Original subtitles

One of the most breathtaking sites in all of cinema:

the mass ranks of warriors charging up the flanks of Mount Fuji.

Their brightly coloured banners flattering in the wind,

armies subdivided into primary colours:

red, blue and yellow.

Their 16th century Japanese armour magnificent in every detail

as they storm a once mighty castle.

So, let's... let's talk about Ran and Akira Kurosawa.

Well, what an amazing film.

I saw it again the other day and I couldn't believe what I saw.

I mean... when I met him at Cannes,

I had an interview with him. He didn't do too many interviews.

But I asked him about Ran,

and he said, "Well, I'm a sentimentalist." And I said, "What?"

When you look at Ran, it's hardly sentimental,

but he said, "Well, to me...

it's about the Gods, or God,

being very upset with the human race

because the human race is intent on destroying itself,

and when you look at Ran, everybody is destroyed."

A decade in the making and finally released in 1985

when Kurosawa was an old man, Ran is a staggering achievement,

at once a bleak report on a world forsaken by God,

and an astonishing testament

to what one extraordinary artist could do with the medium.

(SPEAKING JAPANESE)

INTERPRETER: I'm very pleased to think that...

I'm understood in foreign countries.

And... it's a nice thing to know that one country after another

reaches some ability of understanding in what I'm trying to say.

And I think film has a very important role

in fostering this sort of understanding.

One of the greatest directors cinema has ever known,

Akira Kurosawa applied himself to dramas, comedies, and thrillers,

but his reputation was founded on the samurai epics

he made in the '50s and '60s.

Legendary titles like Rashomon, Yojiimbo,

Hidden Fortress, and Seven Samurai.

Nicknamed the Emperor for his physical stature,

his total command of the medium and his uncompromising nature,

Akira had followed his beloved older brother, Heigo, into filmmaking.

Heigo, a master narrator of silent film,

encouraged his younger sibling to read foreign literature

and watch foreign films and plays.

And it was Heigo who had taken his brother to see the aftermath

of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923,

forbidding him from turning away from the scattered corpses,

a brutal image that would echo through his work,

and never more so than in Ran.

Akira Kurosawa is a phenomenally interesting Japanese director

because in a way he encapsulates a particular spirit and time in Japan

with his work, but as an artist, he moves his work beyond that.

He was born the son of, basically,

a man who had a long line of samurai,

part of a samurai clan, but who was also quite modern in his thinking,

and he wanted his children to watch Western films

and engage in Western culture.

Akira Kurosawa made films in many genres.

He made comedies, he made gangster thrillers,

he made social realist films,

but the ones, of course, that we really remember him for

are his samurai movies.

The samurai movies - Throne of Blood, Rashomon,

Sanjuro, Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress,

and, of course, Seven Samurai - are canon.

They are sort of a canon of samurai movies.

And what they do is they establish a genre

and they establish the kind of political

and also social and...

the characters of the samurai for all time.

Unique amongst Japanese filmmakers,

Kurosawa found inspiration in foreign literature and films.

He was keenly influenced by the great Westerns of John Ford

and the work of DW Griffith and Cecil B De Mille.

He loved the morally complex novels of Dostoyevsky

and the plays of Brecht, and he thrilled to the great scope

and dimension offered by Shakespeare.

He had transformed Macbeth

into the elemental samurai epic Throne of Blood

and reconfigured Hamlet as The Bad Sleep Well.

At the peak of his career, Kurosawa's 15 glorious years,

from 1950 to 1965, he made 12 films.

From 1970 for the next 20 years, he only made four,

and those films were very difficult for him to make.

In 1975, he was backed by the Soviet Union for Dersu Uzala,

a story of a Mongolian woodsman helping a Russian Explorer.

Then he was helped by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas,

who had persuaded 20th Century Fox to back him for Kagemusha.

In 1975, also, he began working on...

what he thought was his great story.

It was the story Ran, the film, which was going to end his...

investigation of the samurai tradition.

Often with his work alongside Toshiro Mifune,

his amazing star actor who had this great burly physicality to him,

they were lauded around the world. But times did move on,

and the nickname for Kurosawa was the Emperor.

