Kurosawa's Ran began as a what-if about three loyal sons turning bad
Akira Kurosawa read about a warlord famous for three devoted sons and wondered what would happen if they were rotten instead. Only later did King Lear enter the picture. The result, Ran, cost $11–12 million, burned a real castle on Mount Fuji, and earned Kurosawa the single Best Director nomination of his career.
The seed was Mōri Motonari, a Sengoku-period daimyō whose three sons were celebrated for loyalty and talent. Kurosawa, reading about him in the mid-1970s, flipped the legend so the sons become their father's enemies. Shakespeare's King Lear shaped the story heavily, yet Kurosawa said he came to the play only after planning had begun, and he never fully explained how the two tales fused. He drafted the script soon after Dersu Uzala in 1975, then left it untouched for seven years while painting storyboards for every shot.
Money was the obstacle. Kurosawa's so-called third period, from 1965 to 1985, was a lean stretch in which he often had to look abroad for funding; television had shrunk Japanese cinema audiences, which peaked at 1.1 billion in 1958 and fell below 200 million by 1975. After Kagemusha succeeded in 1980, a film he later called a dress rehearsal, French producer Serge Silberman backed Ran as a Japanese-French co-production. Shooting started in 1983.
The scale was enormous. Emi Wada and Kurosawa designed 1,400 costumes and suits of armour, which master tailors spent three years making by hand, and 200 horses were used. Much of the film was shot around Mount Aso, the country's largest active volcano, with scenes at the castles of Kumamoto and Himeji. Hidetora's third castle was an actual structure built on the slopes of Mount Fuji and then burned; with no miniatures, Tatsuya Nakadai had a single take to flee it. Kurosawa typically ran three cameras at once, favouring long shots over close-ups.
Grief ran through the production. Yōko Yaguchi, his wife of 39 years, died during filming, and he paused for just one day. Ran premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on May 31, 1985. Wada won the Academy Award for costume design, Toru Takemitsu wrote a Mahler-inspired score, and Kurosawa's remark that "Hidetora is me" has encouraged readings of the film as self-portrait.
Source: Ran (film)
