The director who invented the modern action epic almost never made his masterpiece because he could not find out what a samurai ate for lunch. This episode traces the grueling creation of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai, starting in post-occupation Japan, where censorship of samurai films had just lifted and Kurosawa wanted to strip away the theatrical conventions of the jidaigeki. We explain how his abandoned day-in-the-life samurai project with Shinobu Hashimoto collapsed in the archives, and how a passing historical anecdote about farmers hiring masterless samurai became the seed of the film.

We go inside the six-week writing retreat at an inn in Atami with Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, who held veto power over every scene, the family trees and shoe-tying notes Kurosawa wrote for a fictional village, the three-month pre-production  ...