He was sort of revered in some corners,

but his films were increasingly being seen

by the late 1960s, early 1970s as a bit old fashioned.

Up to that point, up until 1970,

he'd only made films in black and white,

and it was becoming increasingly difficult for him

to secure funding to make his films,

which were often slightly more expensive

than the Japanese film industry, and the Japanese studios wanted to pay for.

By his mid-seventies, Kurosawa was forgotten man in Japan.

His great partnership with star Toshiro Mifune was long since over.

His films had passed out of fashion, much like the protagonist of Ran,

Kurosawa had begun to wonder what his life amounted to.

Ran is Akira Kurosawa's last great samurai masterpiece.

Not only is it an incredible epic, amazingly visual movie,

but is it also a summation of all of his work beforehand,

as well as his own life.

And at the same time, it reflects back on his earlier samurai films

because it moves into a completely different kind of ethos.

This is a film about an old man.

This is not a film about a young samurai.

This is a man about... who's been a warrior.

He's been a conqueror. He is a warlord,

and he's surrounded by huge numbers of samurai and armies,

and he's now reflecting back on his achievements

and finding them, in a way,

giving him a sort of sense of guilt.

So this is Kurosawa not only looking at his own work,

but he's also looking, to a certain extent,

at his own life and what he's achieved.

So I gather that Kurosawa was having a hard time

getting financing for his later films.

Oh, he had a very hard time. It really made him miserable.

He also felt the public was not on his side anymore.

The young people who went to the cinema or watched television a lot,

they were out of tune with these big medieval epics,

which didn't relate to them.

They wanted something different.

As for the film producers,

they didn't really want to spend vast sums of money

on an old man who's making great big epics,

which they were by no means certain that the public would like.

So it was very difficult for him.

He'd just done Dodes'ka-den,

which was one of his... working class films

about the working class people,

the poverty-stricken people in Japan.

The trouble was there weren't very many

and again, the public didn't really like it.

So, he then embarked on Ran, which was...

..well, I think it's a bit of himself as well.Yes.

OK, it's Lear, of course it's Lear,

but it's also Kurosawa,

who had been rejected after a lifetime of work

and worldwide praise...

..rejected by his own public. That cut him very deeply.

The title Ran translates to Chaos or Turmoil or Revolt.

The story famously follows the contours of Shakespeare's King Lear,

as the ageing warlord, Hidetora,

chooses to divide his kingdom amongst his three sons,

a decision that will reap devastating consequences

as his land is engulfed by war.

It's extraordinary.

It's a portrait of the world ablaze, isn't it?Yes.

A portrait of the world that has destroyed itself...

..through this old man's hopes and fears.

Extraordinary film. Every time I see it...

..I think, goodness, how can anybody go and watch this?

Because, you know, people want cheerful films, adventures.

Are they going to like Ran? They won't even understand it probably.

But yes, it has a primal power... It has a primal power.

..you don't need the words, you know? Yes, it is.

That's why I love the idea that he's adapting, on a loose level,

he's adapting King Lear without a single line of Shakespeare.

Yet it's still the play in a lot of ways.Yes.

Well, he did a very good Macbeth, too,

which was a totally different Shakespeare.Throne of Blood, yes.

The setting is a Sengoku period of the 15th and 16th centuries,

when Japan was riven by civil war.

The feudal system had collapsed

and samurai warlords fought for control of Japan.

Ran is centred on one such warlord, Hidetora,

who has committed his share of atrocities.

Haunted by a dream he chooses to abdicate and divide

his kingdom between his three sons, Taro, Jiro, and Saburo.

So, Kurosawa was interested in telling a story

about the rival feudal warlords

of the 15th and 16th century,

in the Sengoku period in Japan.

It was a sort of dissent into chaos,

a word which roughly could be translated as Ran,

but he was interested because he first read

a story of a real feudal warlord,

who was famous for having three very good and loyal sons

that he could pass and split up his kingdom between.

But when he read the story, he thought...

what if the sons weren't so good?

They weren't in the fashion of the filial piety

of traditional Japanese culture,

but if they were extremely treacherous instead?

