Writer: Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa wrote or co-wrote nearly everything he directed and considered the script the part of filmmaking that could not be fixed later. His method was collaborative in an unusual way: he would take two or three writers to an inn, have them draft the same scenes independently, and then assemble from the comparison.

Rashomon is the structural achievement, four contradictory accounts of one event with no adjudication offered, and it gave English a term for the situation. Ikiru builds its second half entirely as a wake, with mourners reconstructing a dead man’s last months in argument.

He also adapted Shakespeare twice, moving Macbeth and King Lear into feudal Japan for Throne of Blood and Ran, and both are more faithful to the plays’ logic than most English-language versions.