Ran (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  'Hidetora is me,' Kurosawa once said of the aging warlord at the center of Ran, his 1985 Japanese epic. He was 75 when the film premiered. He had spent the previous decade painting storyboards for a picture he could not afford to make. He hunted for money while his career quietly crumbled.

  Hidetora Ichimonji, Ran's central figure, has massacred rivals, blinded children, and razed entire families to build his empire. When he tries to distribute his kingdom among three sons, the structure of violence he built turns inward. Two of his sons move to destroy him. The youngest, who alone told him the truth, was sent into exile.

  Japan's first Tokyo International Film Festival screened Ran on the 31st of May, 1985, and Kurosawa did not attend. That act of absence cost the film its formal candidacy as Japan's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Yet American director Sidney Lumet organized a campaign that earned Kurosawa his only career nomination for Best Director. Kurosawa's path to Ran runs through a personal catastrophe and a decade of storyboards. It begins with a parable he first read in the mid-1970s, about a warlord and three loyal sons.

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• 2. A Decade of Storyboards

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  Kurosawa traced the seed of Ran to a parable about Mori Motonari, a Sengoku-period warlord famous for three exceptionally loyal sons. He read that parable in the mid-1970s. The question that seized him was simple and unsettling: what if those sons had been treacherous instead?

  King Lear entered the picture only after Kurosawa had already begun pre-planning. According to him, the stories of Motonari and Lear merged in a way he was never fully able to explain. He wrote the script shortly after completing Dersu Uzala in 1975, then set it aside. In his own words, he 'let it sleep' for seven years.

  During those years, Kurosawa painted storyboards for every shot in the film. Those paintings were later included with the screenplay in the Criterion Collection DVD release. Red Beard in 1965 had been his last directing credit before a gap of nearly five years. Japanese cinema attendances had fallen from 1.1 billion in 1958 to under 200 million by 1975, in part because television was drawing audiences away. In 1968, 20th Century Fox fired him from Tora! Tora! Tora! His 1970 film Dodes'ka-den was a commercial disaster that bankrupted his production company. A year later, unable to find any domestic backing, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrists.

  Medical treatment and an invitation from Mosfilm to make a film in Russia contributed to what writer Stephen Prince called Kurosawa's 'spiritual recovery.' Dersu Uzala, the film he made there, helped restore his international standing. Kagemusha in 1980, which Kurosawa later called a dress rehearsal for Ran, attracted French producer Serge Silberman's backing. The original description of Hidetora in Kurosawa's completed script had been modeled on Toshiro Mifune. Filming began in 1983 with an entirely different actor in the lead.

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• 3. A Real Castle on Fire

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  Tatsuya Nakadai had one take to flee a burning castle. The structure was real, built on the slopes of Mount Fuji by Kurosawa's crew, then burned to the ground. No miniatures were used for the sequence. For Lady Sue's family castle, the production constructed the Azusa castle near Mount Fuji as a custom-built ruin. Filming also took place at Kumamoto and Himeji, two of Japan's most ancient castles. Mount Aso, Japan's largest active volcano, provided the mountains and plains for most of Ran's outdoor landscape.

  Emi Wada and Kurosawa designed the 1,400 uniforms and suits of armor worn by the film's extras. Master tailors spent more than two years handmaking each piece. Two hundred horses were also used across the production.

  Kurosawa shot most scenes with three cameras simultaneously, each using different lenses and angles. He preferred long shots over close-ups. On some occasions, he positioned cameras as static frames and brought action into them, rather than tracking movement. Jump cuts shifted the pace of scenes at key points.

  During production, Kurosawa's wife of 39 years, Yoko Yaguchi, died. He halted filming for one day to mourn, then resumed. His regular recording engineer, Fumio Yanoguchi, also died late in production, in January 1985. One scene that Kurosawa filmed but cut from the final edit required an entire field to be sprayed gold. The documentary A.K. preserves footage of that shoot.

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• 4. Beyond King Lear

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  Throne of Blood in 1957 adapted Shakespeare's Macbeth, and The Bad Sleep Well in 1960 drew from Hamlet. Ran was Kurosawa's third encounter with Shakespeare. All three films received critical acclaim. In Ran, the transformation of the source material went further than a change of setting. King Lear's protagonist is a fool who endures more than he deserves. Hidetora spent his life slaughtering men, women, and children to build his domain. The ruin that descends on him in Ran is not undeserved suffering but consequence.

  Kurosawa's primary concern was that Shakespeare gave his characters no past. He wanted the people Hidetora had victimized to be present within the film. Lady Kaede, Lady Sue, and Tsurumaru all carry direct wounds from Hidetora's rule. In King Lear, Gloucester has his eyes gouged out by Lear's enemies. In Ran, it was Hidetora himself who gave the order to blind Tsurumaru and leave him impoverished.

