Quick LinksWriter/Director John Milius Introduced George Lucas to Kurosawa's Films R2D2 and C3PO Mimic Tahei and Matashichi as Our Entryway to Star Wars
Plenty of ink has been spilled on George Lucas' admiration for the director Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese filmmaker made 30 films in a career spanning over five decades, but very few made it over the Pacific Ocean to movie theaters in California by the 1960s. Lucas grew up in the small city of Modesto, California, smack-dab in the middle of the state and far from the cultural hotbeds of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The town had a movie theater but never screened foreign films, so Lucas' early film education came from films like The Blob and The Bridge On the River Kwai.
Still, Lucas was clamoring for more artistic input, consuming many films from Canyon Cinema, a Bay Area nonprofit that distributed independent, avante-garde films. Lucas had developed a taste for artistic cinema by the time he had reached film school at USC, and a friendship he made there led to his discovery of Akira Kurosawa. His love of Kurosawa, in turn, led him to incorporate the Japanese auteur's work into his own. The most notable example of that appropriation is the beloved droids that Lucas created for his generational film Star Wars -- R2D2 and C-3PO -- who were drawn from a very unlikely source within Kurosawa's film oeuvre called The Hidden Fortress.
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope PGActionAdventureFantasy Sci-Fi Release Date May 25, 1977 Director George Lucas Cast Mark Hamill , Harrison Ford , Carrie Fisher , Peter Cushing , Alec Guinness , Anthony Daniels Runtime 121 Main Genre Action Writer/Director John Milius Introduced George Lucas to Kurosawa's Films Close
Lucas enrolled at USC in 1965, having already made shorts about car racing with an 8mm camera in high school but having seen precious few films of importance. Lucky for Lucas, he was classmates with scribe extraordinaire and eventual Conan the Barbarian director John Milius. Milius was a walking paradox, a Jewish kid from the flyover states who somehow mixed the Zen of surfing with a love of guns and ammunition. He was friends with Hollywood's left but voted for the right. Milius also had a seriously outsized personality (but enormous charm) thanks in no small part to his already advanced taste in films -- namely for George Lucas -- Akira Kurosawa's.
Related How One of the Greatest Filmmakers of All Time Influenced The Acolyte
Star Wars wouldn't be what it is without Akira Kurosawa, and the same is especially true for The Acolyte.
Remember, this was pre-VHS -- there was no Blockbuster Video nor any other way of seeing obscure foreign films except at ahead-of-their-time movie houses and film festivals. The first Kurosawa film that George Lucas saw was, naturally, The Seven Samurai. In ranking Kurosawa's films, Lucas has Hidden Fortress only 4th -- but Kurosawa's approach to the storytelling in that film made Lucas enamored. "The one thing about Hidden Fortress is it did influence me in doing Star Wars," Lucas remarked in an interview about his Japanese filmmaking hero, adding, "As I was beginning to write the screenplay and put it together I remembered Hidden Fortress and the one thing that really struck me about it was the story was told from the two lowliest characters... and that [film] was the strongest influence, actually, [on Star Wars]."
R2D2 and C3PO Mimic Tahei and Matashichi as Our Entryway to Star Wars Close
In Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, Tahei and Matashichi are sort of the Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne of feudal Japan, trying to cash in big when they sell their homes to become soldiers -- only to strike out in comical fashion when they're trapped in a lowlier outfit. Still, the politics of Kurosawa's film and the black and white severity struck a chord with Lucas. He absolutely loved the idea of a serious story about tyrannical overlords ruling a peasant class -- only told through the eyes of the comic relief -- the very slapstick duo of peasants.
In Star Wars, it is droids who are the enslaved members of society, but the influence of Hidden Fortress meant it was important for Lucas to humanize these droids. That led to C-3PO's theatrical Salisbury accent (courtesy of Anthony Daniels) and R2D2's emotional sound effects. The main difference was that R2 was a bit more like a pet, with Lucas using the same magic trick of having C-3PO essentially translate for the audience by repeating back what R2 says (just like Han Solo and Chewbacca).
Related Ewan McGregor's Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony Includes Heartwarming Star Wars Reunion
They may be the bitterest of enemies in that galaxy far, far away, but the real-life friends share a touching moment in Los Angeles.
It's even harder to believe old Obi-Won pulled off his famous "These aren't the droids you're looking for," given just how individualistic and humanistic these droid characters became in the films and in popular culture. They are the only characters to appear in the first six Star Wars movies, and with good reason -- Lucas always wanted the audience to see the story through their synthetically static eyes. They may have been the most artificial of Star Wars characters -- but they were most like us Earthbound movie theater dwellers. Star Wars is streaming on Disney+.