One of my favourite film directors is Akira Kurosawa. Sadly, he is no longer with us but he has left a fantastic legacy of fine films which have had so much influence in the film world.

Most people will know of him as the maker of “The Seven Samurai” - a film that told the story of seven itinerant swords-for-hire who come together to defend a village from a large gang robbers. It was remade in Hollywood as “The Magnificent Seven”.  This is extremely interesting as Kurosawa has always acknowledged the influence on him of John Ford westerns!

He was perhaps the only Japanese film maker of his era to gain wider acceptance in the west although in Japan his staus was not as pronounced. His long career spanned over from the 1930s as a young assistant director to the 2000s just before his death. He made over 30 films as director and many more as writer, editor or producer, sometimes combining the roles on one film.

His golden era started in the 1950s with a series of critically acclaimed but mostly historical films. In addition to “The Seven Samurai”, he directed the savage and cynical revenge piece “Yojimbo” translated as The Bodyguard. This film was remade in the West as “A Fistful of Dollars”  - the classic spaghetti western that spawned a whole new genre of films.

More interestingly, he made the superb “Rashomon” - a tale of the (supposed) rape of a woman in the forest told from several different character viewpoints. As well as winning several awards in its day, you can see its influence on more recent Hollywood films such as “The Usual Suspects” and many court room dramas.

Speilberg and Lucas have acknowledged their debt to Kurosawa. Indeed, the arguing robots in Star Wars are based on a couple of soldiers in Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress”.

He also had the power to take Shakespearian material and remould it into a medieval Japanese setting. His “Throne of Blood” was a bloody version of Macbeth in the tradition of a No play. One of his greatest works was the masterful “Ran” (literally translated as Chaos) - an epic tragedy based on  ”King Lear”.

In his later works, there were a number of common strands and themes:

• Strong stories - he was a master story teller and he made sure that these shone through his writings.
• Beautiful cinematography - he was also a painter and used to storyboard his pictures as paintings and works of art in their own right. The landscape photography in “Dersu Uzala” is breath-taking. The burning castle in “Ran” is beautiful but terrible. The final scene in “Kagemusha” as the camera pans out to see the extent of death on the battle field is wondrous with the rivers literally running red.
• The weather - he used the weather as a metaphor and also to induce moods in his films. The wind represented  chaos and upheaval in “Throne of Blood” and “Ran”. The rain in Seven Samurai accentuated the slaughter of the robbers at the climax with horses and robbers struggling to fight in the mud. Fog and mist were used to denote the mystical and supernatural and invoke fear in the characters
• Believably human characters - his characters were multi-faceted, mixing the good traits with the bad, making the stories come alive. They all have their own particular mannerisms, foibles, fears and beliefs.
• Action sequences - he was extremely skillful in staging large scale battle sequences as evidenced in “Throne of Blood”, “Kagemusha” and “Ran”. They are stirring, exciting, epic and tragic
• Humour - Kurosawa could use humour to let the audience catch their breath before the next action or show a different side to a particular character.

There is much to admire in Kurosawa’s films if you can get over the inevitable sub titles. He has given Hollywood and the West, in general, many insights in to great film-making. Let’s hope that the newer breeds of director, during their filmic upbringing, have learnt from  an acknowledged master of his craft.

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Ever since cinema began Hollywood executives and screenwriters have been looking for the holy grail - a story structure that will work over and over again in different environments, across different genres and with different characters to lay the foundations for a successful screenplay. If you had this formula it would be like pure gold or cash in the bank.

As film-making is a business no one wants to lose money. No studio wants a flop. Every screen writer wants to increase their chance of their script acceptance. Imagine having a story model that would hook the audience every time and draw them into the film and tap into universal human emotions.

Over the years there have been a couple of main contenders which have been used by screenwriters. Surprisingly, the first was of Russian origin.

Vladimir Propp (1928) made an analysis of Russian folk tales and discovered that they shared certain common structural features regardless of the individual differences in terms of plot, setting or characters. He proposed that there were certain roles that were present in the characters - the hero, the villain, the false hero, the donor, the helper etc. - that were always present in the characters despite the different setting and plot. He also defined 31 narrative units that described action in the story. These units were enough to describe all the stories but not all the units are present although the units that are there follow a prescribed order.

The Proppian analysis or structure does have its limitations. It is difficult to apply such an analysis to non linear story structures where there are several storylines intermingling. Examples include Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and several of Robert Altman’s movies eg. Nashville, Short Cuts.

The second major contender is based on the work of Joseph Campbell whose book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is about storytelling and mythology. This was interpreted by Christopher Vogler, a story evaluator for many motion picture studios, and morphed into “The Writer’s Journey” (1992).

“The Writer’s Journey” shows how a mythic story structure can be used to invest films with a powerful story. There are analyses of many different popular and successful films using the Writer’s Journey structure. And this book has had such an influence on the way Hollywood films are written. George Lucas admitted to using mythic story structures in writing the Star Wars films.

Again, there are more character roles (the hero, the mentor, threshold guardian, trickster etc.) and action narrative units ( ordinary world, call to adventure, refusal of the call, meeting with the mentor etc.) It is probably more sophisticated than the Propp model and can be more flexible in analyzing non linear stories. As the book points out, the model is not a recipe or cook book.

In the epilogue to the book, Vogler says:

the ultimate measure of a story’s success or excellence is not its compliance with any established patterns, but its lasting popularity and effect on the audience.To force a story to conform to a structural model is putting the the cart before the horse.It’s possible to write good stories that don’t exhibit every feature of the Hero’s (Writer’s) journey; in fact, it’s better if they don’t. people love to see familiar conventions and expectations defied creatively. A story can break all the “rules” and still touch universal human emotions.

Whilst there is no perfect story, these models provide genuine insights into what works well and what doesn’t.

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