And so that was actually the genesis for Ran,

rather than what people often say, later on,

was simply just an adaptation,

for example, of Shakespeare's King Lear.

But King Lear did come onto the scene slightly later on,

as the film was being developed before it went into production.

Kurosawa thought about King Lear and about how well it applied

in terms of the themes of a stubborn ageing warlord

who was foolishly banishing

those closest to him if they offended his pride

and how, eventually, this treachery would lead

to nearly everyone's doom.

You can see the influences of many Western artists

in Kurosawa's films,

particularly Ran: John Ford, DW Griffith, Cecil B De Mille.

He loved that big scale material

and the locations in which men were placed almost in miniature.

I think that that gave rise to the whole idea of having a landscape,

which was not just an idea, but something that people moved through.

In spite of the fact of what they could actually achieve.

Throne of Blood is clearly a Japanese version of Macbeth,

an absolutely wonderful, sort of, translation of Shakespeare

into Japanese samurai culture. Marvelous.

The Bad Sleep Well is something even more extreme;

that is the sort of Yakuza version of Hamlet.

Both of them are very successful in their own way, although quite different.

Kurosawa was inspired by two separate stories to create Ran.

The first was the story of a Japanese nobleman

who was explaining to his sons why the three sons needed to unite,

and he explained it with this arrow. He broke a single arrow

and then showed them that three arrows would be impossible to break.

That was the initial inciting incident for Kurosawa.

His other influence was King Leer.

The story of a king at the end of his life with three daughters

and two of those daughters are turning against him,

disloyal, treacherous, and one loves him,

but he can't see that and he pushes her away.

So, Kurosawa blended these stories together:

what would've happened if the nobleman's sons had behaved

like the daughters of King Lear?

That two sons fought against their father

and one son who was expelled from the kingdom?

And that's the basis of the story of Ran.

Now, we can also see very powerful influences

from King Lear in certain characters.

This is a story of a traditional samurai lord,

but there are elements to this which weren't accurate for the time.

So for instance, no Japanese lord would have a jester

or a fool, for them that was just not part of the Japanese tradition.

The nearest thing would've been a page, but they wouldn't have had

the role of clown or humorous character.

So he was very much leaning towards

Lear with sons by the time he started shooting

and by the time he started writing the characters.

The role of the fool from Lear is played by a singer-songwriter,

known only as Peter, an angelic figure

who refuses to leave his master's side.

The character's androgynous qualities

are seen as the sole antidote to the violence.

And Kurosawa spoke about it afterwards.

It was actually one of the first roles he cast, simply called Peter.

He's quite androgynous

and is supposed to be essentially there to entertain

the sort of 'better born'.

But he's able to say things that the others wouldn't get away with,

because he's not bound by the same social codes

and maybe no one takes him as seriously.

If you notice, he doesn't wear a sword,

so he's not a part of the samurai class,

which means there's some leeway.

And Kurosawa puts words in his mouth that I think stand very much

in the latter part of the film for how Kurosawa feels about suffering

and how man is drawn to suffering

more than he is to joy or to peace.

(HORSE NEIGHS)

(HORSE NEIGHS, INDISTINCT COMMOTION)

(LOUDER COMMOTION, HORSE NEIGHS)

(HORSE NEIGHS)

Ran takes a very bleak view of the world, in particular Japan's history.

This is a film as much about the catastrophe of war

as it is about Hidetora's, fragmenting psyche.

Kurosawa's fame was founded on his use of black and white,

but his late films, Kagemusha, and above all, Ran,

made full fulsome use of colour.

What is most startling is the contrast

between the ashen mountain sides or stone walls

and the brightly regaled armies.

In a way, it's perfect for what he wanted to do.

Depressing as it is, you know?

I mean, the amount of people who die in the film is phenomenal,

the traitorous nature of it

and there's this poor old man who's lived.

This Lear has been violent all his life, and been triumphant.

Now he's going to pass it onto his sons, and what happens?

They quarrel with each other. They quarrel with him.

The whole thing goes up in smoke. What is he left with?

