The Japanese director whose influence on Western cinema is so complete that Western cinema is, in part, his work.
Akira Kurosawa directed thirty features across fifty-five years. He is — alongside Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi — one of the three Japanese filmmakers most responsible for establishing Japanese cinema as a global force after World War II. He won the Academy Honorary Award in 1990; he was nominated for Best Director once (for Ran in 1985); his Dersu Uzala won Best Foreign Language Film in 1976.
Kurosawa worked under the studio system at Toho until 1965 and then in independent and international co-productions, including a partnership with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola that funded Kagemusha (1980) when Japanese studios refused to back the production. Several of his films have been remade in the West: Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven (1960); Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars (1964); The Hidden Fortress directly influenced Star Wars (1977).
His influence on Western cinema is so total that it is sometimes difficult to perceive. The American Western, the modern war film, the multi-camera battle sequence, the use of weather as moral atmosphere — almost all of these owe Kurosawa specific debts.
Kurosawa is widely credited with popularising the multi-camera technique for action sequences. He would set up three or more cameras at varying focal lengths and let action play out in front of all of them, producing coverage that could be cut together into action sequences with unusual continuity and geographic clarity.
Seven Samurai's climactic battle sequence — fought in rain across forty minutes of screen time — was filmed with this technique. The result is a battle sequence that, despite being filmed in 1954, remains the model that most subsequent large-scale action sequences have been measured against. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy both directly cite Kurosawa's blocking and coverage.
Kurosawa used rain, wind, fog, and snow as integral parts of his compositions in ways that classical Hollywood largely did not. The rain in Seven Samurai's final battle. The fog in Throne of Blood. The dust in Yojimbo's final showdown. Weather is, in his frame, never decorative — it is doing the same work that lighting or sound does.
The technique is expensive and operationally difficult. Crews had to flood sets, pump out fog, dump truckloads of dust. Kurosawa earned a reputation as a perfectionist tyrant on this account. Rain machines stayed on for full takes that ran multiple times; actors performed entire battles in genuine cold weather. The verisimilitude is the point.
Kurosawa's compositions are densely layered. He preferred long lenses, which compressed depth and allowed characters at multiple distances to be in focus together. A typical Kurosawa frame might have characters at four or five planes of action simultaneously — foreground, mid-foreground, mid-ground, background, far background — all readable.
This is the visual technique most directly inherited by Western directors. Steven Spielberg's depth-of-staging in his historical dramas (Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln) is, in its compositional logic, Kurosawan. So is Ridley Scott's. So is Denis Villeneuve's Dune. The Kurosawa frame is one of the most-quoted visual approaches in 21st-century cinema.
If you've never watched a Kurosawa film:
John Ford (Kurosawa was open about Ford's influence; the two met and exchanged warm correspondence), Dostoevsky and Shakespeare (Throne of Blood is Macbeth, Ran is Lear, The Idiot adapts the novel), Sergei Eisenstein, and the visual tradition of the kabuki theatre. Kurosawa's influence on Western directors — Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola — is in turn so direct that the influence-chain is now self-referential.