Imaginary Wish List: Akira Kurosawa

Making 30 films over a career spanning 57 years, Akira Kurosawa is one of the most influential directors the industry has ever known, directing titles including Seven Samurai, Kagemusha and Rashomon, and redefining the action genre with his epics based on Japan’s samurai era, paving the way for the popular Westerns that followed. Inspiring household names like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, critics argue that battle scenes in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy would have been very different without the Japanese director’s work. Shooting on many different cameras, he was an early adopter of 70mm (though he claimed to hate new technology) and edited on set to turn his films around quickly. In honour of Tokyo-born Kurosawa’s body of work, here's what we imagine he might wear behind the camera.