A life which is worthless. Extraordinary.

He has spent over 50 years at war.

He says, "You know, I started my conquest at the age of 17.

I'm now 53 and I'm getting tired."

In order to retire, he decides to pass on responsibility

of his territory to his three sons.

His youngest son decides that that's not such a good idea,

partly because he doesn't trust his two elder brothers

and so he gets disenfranchised, he gets actually sent away.

Hidetora will then take his retinue of 300 samurai warriors

and basically stay at each of his son's castles in turn.

This is his grand plan.

Of course, it goes horribly wrong because the two sons that are left.

in order to be able to control this, really don't want him.

They want to sort of get rid of him and then control their own destinies.

They don't want him hanging around as well.

Within the fury, our eyes are drawn to a figure in a white robe

staggering down the castle steps.

An old man driven to madness

by this vision of destruction he has wrought.

Somehow, the arrows and flames never touch him.

Ran was three years in production.

The making of the costumes and the building of the sets

was enormously laborious tasks,

and then once everything was in place, it took a year to shoot.

It was a vast epic in scale

for a number of reasons. He was using real castles.

He built an entire castle from nothing

on the slopes of Mount Fuji,

something which costs at the time $1.6 million.

So in today's money, that would be an enormous sum.

It was incredibly ambitious.

I always remember the scene of the burning castle

when the old man staggers out. Of course, they had to do it in one take

because the castle was burning.

What a lot of pressure on the actor that must have been!

Of course, he's marvellous in it. Yes.

The actors were really...

had to be completely disciplined.

Everything had to be right.

The light, the weather, the costumes,

everything had to be right.

To have that number of horses in the film,

they cost more than human beings,

especially when you have to ship them over from America,

and even the little bowls from which they eat

are absolutely perfect for the period,

and made specially at great cost.

The costumes cost an enormous amount.

So the film was terribly expensive to make,

but what a film.

So originally Toshiro Mifune was set to star

in Ran as Hidetora, the warlord.

But things changed between him and Kurosawa over the years,

and instead Kurosawa turned to another actor

who he had worked with in the past.

That actor was Tatsuya Nakadai,

who was 51 at the time of Ran, though made up to look much older,

and he was already a big star, often associated

to samurai films of that time.

And he had been either a star or a co-star

in several other Kurosawa films.

So Nakadai had developed a good working relationship with Kurosawa

in Kagemusha where he plays this kind of dual role of a thief

pretending to be a feudal leader.

And he was really right for this part

in a way that maybe Mifune might not have been

because of his burly physicality in his more action-orientated roles

that he had played in the past for Kurosawa.

But this was a different style and a different type of actor.

Nakadai was stage trained.

He had a slightly more intellectual energy,

and he also had a comedic side to him,

even if it wasn't overtly comedic.

It suited the theatricality of what Kurosawa was doing with Ran

because it wasn't strict realism that he was dealing in.

It was something more heightened.

Kurosawa turned to traditions in Japanese performance,

like Noh theatre for a lot of the work in Ran.

He had costume makers from Noh theatre work

with the costume designs to create the costumes.

They have a very traditional feel to them.

He also had certain things that he took from the performance style,

the makeup. So a lot of the makeup resembles characters

from Noh and Kabuki theatre, and also certain ways

of delivering gestures is from that performance style.

So, if you like, he's paying tribute to the long tradition

of Japanese performance art, as someone who

the Japanese had sometimes derided for being too Western.

This is him showing you what happens if you truly fuse

the performance and the filmmaking styles of both cultures.

This is very much... possibly the most beautiful

fusion of the two in his career.

So Nakadai was made up to look much older than he was at 51.

It's easy to forget, he was a distinguished looking gentleman under there,

but you have these thick eyebrows and this long grey hair,

and of course this Kabuki-like white face makeup,

which only becomes more self-evident

and becomes sort of exaggerated as the film goes on,

until by the final scenes, he's almost completely,

sort of, whiteface tinged with grey.

Sort of looks like he's stained by smoke and suffering

and he looks like a ghost.

So it has this incredible, almost grotesque effect as it goes on.

