Ran (1985)
Synopsis
Ran is a Japanese- French war film/period tragedy directed, edited, and co- written
by Akira Kurosawa, adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear and the legends
surrounding daimyō Mōri Motonari. The film stars Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora
Ichimonji, an aging Sengoku- era warlord who abdicates for his three sons— with
disastrous results.
Background
Akira Kurosawa first conceived of the idea for the film that would become Ran
( Japa nese for “chaos” or “discord”) in the early 1970s, when he read about Mōri
Motonari (1497–1571), a power ful daimyō in the Chūgoku region of Japan who is
remembered as one of the greatest warlords of the Sengoku period (mid-
16th century). Though a brilliant diplomat and strategist, Motonari is best known
for an event that prob ably never happened: the “lesson of the three arrows,” a par-
able that Motonari illustrated by giving each of his three sons an arrow to break.
He then gave them three arrows bundled together and pointed out that although
one may be easily broken, three bundled together are impossible to break. Moton-
ari actually had nine sons (two of whom died in childhood) but most prominent
of them were the three sons the parable concerns: Mōri Takamoto (1523–1563),
Kikkawa Motoharu (1530–1586), and Kobayakawa Takakage (1533–1597). For-
mulating a scenario that could generate real drama, Kurosawa imagined trou ble
among the three brothers rather than unity and reasonableness. As he later told
an interviewer, “What might their story be like, I wondered, if the sons had not
been so good? It was only after I was well into writing the script about these imagi-
nary unfilial sons of the Mōri clan that the similarities to [Shakespeare’s 1606
tragedy, King] Lear occurred to me. Since the story is set in medieval Japan, the
protagonist’s children had to be men; to divide a realm among daughters would
have been unthinkable” (Grilli, 2008, p. 126). Kurosawa and two co- writers—
Hideo Oguni and Masato Ide— had a draft of a screenplay completed by 1975, but
Kurosawa would not be able to arrange financing for an expensive, large- scale epic
set in medieval Japan for another seven years. In the meantime, he painted story-
boards of every shot in Ran and made Dersu Uzala (1975) and Kagemusha (1980),
the latter of which he described as a “dress rehearsal” for Ran. In 1982 Kurosawa
fi nally secured funding for Ran from two sources: Japa nese producer Masatoshi
Hara (Herald Ace Productions) and French producer Serge Silberman (Greenwich