Did You Know?
The castle destroyed in the middle of the movie was specially constructed on the slopes of Mount Fuji for the film and then burned down. No miniatures were used for that segment, although an optical of another castle being burned at the end was used.
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Akira Kurosawa referred to his previous film, Kagemusha, as a "dress rehearsal" for this film. He spent ten years storyboarding every shot in the film as paintings. The resulting collection of images was published with the screenplay.
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The story was inspired by samurai legends, but also draws on William Shakespeare's "King Lear" as well.
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Unlike most other characters in the film, the character of the fool, Kyoami (Pîtâ), has no basis in historic Japan. The most similar position in relation to a historic Japanese warlord would be a page, but would be quite different in responsibilities. Rather Kyoami is based on the fool or jester of European medieval times and, of course, William Shakespeare's character of the Fool from "King Lear".
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Akira Kurosawa's wife of 39 years, Yôko Yaguchi, died during the production of this film. Kurosawa halted filming for just one day to mourn before resuming work on the picture.
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Almost the entire film is done in long-shot and there is only one close-up when The Lady Kaede is presented with the head of a fox statue.
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A scene which required an entire field to be sprayed gold was filmed but left out of the final film during editing.
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Akira Kurosawa began writing the film 10 years before its release and said that it wasn't originally meant to be based on "King Lear", but came to that during the writing process.
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Akira Kurosawa's eyesight had deteriorated almost completely by the time principal photography began. He could only frame shots with the help of assistants, who used his storyboard paintings as guidelines.
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The film used approximately 1400 extras (1400 suits of armor were fabricated, designed by Akira Kurosawa) and 200 horses. A number of the horses had to be imported from the United States. Kurosawa used the extras and horses so efficiently that when the film was ready for premiere, newspapers in Japan were reporting that thousands of extras and horses were used to stage the battles.
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Because actor Tatsuya Nakadai was decades younger than Hidetora, he wore full-face makeup that took about four hours to apply.
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Criterion was set to release the film on Blu-Ray in Region 1 territories, which would have made this the first Akira Kurosawa film released on Blu-Ray in America. But Criterion lost the rights to the film at the last minute and was left unable to release it, plus all of their earlier releases of the film on DVD went out of print. As a result, Criterion's release of [Kagemusha] became the first Kurosawa film released in the USA. However, Ran has since been released in American as a part of the Studio Canal Collection, distributed by Lionsgate.
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