How Star Wars Borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Great Samurai Films | Hacker News Reader

How Star Wars Borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Great Samurai Films

openculture.com

52 pointselmar29 comments

Check out Everything Is A Remix for a powerful exploration of these ideas and more, in 40 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ryPC8bxqE

Everybody borrows from everybody!

wow, I know Led Zep's lemon song was from Killing Floor. What I didn't know that Killing Floor wasn't attributed. For the other Led Zep songs, it was new to me that it was from other songs. Awesome video btw.

Yep! I find that it has very philosophical implications for me. Prior to learning about Everything Is A Remix, I would agonize over how to create great work, great writing.

I've since come to terms with the fact that everything is indeed a remix– so the best way to create good work is to consume as much high-quality work as possible, and then make as many remixes as you possibly can.

Higher quality input, broader range of inputs, maximum volume output (without too much judgement about what "quality" means with regards to output– you don't always know in advance what will work and what will not.)

I think you'll find this interesting then : http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg...

Basically , a professor created an AI composer and he claims all great works are made by subconsciously splicing together bits of other works and a machine that does this can be truly creative.

Here it's imitating Mozart : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vctssFH-M5c

It's quite lacking in overall structure but there's definitely something interesting going on here.

Most human stories of any sort can be tied to the monomyth, as described in Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces [0], which George Lucas has directly credited as an inspiration for his storytelling. The cinematographic aspects of the movie likely have similar inspirations, as do the acting styles of the cast, the arrangements of the set designers, of the paintings of good ol' Ralph McQuarrie... and so on. As life is, so art too is recursive.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Fac...

I was into this idea until I actually read The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book's template for the "monomyth" is extremely vague and has many optional elements, so many that any given pair of myths might consist of entirely disjoint elements. Campbell's evidence only comes from a few myths, which makes me worry about cherry-picking. I was sad to realize Kurt Vonnegut's summary of the monomyth is probably correct: "The hero gets into trouble. The hero gets out of trouble."

Vonnegut's summary is a good one, and I agree that the entire book could have been fully summarized in so few words - the hard question is what are those select few words capable of seeding all other possible stories? For me, the book made many good cases that there is something deeper and quite simple about all storytelling, without ever specifically defining it. I guess that is why storytelling is still such an interesting practice.

Not to mention that Campbell's monomyth borrows liberally from Otto Rank and Lord Raglan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank-Raglan_mythotype

There is a funny - and damning - remix of the end of 633 Squadron with Star Wars audio here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZq-tlJTrU

That's really awesome!

Although the nitpicker in me has to point out that the film is heavily edited to fit the dialogue (there's a shot at about 3'25" where you can see them bombing a paper cross pinned to the cliff which is taken from earlier in the film when 633 squadron are training in the Scottish highlands).

I remember reading somewhere that many of the dog fights in Star Wars were copied from the film The Battle Of Britain, but then that, 633 Squadron and many other classic British war movies were made by people who actually fought in the war. If you want a film to look realistic, and you weren't there yourself, copying from films made by those who were is probably the next best thing.

And, Kurosawa himself borrowed heavily from old American westerns. His famous samurai standoffs a were basically gunfights-at-dawn but with swords.

In turn, Kurosawa influenced many later westerns to the point that some of his samurai movies were remade as cowboy movies.

The story behind the remakes is pretty interesting all by themselves:

John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960) was based on The Seven Samurai (1954)

When first released in America, the title for Kurosawa's film was "The Magnificent Seven", it created a stir and the rights for "The Seven Samurai" were bought for US$250 from the Toho Corporation, Toho entered into the contract under the pretense of being the sole copyright owner. Over the following 30 years, several lawsuits followed since Kurosawa hadn't received royalties and hadn't given consent to remakes, the end result of which was that Kurosawa and other principals were paid back royalties, but were countersued and Toho Corp ended up having to pay $50000 to MGM (who also gained the rights to any future remake of The Seven Samurai set as a Western). I guess in the real world, the Bandits end up winning after all.

Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was based on Yojimbo (1961).

Leone didn't acquire the rights to Yojimbo, he just went ahead and made the film, which was surprisingly successful. Kurosawa reportedly said, "I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie." Leone is supposed to have settled out of court for 15% of worldwide residuals plus $100,000.

And he borrowed from Shakespeare: Ran was based heavily on King Lear, Throne of Blood on Macbeth, and maybe some others too. And Shakespeare borrowed from others. That's the way creativity in art (and science and technology) work; hardly anything is made from whole cloth.

Is the concept behind our intellectual property system, that there is a single creator who owns the work, realistc?