The hidden truth: George Lucas

A passion for Kurosawa’s movies is, it seems, one of the qualifications for membership of that most exclusive filmmakers’ club ? the wunderkind generation who redefined Hollywood in the Seventies and remain powerful players to this day. And when the Japanese director’s career hit the doldrums, it was George Lucas and his buddies who came to the rescue.

In 1980 Lucas, fresh from his success with Star Wars, and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) produced Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, a typically grand medieval epic. Nine years later, Lucas joined Steven Spielberg to present him with an honorary Oscar for “accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world”.

Unsurprising, then, that Lucas holds Kurosawa’s best-known film, Seven Samurai, in such high regard. Not that it was a childhood favourite: growing up in an out-of-the-way Californian town, the future master of the movie universe was seriously deprived of the classics.

“I first saw this when I was in film school,” he says, “and I hadn’t been exposed to Japanese cinema before. I come from Modesto and we didn’t have foreign films there ? we had to go up to San Francisco for them, and even then it was very hard in those days to see any foreign films. Now we have DVD, we have film societies, we have all kinds of ways of seeing films that just weren’t possible in those days.”

Nevertheless, it took Lucas’s friend John Milius (writer of Apocalypse Now, director of Big Wednesday) forever to persuade him to see Seven Samurai. “He was completely obsessed with Japanese cinema and he kept saying: ‘You know, if you ever get a chance to see this movie, you’ve got to see it. It’s the best film ever made.’ And on and on. All film students were like that, they were obsessed, and so I didn’t think too much of it.

“But then there was a day when it was being shown in the cinema department and I went and saw it, and it basically changed my life.

“I mean, it’s a brilliant, brilliant film, and every time I see it I can’t believe the magic mixture of a great story and great acting and humour and action and suspense ? wonderful cinema. The art of moving pictures is on every frame of this movie.”

For a film that offers so much, the plot is very straightforward. A village in 16th-century Japan, fearing the return of a gang of bandits who have vowed to steal their barley harvest, hires a bunch of samurai fighters to defend them. In a three-hour-plus slow burn, we witness the recruitment of the seven, their journey to the village, the uneasy relationship that develops between the warriors and the farmers, and finally the battle fought in a blur of mud and torrential rain.

Some fans might be surprised that Lucas places Seven Samurai above Hidden Fortress (1958), another Kurosawa film, the plot of which has often been cited as a key influence on Star Wars. Lucas ? who astonishingly claims that he’d “never really been a science-fiction person” ? was keen to put the record straight.

“The influence of Hidden Fortress comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people. I said that is a great device, and that’s how I ended up with R2-D2 and C-3PO [the two robot characters who appear in all six Star Wars episodes].

“But I think Seven Samurai influenced me a lot more, in terms of understanding how cinema works and how to tell a very exciting story and still have it be very funny and very human.” It is a mark of Kurosawa’s gift for characterisation that all seven of his swordsmen ? and a few of the villagers ? are clearly defined with the deftest of strokes: there is very little backstory to explain why each of them has reached this point in his life, no long, soul-baring speeches.

“I’ve never done a film this complicated in terms of characters,” says Lucas.