Writer: Hideo Oguni

Hideo Oguni collaborated with Kurosawa on more than a dozen films including Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low and Ran. He was the oldest of the writing group and functioned as the structural check on the other two.

Kurosawa’s accounts describe Oguni as the one who would say a scene did not work and refuse to explain why until the others found it themselves. That role is invisible on screen and probably accounts for the consistency of the films’ construction.

He wrote for other directors throughout, and his career spans from the immediate postwar period into the 1980s.