  Lady Kaede, played by Mieko Harada in her first Kurosawa film, drives the clan's destruction as an act of personal revenge. Hidetora's forces massacred her family. The role of the Fool, a minor figure in Shakespeare's play, was expanded into the central character Kyoami. Kurosawa cast singer-dancer Shinnosuke 'Peter' Ikehata in that role.

  Three of the performances in Ran are shaped by Japanese Noh theatre conventions. Noh is a traditional theatrical form where emotion is conveyed through stylized, codified gesture rather than naturalistic speech. Nakadai's Hidetora is defined by long periods of stillness and silence, broken by abrupt and sometimes violent changes in posture. The Noh register was applied to Lady Kaede and Tsurumaru as well, communicating obsession and grief in ways that resist easy sympathy.

  In the Battle of Hachiman Field, Saburo's arquebusiers annihilate Jiro's cavalry from the treeline, where horses cannot follow. Kurosawa told critic Michael Wilmington that the war scenes were a metaphor for nuclear warfare and post-Hiroshima anxiety. Arquebuses had transformed samurai warfare when they were introduced to Japan in the 16th century. Kurosawa made this visible by setting his camera's focal plane beyond the action, so that armies appear as depersonalized, abstract shapes. The score that frames this battlefield abstraction came close to not existing at all.

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• 5. A Garden of Sound

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  Kurosawa secured Toru Takemitsu's involvement in 1976, while Ran was still in its planning stages. Their initial idea for the score was tategoe, a shrill-voice chant style without instrumentation. By the time production began, Kurosawa's vision had shifted entirely. He now wanted a powerful orchestral score in the manner of Gustav Mahler. This was their second collaboration; the first had been Dodes'ka-den in 1970.

  Kurosawa's practice of sending Takemitsu written notes drove the composer to open frustration. Takemitsu visited the film set directly instead, seeking a sensory experience of the production rather than working from instructions. At one point, he resigned from the project. Producer Masato Hara intervened, negotiated a peace, and Takemitsu returned to complete the work.

  Takemitsu described his guiding principle through the Japanese concept of ma, which he interpreted as a surplus of energy surrounding an abundant void. He said: 'My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.' Years later, he admitted a lingering wish that Kurosawa had trusted him more. 'Overall, I still have this feeling of... Oh, if only he'd left more up to me...,' he said. 'But seeing it now... I guess it's fine the way it is.'

  Kurosawa had originally planned to have the London Symphony Orchestra record the score. On meeting conductor Hiroyuki Iwaki of the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra, he changed his mind and engaged Iwaki and the orchestra instead. Kurosawa had the orchestra play up to 40 takes of each piece. The soundtrack runs just over an hour. Produced by Reynold da Silva and David Stoner, it was first released in 1985 by Silva Screen Productions and reissued in 2016. Takemitsu won the Best Music award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his work on Ran.

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• 6. Chaos Recognized

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  Emi Wada won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Ran, giving the film its only win at that ceremony. The four Oscar nominations also covered art direction, cinematography, and direction. In Japan, Ran was absent from the Best Picture category at the Japanese Academy Awards. It did win prizes there for best art direction and best music score. Ran also received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

  Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Ran four out of four stars and called it 'a great, glorious achievement.' Bob Graham in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: 'In Ran, the horrors of life are transformed by art into beauty. It is finally so moving that the only appropriate response is silence.' Gene Siskel, writing for the Chicago Tribune, called the physical scale of Ran overwhelming. Vincent Canby in The New York Times found in it 'the terrible logic and clarity of a morality tale seen in tight close-up.' Shawn Levy of the Portland Oregonian placed it as Kurosawa's most sumptuous work, directly alongside Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, and Dersu Uzala.

  John Simon of the National Review filed the major dissent, calling Ran 'an almost total failure by a genius in his old age.' That judgment has not held against the aggregate. On Rotten Tomatoes, 89 reviews produced a 96 percent approval rating with an average score of 9 out of 10. On Metacritic, 21 critics produced a weighted average of 97 out of 100.

  The National Board of Review awarded Ran both Best Director and Best Foreign Film. The National Society of Film Critics gave it Best Film and Best Cinematography; the cinematographers credited were Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda, and Asakazu Nakai. In 2000, Roger Ebert added the film to his Great Movies list. In the British Film Institute's 2002 Sight and Sound directors' poll, Ran ranked 41st. In 2018, the BBC's list of 100 greatest foreign language films, compiled by 209 critics from 43 countries, included it. By 2009, Kinema Junpo's poll placed Ran 59th among the greatest Japanese films. Many rivals who had once boasted that Kurosawa was finished watched Ran take its place among the most celebrated films ever made. Mieko Harada and Akira Terao, who played Lady Kaede and Taro in Ran, went on to work with Kurosawa again in Dreams. Hisashi Igawa, who played Kurogane, appeared in both Dreams and Rhapsody in August.

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