FilmSkool — a free film school
Seven Samurai (1954)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Directed by Akira Kurosawa · Shot by Asakazu Nakai · Cut by Akira Kurosawa · Music by Fumio Hayasaka · Ratio Academy ratio · 207 min
How it was made
- Co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto's initial informal script ran to 500 pages before Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni spent six weeks at a ryokan in Atami reducing it, each writing the same scene independently before combining the best material, with Oguni holding final say over whether a scene was ready.
- The main village was built as a studio set requiring twenty-three houses, but no single location covered every needed setting, so the production filmed across five separate locations including Shizuoka Prefecture and Hakone.
- Forty horses were bought for the shoot, but moving them between the five village locations proved impossible, so local horses were painted to match their colouring instead.
- Toho's original budget of roughly $150,000-$200,000 ran out by September 1953 with less than a third of the script filmed, halting production until the studio agreed to keep financing it; the final cost reached about ¥210 million, making it the most expensive Japanese film made up to that point.
- For the final battle, shot last and kept secret from most of the cast until filming began, Kurosawa used a multi-camera setup with telephoto lenses to compress and intensify the sense of a large number of combatants.
- Actor Yoshio Tsuchiya suffered real burns during a stunt that placed him close to a burning barn during the resumed battle-scene filming.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Akira Kurosawa
This is the plain index, shown because JavaScript is off. Every lesson here is a free video published by the channel credited on it and plays through that channel's own embed — FilmSkool hosts nothing.