George Lucas on Akira Kurosawa

Sneak Peeks—

Mar 19, 2014

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Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress has long been cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars. An avid fan of Kurosawa’s, Lucas would eventually work with the Japanese auteur, executive producing the international version of his 1980 Kagemusha. In this excerpt from a 2001 interview, conducted for the Criterion Collection and available on our special edition of The Hidden Fortress, Lucas talks about the inspiration he took from the work of Kurosawa, which he first encountered in film school in the sixties.


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