But Johnson also takes his cues from some of Kurosawa’s late-period movies. Mark Hamill’s performance as the grizzled Luke Skywalker owes a lot to Kurosawa’s frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune, who Lucas himself considered casting him as Obi-Wan Kenobi. (In fact, one character can even be heard saying the words hidden fortress-until Vader interrupts him.) Johnson seems to have returned to the source as well.
George Lucas has never made a secret of the fact that Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, about two ragged adventurers who set off to rescue a princess, was a major influence on the first Star Wars movie.
