How The World’s Most Creative People Steal and Adapt

Akira Kurosawa is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. The Japanese film director and screenwriter directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. You most likely saw two of his most famous films, even if not in their original form, the Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.

The first was reshot in the USA as the Magnificent Seven with Cowboys substituting for Samurai, although the story remained the same. His second film Yojimbo was reshot in Spain in 1962 and created an entirely new gene of a cowboy movie, the spaghetti western. Directed by Italian Sergio Leone, A Fist Full of Dollars was shot on a tiny budget of just $200,000 and paid its little-known actor just $15,000 as it catapulted Clint Eastwood into stardom. Spawning a trilogy that would later include a Few Dollars More and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.The first movie was such a blatant retelling of the original Japanese movie, albeit three thousand miles and three centuries removed, that Kurosawa’s production company sued Leone, which held up the films the US release until 1967.

Going deeper into the inspiration for the original plot, Kurosawa stated that a major source of his ideas came from the 1942 film noir classic The Glass Key, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. However, it has been noted by many critics that…