natalie 
Lucas struggled with just how to tell this massive sci-fi space opera on a personal and relatable scale, and he found the answer in director Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. Telling the story of a roguish general protecting a beautiful princess from an evil clan behind enemy lines, “the one thing I was really intrigued by was the fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters,” Lucas explained in an interview for The Criterion Collection’s release of the Kurosawa classic. “I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story. Take the two lowliest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view. Which, in the Star Wars case is the two droids, and that was the strongest influence. The fact that there was a princess trying to get through enemy lines was more of a coincidence than anything else.”
