George Lucas: A Life

by Brian Jay Jones

At the encouragement of John Milius, Lucas went to see several Kurosawa films at the La Brea Cinema in Los Angeles, and remembered being “really blown away” by the director’s 1954 film The Seven Samurai. “It really had a huge influence on my life in terms of seeing something that brilliant and something that emotional, and at the same time so exotic,” said Lucas.70 He loved Kurosawa’s style, “so strong and unique,”71 with the horizontal “wipes” to transition between scenes, the rat-a-tat editing, and the dusty, slightly worn look of his sets and costumes. Everything in a Kurosawa movie looked as if it had been used, repaired, then used again—a design aesthetic that Lucas would bring to Star Wars. Lucas also liked that Kurosawa was confident enough in his storytelling to plunk audiences down in the middle of medieval or nineteenth-century Japan without the benefit of backstory. Give audiences a bit of time with the mythology, thought Kurosawa, and the foreign would