa loomed large over Lucas’ creative output, and he worked elements of Seven Samurai into Star Wars, most notably basing Master Yoda on Shimada, the older samurai who serves as a mentor to his younger brethren.
