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During his heyday, Akira Kurosawa secured his spot as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Some of his early classics included Drunken Angel (1948), Rashomon (1950) and Ikiru (“To Live”) (1952).

Seven Samurai (1957) and Yojimbo (1960) would later be remade as John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), respectively. Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) also inspired certain aspects of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977).

However, by the mid-1960s, the filmmaker’s career, and life for that matter, was in free fall. After his personal disappointment with Red Beard (1965), being fired in 1968 from what would become 20th Century Fox’s Tora! Tora! Tora! and the financial failure of Dodes‘ka-den (“Clickety-clack”) (1970), Kurosawa attempted suicide.

It was also during this dark time that the filmmaker wrote what would later become Ran (1985). After sitting on it for several years, he personally painted storyboards for every one of the epic’s shots, which proved to useful since Kurosawa was nearly blind by the time Ran began filming.

Like Kurosawa, Ran’s Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakasai) is a man who has obtained power and achievement but looks back on his life with a degree of disappointment and perhaps wonders what he would have done differently. Roger Ebert described Ran as a “remarkable statement made by an old man about an old man who discovers that’s it never too late to learn humility and forgiveness.”

Ran’s filmmaker had previously re-examined, rather harshly, the genre that made him famous with Kagemusha (“Shadow Warrior) (1980). Here, an unnamed petty thief (Tatsuya Nakadai) is used as a political decoy for a dying warlord to discourage attacks from rival clans.

Among the other real-life figures depicted, the warlord that the “shadow warrior” impersonates is based on daimyo Takeda Shingen, who reigned over the Kai Province of Japan during the Sengoka period. Kagemusha also concludes with a re-imagining of the 1575 Battle of Nagashino, where the thief dies attempting to raise the flag of his defeated clan.

Like he did with Kagamusha, whose American distribution was financed by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Kurosawa sought international founding for Ran, which ultimately came from France, due to his then lack of popularity.

Kurosawa would later reflect back on his life and career with his final film Madadayo (“Not Yet”) (1993), based on the life of Japanese academic and author Hyakkan Uchida. In the film, every year the professor’s students throw him a party in which they all ask him in their respective languages, “Are you ready?” Hyakken (Tatsuo Maraumura) then responds by chugging a ceremonial glass of beer, which gradually becomes more difficult as the years go by, and shouting, once again in his respective language, “Not yet!”

This ritual, and the film’s title, alludes to an ancient Japanese legend about an old man that refuses to die. So, perhaps, like Kurosawa, who would die only five years after Madadayo’s release, Hyakkan knows that death is near but doesn’t let it stop him from living life to the fullest.

Unlike the more optimistic view that Madadayo leaves us with, Ran and its predecessor, Kagemusha, show the more pessimistic outlook of a filmmaker who has clearly become jaded by the experiences of his time yet perhaps retains a glimmer of hope.