We all have our own ideas about what makes a great film. Are popular films great? You would think that something that draws in audiences in their thousands and millions must be great. Not so. Look at Rush Hour 2 and Pearl Harbour. It could be just that the latest hot film star is appearing in their next movie. Bankable stars in mediocre movies. What about Harrison Ford in Sabrina and Six Days, Seven Nights. Your favourite auteur film director’s latest offering should be great based on past performance. Not necessarily. Even Spielberg slips up occasionally – look at 1942 and Amistad. Conversely, some great films have inauspicious beginnings. What film did little business at the box office but became one of the most successful DVDs of all time and in the process became re-evaluated as a great film? The Shawshank Redemption.

All I’ve tried to do is to show that there is no simple way to forecast what will make a great film. As usual it is a combination of factors that, mixed together and cooked at the right temperature with loving care, produce a great film. I believe that no one factor on its own can produce greatness. Not just the director, not just the star, not just the subject. Not just the story or script.

However, two or usually three or more factors working together can do it. Here is my list of ingredients for greatness.

• Story/ Script – This is the most important ingredient for me. You need a story that grabs the audience and takes them with it on a journey. It must affect the audience’s emotions. You need a script that does justice to the story and provides colour and originality to the action. If you don’t have a good story or script you rely too heavily on other factors and the probability of producing a great film plummets. Watch The Godfather I and II. Great stories from an average book but even better scripts. You are drawn into another world with very different codes of conduct and behaviour and morals. The Shawshank Redemption’s story is gripping even though the script came out of a short story by Steven King. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven provides an unusual raw and downbeat view of the old west with no heroes riding off into the sunset.
• Acting – good actors telling a good story gives the basis for greatness. One example of greatness that involves just a good story and great acting is Salvador. James Woods gives a career high performance as the thoroughly unlikeable war photographer who goes to El Salvador to make money and retrieve his reputation and in the process gets caught up in the civil war. Good supporting cast performances particularly by James Belushi as his unwitting sidekick drive the film with a nervous energy that has you wincing and squirming. It could be the film that disproves my previous hypothesis where the acting alone could make this film great. A more recent example might be Forest Whittaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
• Cinematography – By this I mean that what you see on the screen makes you go wow. Not just the CGI although that has to be taken into consideration e.g. The Lord of The Rings. But just consider David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia. Beautiful sweeping cinematography conveys the epic feel of the film, the vastness of the desert, the scale of the battles. However, you can equally be impressed by the edgy quality of the cinematography in something like Traffic or Heat. You can also marvel at the beauty, colour and technical artistry in some of the recent Chinese films such as The House of Flying Daggers and In the Mood for Love.
• Editing – Editing conveys the pace of the film and splices the narrative together. Poor editing can leave an audience confused or bored. A well edited film will enhance the story telling and adjust the pace of the story to the action. Well edited films will have an internal rhythm to them.
• Direction – You may wonder why I’ve taken so long to get to direction. The director is the ringmaster and as such needs to juggle all the above (and more such as art direction, sound, costume etc.) to come up with a great film. The great ones can coax new meanings and nuances out of formulaic stories and scripts. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket could have been just another Vietnam war movie but he turned it into a psychological study that showed the dehumanisation of young recruits to help them face the horrors of war. They provoke exciting performances from average actors. Just watch the incredible performance of Sharon Stone coaxed out by Martin Scorcese in Casino. They can inject beauty, originality and controversy into what could have been mundane films.  Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven uses beautiful photography of the American mid west plains to reflect the ebb and flow of the story. They can tap into the issues in society today and make films relevant to the audience. Spielberg does a great job of raising discussion of crime detection and the legal system by projecting a future where crimes can be detected before they happen in Minority Report. Even historical films can touch a nerve by reflecting issues that are important in today’s society. Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese masterpiece – Rashomon – is all about deception and the search for truth played out as a whodunit in the case of an alleged rape in the woods. And directors can put their own individual stamp on films which has lead to the cult of auteurism or authorship.

There you are. Only five factors but great films will have at least two and usually more of these factors present. Just think of films you believe are great films and assess them against these factors. It is fairly simple to do. Do they stand up?

In conclusion. Why is Citizen Kane a great film? Well, it has at least three of the above factors. The story is good although a little dated now as it is about the rise of a press baron (loosely based on the life of Randolph Hearst) and shows the arc of his life and the effect on people around him. However, it does not engage the emotions of the audience and is quite cold. Where it scores highly is in the cinematography, the editing and the direction. The cinematography and editing are ground-breaking and extremely well executed and were way ahead of their time. They actually helped to form a new grammar for films. The direction was excellent in that the telling of the story and the use of new cinematography techniques add nuances and layers to the film beyond the story and script. One could argue that the acting was first rate as well from Orson Welles as the eponymous lead and Joseph Cotton. So, 3or 4 out of 5 is pretty good. Whether it is the best film of all time………

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.