Although we feel for him deeply, there is something...

really striking about the use of makeup in this film.

Another element in the film, which is Lady Kaede.

Lady Kaede is a crucial figure in this story.

She has been called The Lady Macbeth of this particular film, Ran,

because she is the one who engages in a plot.

What we don't know until sometime in the course of the story,

is that this is a very, very intricate plot of revenge,

not only to get rid of Hidetora, but also his entire family.

Lady Kaede is this sort of Lady Macbeth-esque character,

this viper-ish, manipulative seductress,

the wife of the oldest son,

and she basically manipulates and convinces her husband to usurp

his father's kingdom and then eventually also seduces

her brother-in-law in order to do her bidding.

And although she is, sort of...

an incarnation of a whirlwind of evil,

in a sense, she also has her reasons.

Her machinations are the things that drive the story along.

We initially see her as a very ambitious figure.

We think she's got her husband's best interests at heart.

She wants him to become more powerful.

Over the film, we gradually understand that in fact,

the castle that they're living in, the First Castle, there are three castles,

imaginatively known as First Castle, Second Castle, and Third Castle.

The First Castle, the biggest and the most powerful,

was hers and her families, and when it was taken by the overlord,

her father and brother were killed, and her mother committed suicide and she was forced into marriage.

So she does have motivations for what she's doing,

but she is desperate to bring down this family

and regain control of her castle, to regain her family's First Castle.

So she's really manipulating all of the brothers in a way.

The character is played by an actress

who I don't think had worked with Kurosawa before.

Mieko Harada, and she's really a force of nature in this film.

Really quite frightening, and she also has

this unusual cosmetic, sort of, kabuki-like look to her,

which makes her sort of seem like this beautiful,

terrifying doll in some scenes capable of great cruelty.

Words fail me about Kurosawa,

because he doesn't fit into any bracket, does he, really?

No. Not with all his films.

He's bit beyond bracketing, isn't he?He is.

But I do like to think of him as the man who invented action cinema,

whether he knew he was doing it or not, because the West...

I think once we'd had the samurai films and right through to Ran,

I think the Western filmmakers were saying, well, that's how you do it.

That's how you move things in in front of a camera.Yes.

And also must remember that he trained as a painter for some time.

He wanted to be a painter.

And it's very painterly, Ran, isn't it?

You could stop it at any point and you'd have an...

amazing painting, wouldn't you? One after the other.

Yes. Phenomenal. He had phenomenal control

of nearly every element of the filmmaking process, within one film.

Absolutely.

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

Ran only slowly gained its status as a classic.

It did modestly well in Japan and much better in the West.

Critics were united in their fulsome praise.

On this scale, there was no one to match Kurosawa's barbaric lyricism.

There were three more films to come, quieter, elegiac pieces

such as Dreams and Rhapsody In August.

But Ran stands as the capstone

on an astonishing unrepeatable tradition of the Kurosawa Epic.

But the fact that he was so disappointed

with the Japanese audiences,

and the fact that he was, oh, 75 or more when he made the film,

it's astonishing that he could make such a huge,

brilliantly coloured, amazing looking film

at that age, knowing full well, that it probably wouldn't be received

very well by the young people in Japan.

He's a Japanese director. He wanted to appeal to his people.

He knew the traditions of his people.

He knew about the samurai. He really did.

He delved into the history

and yet... young people didn't...

give a damn about him at one point,

but now these films are being revived in Japan.

They always get full houses, apparently.

Ran took over a year to shoot as the director marshalled scenes

with over 1400 extras and 200 horses.

The backdrop had to match the apocalyptic nature of the drama,

as well as the grassy planes of the southern island Kyushu.

He filmed on the slopes of Mount Aso,

Japan's largest active volcano,

utilising the stunning 15th century castles

that still stood sentinel on the planes.

Kurosawa marshalled the enormous army of extras that he'd hired,

including local villagers who had no acting training,

by insisting that everyone remain in role,

essentially, behave like soldiers all of the time.

So everyone was dressed in armour and thought of themselves as soldiers throughout the shoot,

during the battle sequences, and during the period they were on set.

