In 1958, Akira Kurosawa released The Hidden Fortress, a film about a grizzled general escorting a princess through enemy territory, accompanied by two bickering peasants who provide comic relief. Nineteen years later, George Lucas released Star Wars, a film about a grizzled general escorting a princess through enemy territory, accompanied by two bickering droids who provide comic relief. Lucas has openly acknowledged the debt. Kurosawa received a percentage of the profits. That is the Kurosawa legacy in miniature. He made films so structurally perfect that other filmmakers have been borrowing from them for seventy years, and the borrowed versions still make billions.

He Failed the Entrance Exam for Art School and Went to the Cinema Instead

Kurosawa was born in 1910 in the Omori district of Tokyo. He wanted to be a painter. He was good at it. But when he failed the entrance exam for art school, his older brother Heigo, who worked as a benshi, a narrator for silent films, introduced him to the world of cinema. Heigo's suicide in 1933 devastated Kurosawa and gave him a permanent preoccupation with mortality, suffering, and the question of what makes a life worth living. Film scholars at the Tokyo University of the Arts have documented that Kurosawa's visual composition in his films draws directly from his painting training. He storyboarded every shot as a complete painting before filming it. His use of weather, landscape, and physical space within the frame is architectural. When it rains in a Kurosawa film, the rain is not atmosphere. It is a character. He entered the film industry as an assistant director in 1936 and directed his first feature in 1943. Within a decade, he had produced Rashomon, the film that introduced Japanese cinema to Western audiences and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Western critics were stunned. They had not realized that anyone outside Hollywood was making films this sophisticated.

Seven Samurai Changed How Action Movies Work Forever

In 1954, Kurosawa released Seven Samurai, a three-and-a-half-hour epic about a group of ronin hired by a farming village to defend it against bandits. The film cost more than any Japanese film had ever cost. It took over a year to shoot. Kurosawa's perfectionism drove the production to the edge of financial collapse. The result redefined cinematic action. Research published in the Journal of Film and Video has analyzed Seven Samurai's influence and found direct lineage in films across every genre and national cinema: The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, Ocean's Eleven, The Avengers. The structure, assembling a team of specialists for a mission, then watching the dynamics between them under pressure, is now so ubiquitous that audiences do not recognize it as an invention. Kurosawa invented it. The battle scenes used multiple cameras filming simultaneously, a technique that was radical in 1954 and is now standard practice. The rain during the final battle was mixed with ink so it would show up on film. The mud was real. The exhaustion on the actors' faces was real. Kurosawa shot the film in conditions that modern insurance companies would never permit.

He Tried to Kill Himself and Then Made Dersu Uzala

By the 1970s, Kurosawa was struggling. The Japanese film industry had changed. Studios were producing cheaper, faster entertainment. Kurosawa's insistence on artistic control and massive budgets made him increasingly difficult to finance. In 1971, after a film was taken from him by the studio and re-edited, he attempted suicide. He survived. He spent the next several years in near-obscurity. Then the Soviet Union invited him to make a film. Dersu Uzala, the story of a friendship between a Russian explorer and a Siberian hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1975. It is one of the gentlest films ever made by a man known for epic violence. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped finance his next film, Kagemusha, in 1980. Steven Spielberg called him the Shakespeare of cinema. He made eight more films before his death in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight, including Ran, his adaptation of King Lear set in feudal Japan, which many critics consider his masterpiece. He made thirty films in fifty-seven years. Every one of them looks like it was painted by someone who wanted to be an artist and ended up becoming something larger instead.