47 Fun Facts About Seven Samurai

Which monster movie did Seven Samurai's studio release just months later in 1954?

Godzilla followed that November, and one actor links the two films: Haruo Nakajima, cut down as a bandit in Seven Samurai, climbed into the monster suit and went on to wear it in twelve films.

Seven Samurai's 1586 setting falls in which period of Japanese history?

The Sengoku period brought over a century of civil war between rival clans: every defeat cut more samurai adrift, wandering swordsmen like the ones the farmers set out to hire.

What do the farmers offer the samurai as their only payment for defending the village?

Food is all the village can spare, so its elder sends them to look for samurai who are hungry; most of the proud swordsmen they approach still turn the offer of rice down flat.

What is the samurai leader Kambei doing when the villagers first see him in town?

Rescuing a boy from a thief costs Kambei his topknot, the badge of a samurai's rank: he shaves his head to pass as a priest and get close, and the watching farmers decide he is the man to ask.

Which wild self-proclaimed samurai, played by Toshiro Mifune, is accepted only after failed attempts to drive him off?

Kikuchiyo was written late: Mifune was first meant to play the stern master swordsman, until the writers added a seventh samurai to their six and gave him that part instead.

Which star of Ikiru plays Kambei, the ronin who leads the seven?

Takashi Shimura's Kambei shaves his head in his first scene, then spends the rest of the film absently rubbing the stubble as it slowly grows back over the months of the story.

What does the wild seventh samurai reveal in his furious speech over the looted armour?

He was born a farmer himself, and it bursts out as he rages that samurai raids made the villagers the scavengers they are; the other six, furious a moment before, are shamed into silence.

How does the villager Manzo try to protect his daughter Shino from the samurai?

He disguises her as a boy by hacking off her hair while she weeps, and it fails: the youngest samurai scolds the 'lad' for skipping the men's training, discovers the truth and falls in love with her.

Which of the seven, recruited while chopping wood, makes the banner for the samurai and the village?

Heihachi's banner gives each true samurai a circle, the misfit among them a triangle and the farmers a written character; he is the first of the seven to die, and it is raised over the rooftops at his funeral.

What does Rikichi's captive wife do when the samurai raid the bandit camp?

She runs back into the burning barracks the instant she sees her husband among the raiders, and the samurai who drags Rikichi away from the flames is shot dead, the first of the seven to fall.

What follows when the wild seventh samurai slips off alone to steal a musket?

Bandits break in and kill villagers at the post he left unguarded, so the prize he carries back in triumph earns only a furious rebuke from Kambei; the gang had just three muskets in all.

Which of the seven, the serious master swordsman, single-handedly captures a musket from the bandits?

Kyuzo walks out alone into the dark and strolls back at dawn with the gun, and the youngest samurai's awestruck praise so stings the wild seventh that he rushes off to match the feat.

How does the bandit chief kill the master swordsman in Seven Samurai's final battle?

He shoots him from a hut where the village women are hiding: every one of the four samurai who die is brought down by a musket ball, and not one is ever beaten with a blade.

What is the weather during the final battle in the village?

Heavy rain, all of it man-made: the battle was shot in the depths of winter, after snow had fallen on the set, and the actors fought soaked through in freezing mud.

Which of these is among the three samurai still alive at the end of Seven Samurai?

Katsushiro, the youngest, is left standing with Kambei and Shichiroji before four grave mounds, and the village girl he loves walks straight past him to join the singing rice planters.

In Seven Samurai's closing line, Kambei says the victory belongs to whom?

The peasants, not the men who fought for them: 'In the end, we've lost this battle too,' Kambei says, as the three survivors stand by their comrades' graves and the village goes back to planting rice.

Which studio produced Seven Samurai, then the most expensive Japanese film ever made?

Toho halted the shoot when the money ran out with most of the script still unfilmed, argued over whether to scrap it, and then agreed to pay for the rest.

Which Wes Anderson film borrows music from the score of Seven Samurai?

Isle of Dogs, a stop-motion tale of dogs exiled from a Japanese city, plays music from two Kurosawa films: Anderson said from the outset that the director would be a heavy influence on it.

What did Kurosawa do while production was suspended for lack of money in September 1953?

He went fishing, confident the studio would back him rather than abandon the film; he was right, and the cameras were rolling again that autumn.

What filming technique did Kurosawa first use for Seven Samurai's final battle?

A multi-camera setup with telephoto lenses put three cameras on the battle at once, each at a different angle, so the chaos could be cut together afterwards; several cameras and long lenses marked his films from then on.

By the usual account, why did Kurosawa shoot Seven Samurai's battle last?

To stop the studio pulling the plug, the story goes: he believed that if the climax were already shot, the company would make him wrap up the rest. His assistant director later denied the schedule was aimed at the company.

Cradling an infant orphaned by the bandits' fire, what does Mifune's wild samurai cry out?

'This baby is me!' he sobs, sinking down beside the burning mill: the clown of the seven turns out to have been orphaned in just the same way.

Kambei, who leads the seven in Seven Samurai, is a ronin, meaning a samurai without what?

A lord: a samurai whose master was killed or defeated was simply out of a job, free to wander and hire out his sword, which is how such men end up working for a village of farmers.

Critics credit Seven Samurai with popularising which now-standard movie plot device?

Assembling a team for a mission, one specialist at a time, fills the film's whole first hour, and the idea passed straight into The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen and heist films ever since.

Which Star Wars series retold Seven Samurai in 'Sanctuary', where its hero trains villagers to fight off raiders?

