![Ran: Ten Years To Finance And Fourteen Hundred Sui](https://cdn.slatesource.com/f/b/6/fb6eb9f0-5948-45e5-8c59-23043579318c.webp)

# Ran: Ten Years To Finance And Fourteen Hundred Sui

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/ran-ten-years-to-finance-and-fourteen-hundred-sui)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/f/b/6/fb6eb9f0-5948-45e5-8c59-23043579318c.webp)

## Ran (1985)

Kurosawa was seventy five and nearly unemployable in Japan, so the French paid for his largest film.

Runtime

160 minutes

Director

Akira Kurosawa

Budget

$11.5 million

Box office

$19 million worldwide

Cinematography

Takao Saito

## Lear Reassembled As Warfare

An ageing warlord divides his territory among three sons, the youngest objects and is banished, and the arrangement collapses into a war that consumes everyone including the innocent. Kurosawa took the frame from King Lear and the substance from the sixteenth century Mori clan, then changed the daughters to sons and handed the play's real engine to a daughter in law with a family to avenge. He painted the film in colour blocks, each army in a single flat hue, so battles read as abstract movements of yellow, red and blue across grey hillsides. The third castle assault is staged almost silently with only Toru Takemitsu's score, and the burning keep was a full sized structure set alight with the lead actor inside it for the one take available.

> In a mad world only the mad are sane.

journey·6 Scenes

# Watching Ran

Hope

/

Scene

The Hunt

Divided

"A boar hunt, a picnic on a hillside, and an announcement of succession that one son refuses to applaud."

Financing took a decade and finally came from Serge Silberman in France. Emi Wada's fourteen hundred costumes were woven and hand finished over two years and won the film's only Oscar.

Kurosawa's wife Yoko died during production. He suspended shooting for a single day and resumed. He was also close to blind in one eye and worked from his own storyboard paintings.

Kurosawa called it his statement about the nuclear era rather than a period picture, and the film's view of history is total: everyone who acts is punished, everyone who does not is punished, and the last figure standing is a blind man on a precipice holding a picture of the Buddha. It is the last of the great handmade epics, made just before digital extras made crowds cheap, and the hillsides full of real people are the reason it cannot be replicated.

[Ran on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?utm_source=slatesource)