100 Great War Movies by Robert Niemi

Author:Robert Niemi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

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KAGEMUSHA [THE SHADOW WARRIOR] (1980)

Synopsis

Kagemusha is an epic war film by Akira Kurosawa set in the Sengoku period of Japanese history that tells the story of a petty criminal who is taught to impersonate a dying daimyō (warlord) to dissuade his enemies from attacking his now-vulnerable clan. The daimyō is based on Takeda Shingen, and the film ends by depicting the actual Battle of Nagashino in 1575.

Background

In the five years after the release of Dersu Uzala (1975), director Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) worked on developing three film projects: a samurai version of King Lear entitled Ran (Japanese for Chaos); Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (never filmed); and Kagemusha, a screenwriting collaboration with Masato Ide about a petty thief who impersonates a feudal warlord. Kurosawa could not secure funding for Kagemusha in Japan until the summer of 1978, when he met with two of his greatest admirers: American directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. After Lucas and Coppola persuaded 20th Century Fox to pre-purchase foreign distribution rights for $1.5 million, Toho Co. Ltd. (Tokyo) put up the bulk of the funding: 100 million yen ($5 million). With a $6.5 million budget, Kagemusha was the most expensive film made in Japan up to that time. It was also the most meticulously planned. In the years spent finding financing Kurosawa made hundreds of storyboard drawings and paintings mapping out the look of every shot and scene. Location scouting for a movie set in 16th-century Japan proved to be challenging; pervasive industrialization after World War II rendered much of the country visually unsuitable for a period film. Kurosawa visited dozens of medieval castles before choosing Himeji Castle (40 miles west of Kobe, on Japan’s main island of Honshu), Iga-Ueno Castle (40 miles southeast of Kyoto, also on Honshu), and Kumamoto Castle (on Japan’s most southwesterly island of Kyushu). Battle scenes were filmed on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost and least developed island, utilizing hundreds of hand-picked extras and 200 specially trained horses, flown in from the United States. Many of the riders were female members of various Japanese equestrian organizations whom Kurosawa preferred because he found them more daring than most men.

Production

As Kurosawa scholar Donald Richie notes, “Of all the films of Kurosawa, Kagemusha was the most disaster-ridden” (Richie, 1996, p. 205). Kurosawa’s cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, had to drop out due to failing eyesight brought on by diabetes. He was replaced by Takao Saito and Masaharu Ueda (supervised by Asakazu Nakai). Next, Kurosawa and his composer, Masaru Sato, parted ways after intractable disagreements over the film’s score. Sato was replaced by Shinichiro Ikebe. Then Shinaro Katsu, Japan’s leading comic actor for whom Kurosawa wrote the starring roles of Shingen and the thief, quit or was fired (accounts vary) on the first day of shooting. Stage actor Tatsuya Nakadai was hired to replace Katsu. Though disrupted by a typhoon and by Nakadai falling off his horse and spending time in the hospital, the nine-month shoot in 1979 went only a week or so over schedule.

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