KUROSAWA MADE DETAILED CHARACTER NOTES BEFORE THE SCRIPT WAS EVEN WRITTEN. For example, the cold master swordsman Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), was based on Miyamoto Musashi, one of the most famous samurai who ever lived. SOME OF THE CHARACTERS WERE BASED ON REAL HISTORICAL FIGURES.īecause copious research into the lives of samurai was done as part of the writing process, some of the characters were ultimately based on real historical figures. As a result, production was closed down “at least twice.” Instead of arguing, Kurosawa simply left to go fishing, believing that the studio had already invested so much money into the film that they wouldn’t simply scrap it. KUROSAWA PROTESTED PRODUCTION DELAYS BY GOING FISHING.Īs the production process of Seven Samurai grew longer and longer, producers grew worried that Kurosawa was spending too much on the film. As a result, the budget ballooned to nearly $500,000-a massive sum at the time. Because Kurosawa demanded the authenticity of things like a fully constructed outdoor village location, and because of frequent production challenges, the shoot dragged on and eventually took a year to complete. THE BUDGET WAS UNPRECEDENTED IN JAPAN.Īt the time Seven Samurai entered production, most major Japanese films cost around $70,000. From that, Kurosawa and Hashimoto developed the idea of a group of samurai hired by peasants to protect them from bandits, and Seven Samurai was born. Then, producer Sôjirô Motoki found, through historical research, that samurai in the “Warring States” period of Japanese history would often volunteer to stand guard at peasant villages overnight in exchange for food and lodging. Hashimoto went off to write that script, but Kurosawa ultimately scrapped that idea as well, worrying that a film that was just “a series of climaxes” wouldn’t work. Kurosawa ultimately scrapped that story, and instead pitched the idea of a film that would cover a series of five samurai battles, based on the lives of famous Japanese swordsmen. The film would be an intimate portrayal of a warrior who got up in the morning, had his breakfast, went to work at his master’s castle and then, after making a mistake, would be so disgraced that he would return home and commit ritual suicide. When Kurosawa first set out to make a samurai film, he sat down with screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto and outlined the idea of a “day in the life” story about a single samurai. IT BEGAN AS THE STORY OF A SINGLE SAMURAI. Other classics, including Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), would follow. It’s the most ambitious and praised of all of his samurai films, but while other directors might have built up to such a massive project, this was actually his first samurai movie. He’s known now as the genre’s greatest master, but Kurosawa was more than a decade into his career as a director before he made Seven Samurai. IT WAS AKIRA KUROSAWA’S FIRST SAMURAI FILM. To find out why, check out these 16 facts about how Seven Samurai became a masterpiece. It’s a flawless film, but making it wasn’t easy. Seven Samurai, arguably the greatest film ever made in Japan, combined brilliant performances, revolutionary camerawork, and a respect for period accuracy to create something audiences around the world had never seen before, and it’s still remembered as one of the great movie epics. More than half a century ago, Akira Kurosawa pushed his creative powers to new limits with a film that merged grueling shoots, an unprecedented budget, and an all-star cast to change Japanese cinema forever.
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