And as a result, everything was disciplined as if it was an actual army.

He turned to Ishiro Honda,

a colleague from his earlier days who'd been a soldier for eight years

to marshal the armies in the second battle sequence.

There are two big battle sequences in this film.

The first is in Third Castle,

where the end of our warlord's ambitions become apparent to him.

His retinue is entirely lost, and he is reduced

to just one man alone in the wilderness.

Then at the end, his younger son comes to his aid,

comes to try to find him and bring him home.

Of the two older brothers, one is dead,

so the other is in charge of their combined military forces.

There are two armies facing off against each other,

the youngest and the older brother,

and then the youngest brother's father-in-law turns up

with his own army on one hill and a neighbouring warlord

turns up with his army on another hill. So there are four armies

on this battlefield that have to be arranged and marshalled,

and Honda has to oversee this with his military training

because this is beyond the intimate battle of the Third Castle.

This is something where you are actually fielding for full armies.

There are horses, there are guns,

there are soldiers who have to be precisely maneuvered around.

And so that's where he turned for help, a real soldier, if you like.

I was fortunate enough to talk to Akira Kurosawa

after seeing Ran at a film festival,

and... he showed me

several, actually several pieces of the artwork

that he'd done for it about, maybe, 20 actually, he'd brought with him.

And I have to say, they were breathtakingly beautiful.

I mean, very, very detailed.

This was a man who not had been a painter,

but he actually had a complete visual idea

of how the film would look.

I looked at a few of them

and I realised that what I was looking at was the film.

I was looking at a frame of the film, so they were almost identical

to my memory of the film, which I'd only just seen.

So to actually go from that to the film meant that...

Kurosawa was wholly in command

of his own mental image of what he wanted to see on the screen.

With Ran, you have...

a director who has taken all the combined decades of experience

of all the great films that he had made prior

into a late career masterpiece,

and I think there's this great telling thing about Kurosawa,

who I think could be quite a self-lacerating character.

When he received, in 1990, the Academy Award

for Lifetime Achievement as a director,

he said that he was still learning about cinema and he didn't feel he deserved it,

he was still learning everything about cinema,

and he was in his 80s at that point,

which I think is such a generous and modest response

for a filmmaker of his calibre.

But with Ran, there was something really great,

which is that people used to ask him what his favourite

or his best film was in his career

and he always used to say his stock answer was 'my next film.'

But after Ran in 1985,

people would ask and he would say, it's Ran.

It is a hugely influential film, and was from the moment it was released.

From the day that it was out, really, people started to steal from it.

So there was the film Excalibur, which was made very shortly afterwards,

which copies the battle sequences very, very closely.

The films go on all the way through

to Game of Thrones recently,

copies the battle sequences from Ran. It's sampled again

and again and again from the moment it's released.

So, he's the poet who's honoured in other lands, in a sense,

and it's seen as such a masterpiece outside Japan,

and in Japan now it is recognised, but at the time,

it perhaps... he wasn't given the welcome home he was expecting.

It's a film that works on so many levels.

It's not just about a man who is... beyond redemption.

The thing about Hidetora is that

the guilt that he is now feeling...

gives him a sense that he has to somehow find peace.

He has to find atonement, and he cannot find it

because he's gone too far down the line.

This is Kurosawa at his most fatalistic.

This is a very, very bleak philosophy,

that there is no sense that Hidetora...

will actually find redemption, even though there are one or two characters

and one or two moments in the film

where there is a spark of hope, there was a little spark of hope.

You think he will, or at least

there will be somebody who will come up to save him.

He said he was a sentimentalist,

but I think he was deeply humanistic, wasn't he really?Yeah.

In everything he did...

he felt very strongly about...

how the world was going and...

Always...

with one individual at the centre,

like the old boy in Ran, who ruined his life, wrecked his life.

Somehow... every decision he takes is wrong,

..and it's done with the best motives at first.

An extraordinary film, from an extraordinary director.

We won't see it like again, that's for sure.Yeah, true.

(HORSE NEIGHS)

(HORSE NEIGHS)

(HORSE NEIGHS)

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