The Mandalorian sent its bounty hunter to drill a village of krill farmers against raiders, a tribute from a saga that Kurosawa's films had helped to inspire in the first place.

Kurosawa first planned a film about one day in a samurai's life, ending in what?

Seppuku for a mistake made that day was the planned ending, but the project died in the library: nobody could establish how such a man spent his hours, down to whether he ate lunch at his post.

What exposes the family scroll waved by the wild seventh 'samurai' as stolen?

It gives his age as thirteen: the name he jabs at belongs to a boy, the six real samurai roar with laughter, and the name on the scroll sticks to him for the rest of the film.

Who composed the score for Seven Samurai?

Fumio Hayasaka scored the film while gravely ill with tuberculosis; he died the following year at 41, partway through the music for Kurosawa's next picture, which a pupil had to finish.

Seven Samurai reinvented jidaigeki, a Japanese film genre whose name means what?

Period drama had been a slow, ritual, theatrical genre until Kurosawa gave it the pace and staging of a Hollywood western, and Hollywood duly turned his film back into one.

Which Hollywood director of Westerns did Kurosawa revere and draw on for Seven Samurai?

John Ford was the director Kurosawa looked up to, and the debt came full circle: having borrowed the conventions of the western, his film was itself remade in Hollywood as a western six years later.

Which prize did Kurosawa win for Seven Samurai at the 1954 Venice Film Festival?

The Silver Lion was shared four ways that year; the way had been opened three years earlier, when Kurosawa's Rashomon took the festival's top prize and turned Western eyes to Japanese cinema.

Seven Samurai's Oscar nominations were for art direction and what else?

Costumes: both nominations came at the 1957 ceremony, nearly three years after the film opened in Japan, because it took until 1956 to reach American cinemas; neither brought a win.

Under what title did Seven Samurai open in New York in November 1956?

The Magnificent Seven was the name its American distributor gave the subtitled film; once Hollywood's Western took the title in 1960, the original went back to being Seven Samurai.

Which trick is at the heart of Kambei's defence of the village in Seven Samurai?

Leaving one gap as a trap, he tempts the horsemen into the single spot where the defenders are waiting, while fences, a flooded moat and a wrecked bridge close every other way in.

Who directed the 1960 Hollywood Western remake of Seven Samurai?

John Sturges moved the siege to a Mexican village and had the script rewritten while the cameras rolled; the hit that emerged had a theme tune stirring enough to be reused in Marlboro cigarette commercials.

Who plays the leader of the gunfighters, the Kambei role, in the 1960 Western remake of Seven Samurai?

Yul Brynner had helped buy the remake rights himself, played the black-clad leader, and was the only one of the seven to come back for the sequel six years later.

Which 1980 Roger Corman space opera transplanted the seven-defenders plot into outer space?

Battle Beyond the Stars borrowed more than the plot: Robert Vaughn, one of the seven gunfighters of the 1960 Western, signed on again to play a hired killer among the stars.

Which Pixar film is cited alongside The Dirty Dozen as an unofficial copy of Seven Samurai?

A Bug's Life has an ant set out to hire warriors to protect the colony's harvest from raiding grasshoppers, and come home with a troupe of circus performers he has mistaken for fighters.

Which 1975 Bollywood blockbuster, a 'curry Western', borrowed its hired-defenders plot from Seven Samurai?

Sholay hires two petty crooks, not seven swordsmen, to rid a village of a bandit chief, and India could not get enough of it: the film ran for five years without a break at one Mumbai cinema.

Which video game includes a black-and-white 'Kurosawa Mode' influenced by Seven Samurai?

Ghost of Tsushima's makers went to the Kurosawa estate for leave to put his name on the mode, then added film grain to the black-and-white picture and reworked even the sound to suit it.

Seven Samurai tied for third in Sight and Sound's 1982 critics' poll; which film topped it?

Citizen Kane won for the third poll running; Kurosawa's epic was a newcomer to the top ten that year, now that critics outside Japan could at last see it at its full length.

Which outlet's 2018 poll named Seven Samurai the best foreign-language film without one Japanese critic's vote?

The BBC's panel put it first, yet no Japanese critic on it voted for this or any other Kurosawa film: several chose the quieter Ozu and Mizoguchi, an echo of the old complaint at home that he was the most Western of Japanese directors.

Which director cited Seven Samurai as his favourite Kurosawa film in a Criterion interview?

George Lucas ranks it first, with Yojimbo and Ikiru next, and The Hidden Fortress, the Kurosawa film he mined for Star Wars, only after those.

Seven Samurai was one of Mifune's sixteen Kurosawa films; which was the last?

Red Beard, in 1965, ended the run: the two parted ways afterwards and never worked together again, though Mifune had starred in most of what Kurosawa made since Drunken Angel in 1948.

Which future star has about three seconds in Seven Samurai as a nameless samurai walking through town?

Tatsuya Nakadai crosses the screen in about three seconds; seven years later Kurosawa cast him opposite Mifune as the pistol-carrying villain of Yojimbo.

How does Manzo react when he finds his daughter Shino with the youngest samurai?

He beats her: a farmer's daughter and a samurai belong to different castes, and the pair know they have no future together, yet the other samurai and villagers step in and urge him to forgive them.

Why did Seven Samurai's 2016 4K restoration rely on duplicate film elements?

The negative is missing: nobody knows where the original went, so the restorers worked from a master positive and a duplicate negative, repairing the wear digitally.