MOVIE NEWS – We know that George Lucas drew a lot from the works of his predecessors, but an unlikely source inspired the friendship between R2-D2 and C-3PO…
Much has been written about how much George Lucas admired the legendary Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese filmmaker made 30 films in a career that spanned more than five decades, but very few made it across the Pacific to California theatres in the 1960s. Lucas grew up in the small town of Modesto, California, in the middle of the state, far from the cultural strongholds of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
By the time Lucas got to film school at USC, he had developed a taste for art films and discovered Akira Kurosawa through a friendship he made there. His love for Kurosawa led him to incorporate the work of the Japanese author into his own works. One of the most spectacular examples of this appropriation is the two beloved droids Lucas designed for Star Wars—R2-D2 and C-3PO—who come from a very unlikely source in Kurosawa’s cinematic oeuvre, The Hidden Fortress.
John Milius introduced George Lucas to Kurosawa’s films
Fortunately for Lucas, his classmate at USC was the excellent screenwriter and later director of Conan the Barbarian, John Milius. Of course, the first Kurosawa film George Lucas saw was The Seven Samurai. In his ranking of Kurosawa’s films, Lucas ranked The Hidden Fortress only fourth, but Kurosawa’s approach to storytelling in that film made Lucas fall in love.
“The one thing about Hidden Fortress is it did influence me in doing Star Wars,” Lucas remarked about his Japanese film hero in an interview.
Then he added: “As I was beginning to write the screenplay and put it together I remembered Hidden Fortress and the one thing that really struck me about it was the story was told from the two lowest characters… and that [film] was the strongest influence, actually, [on Star Wars].”
R2-D2 and C-3PO mimic Tahei and Matashichi in Star Wars
In Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, Tahei and Matashichi are kind of Dumb and Dumber in feudal Japan. They want to make a big buck when they sell their house so they can be soldiers – only to go on a sleazeball in a comical way. Still, the politics and black-and-white rigour of Kurosawa’s film struck a chord with Lucas. He absolutely loved the idea of a serious story about the tyrannical lords ruling the peasant class – only with a more comic twist – told from the point of view of a very simple duo of peasants.
In Star Wars, droids are quasi-enslaved members of society. But because of the influence of the Hidden Fortress, it was essential for Lucas to humanize these droids. This led to C-3PO’s staged Salisbury accent (courtesy of Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2’s emotive sound effects. Lucas used the same magic trick of C-3PO, essentially translating for the audience, speaking back to what R2 was saying (as did Han Solo and Chewbacca).
Humanized droid characters became more individualistic and human in films and popular culture thanks to the film. They are the only characters to appear in each of the first six Star Wars films, and for good reason – Lucas always wanted the audience to see the story through their synthetically static eyes. They may have been the most artful of Star Wars characters – but they were the most like us down-to-earth moviegoers.
Source: Collider
