Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon's Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, and its subsequent commercial success in the United States, introduced postwar Japanese cinema to Western audiences at scale for the first time and touched off a decade of Western critical and commercial interest in Japanese film.

Seven Samurai (1954), made over nearly a year of production including a 45-day screenplay retreat and 148 days of shooting, became one of the most influential films in cinema history — voted the best Japanese film ever made in a 1999 critics' poll and ranked 20th among all films worldwide in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll — and its structure directly influenced later films including Star Wars (1977).

For The Most Beautiful (1944), Kurosawa had his cast live in a real factory during the shoot, eat the factory's food, and address each other only by their characters' names — an immersive production method he returned to, in various forms, throughout his career.

In 1968, three weeks into directing the American co-production Tora! Tora! Tora!, Kurosawa was fired from the film, officially attributed to fatigue — a specific professional setback that preceded a deeper career crisis over the following years.

After being fired from Tora! Tora! Tora! (1968) and then seeing his next film, Dodesukaden (1970), fail commercially, Kurosawa attempted suicide in December 1971; he survived, and his health recovered within months. He continued directing afterward: his next film, Dersu Uzala (1975), was funded not by a Japanese studio but by the Soviet agency Mosfilm and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Kagemusha (1980, backed in part with help from American directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola) and Ran (1985) followed, both financed internationally rather than by a Japanese studio.