Kagemusha
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Short description
Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha takes place in 16th-century Japan, during the wars among rival clans competing for control of Kyoto. A petty thief, condemned to death, is spared because he looks exactly like the powerful warlord Shingen Takeda. When Shingen is mortally wounded, his brother and his generals decide to keep the death secret and have the double impersonate him, so that their enemies will not seize the moment to attack. The thief reluctantly takes on the role, and as he grows into it, the deception extends further than his handlers intended, until he is called on to lead the clan's army.
Tatsuya Nakadai plays both the warlord and his double, with Tsutomu Yamazaki as Shingen's brother Nobukado, Kenichi Hagiwara as his son Katsuyori, and Daisuke Ryū as Nobunaga Oda. Kurosawa directed, wrote the screenplay with Masato Ide, and produced; the film runs three hours. It was the nineteenth of the twenty-three features he directed, arriving after Dersu Uzala and before Ran. Made for about six million dollars, it returned roughly four million at the worldwide box office.
On IMDb the film holds a 7.8 rating from 768 votes, and on TMDB it stands at 7.6 from 27 reviews, so critics and audiences are closely aligned in their assessment.
What's left behind the scenes
- The original title of the film translates to "Shadow Warrior".
- When it became clear that the Toho studio was unable to provide the budget required for filming, Akira Kurosawa (1920-1998) was helped by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. In July 1978, Kurosawa was in San Francisco, where he met Lucas and Coppola. They persuaded the management of The 20th Century-Fox, on the wave of the success of Lucas’s film "Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope" (1977), to finance Kurosawa. The film company agreed in exchange for worldwide distribution rights to the future film outside of Japan. This was the first case where the distribution rights to a Japanese film were sold to Hollywood even before filming began.
- Hundreds of horses and thousands of extras were used in the battle scenes. According to Lucas, the final battle (the battle near Nagashino Castle in 1575) involved 5,000 extras.
- Filming lasted 9 months, including almost 2 months for the final battle scenes, which took place on the island of Hokkaido.
- 200 specially trained horses were delivered from the USA by plane. Many of the riders were women.
- The international version of the film has a runtime of 159 minutes.
- When it became clear that Toho Studios could not provide the required budget for filming, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola came to the rescue. In July 1978, Kurosawa was in San Francisco, where he met Lucas and Coppola. Riding the wave of success from Lucas's "Star Wars," they persuaded the management of 20th Century-Fox to finance Kurosawa. The company agreed in exchange for the distribution rights to the future film outside of Japan. This was the first time the North American distribution rights for a Japanese film were sold before filming had even begun.
- According to Lucas, 5,000 extras were involved in filming the final battle.
- At the 43rd minute, when the double discovers the body of the deceased daimyo, the "corpse" visibly flinches.
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