The three daughters from Shakespeare's play become three sons, so naturally a lot of things need to be swapped around, but surprisingly, I don't think there's anything in the original which Kurosawa doesn't integrate somehow. I'd forgotten how bleak the ending is - it's totally faithful to 'Lear'. 'Is this the promised end? ' 'Or image of that horror?'. There is finally, NOTHING left. All the more brutal as in my mind I'd already paired off the gentle Buddhist daughter-in-law and the good son (whose death is completely meaningless) to pick up the pieces... There is one difference imho. Whereas the central dichotomy of 'Lear' is order vs. disorder, K. makes it violence vs. non-violence, as most clearly epitomised in the characters of the two daughters-in-law. The elder's revenge is truly terrible, but intelligible, even morally satisfying. She is an instrument of karma or Nemesis, by which the King reaps as he has sown. All in all, a masterly adaptation - but I think once in a lifetime will be enough for me.

Made when Kurosawa was 75, "Ran" (meaning chaos) was the venerable director's version of Shakespeare's "King Lear", a project that took ten years to reach the screen and, at $12 million, was the most expensive film ever made in Japan. The film is less a straightforward stage-to-screen adaptation (Lear's daughters are gender-swapped to sons) than an examination of greed, betrayal and disloyalty to the codes of personal honour placed within a dynastic power struggle that finds bloody expression on the battlefield. Kurosawa has amply demonstrated his mastery of staging epic action scenes in films, such as "The Seven Samurai", "Yojimbo" and "Kagemusha" and "Ran" was proof that his ability to orchestrate epic slices of movement and colour remained that of a cinematic virtuoso. In 1985, French director Chris Marker produced an informative making-of documentary.