If you enjoy what you read below – we hope you’ll join us to read the full Visions article and the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Backstory was given the opportunity to exclusively interview the filmmakers behind four of the groundbreaking shorts featured in Star Wars Visions. Below, THE DUEL director Takanobu Mizuno and creative producer Jumpei Mizusaki detail their tribute to George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa. (Note: All answers were given in Japanese and translated to English.)
By Danny Munso
This short is in many ways a showcase film for Visions. Not only was it chosen to be the first in the anthology’s running order, it’s also the only one so far to be spun off into a tie-in novel released concurrently with the series. Produced by animation studio Kamikaze Douga and directed by Takanobu Mizuno, it is the perfect starting point. The visuals are a beautiful mashup of the classic samurai films of famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa — whose films directly influenced George Lucas, particularly The Hidden Fortress, which shares DNA with A New Hope — with iconic Star Wars imagery like droids and lightsabers. And all of it started with a simple drawing. After Kamikaze Douga was given the greenlight to pitch options for its film, character designer Takashi Okazaki produced a mostly black-and-white drawing of a samurai-like figure confronting a droid with his bright red lightsaber blade. For director Mizuno, the image sparked the entire story and visual look that would come to be “The Duel”: “When I saw the drawing, I thought it was so cool. It felt like it conveyed the concept very clearly. We then created the story based on that while paying respect to Star Wars and its origins in the movies of Kurosawa. Everything started with his drawing.”
“The Duel” sees a lone warrior named Ronin aid a small village invaded by Stormtroopers and face off against an evil female Sith warrior. In the middle of their battle, it’s revealed that Ronin is a former Sith himself who kills those who used to be like him and keeps their kyber crystals as trophies. Ronin’s motives for his actions are never made completely clear in the short, although the filmmakers themselves discussed all those details in great length. “We built up the character with a clear idea of his past, future and goals so that his actions and choices would be logical,” creative producer Jumpei Mizusaki says. “The story of “The Duel” is an episode that takes place on a planet that he visits while traveling toward that goal.”
Interestingly, Kamikaze Douga did discuss other story options before seeing Okazaki’s drawing of Ronin. One in particular is as far from “The Duel” as you can get. “We came up with a plan for a story about creative people in the Star Wars universe,” Mizusaki recalls. “There must be designers, composers, architects and others within that universe. Using the idea of the interior designs of fighter craft and battleships and the costumes of the Sith, we wanted to depict how those people battled against deadlines. But Okazaki’s character board for “The Duel” was so ridiculously good we ended up choosing that.”
The visuals of the short follow the tenants laid out by Okazaki’s first drawing of Ronin. While the majority of the film is in black-and-white, the more overt Star Wars elements are often in bright color. This gives particular visual heft to the buttons and panels on the droids and — especially — Ronin and the Sith’s lightsabers. The color choices reflect the entire idea they were going for, which is a complete amalgamation of Kurosawa and Lucas. “Takashi’s character design strikes an exquisite balance in this regard,” Mizuno says. “It underscored the whole concept.” In conceiving the grainy look of the film itself, Mizuno looked to two of Kurosawa’s most beloved works for inspiration. “For the texture of the grainy film, we were aiming for something in between Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai. We wanted to emphasize the impression of an old period drama so we decided that a texture between those two films would be ideal.”
Because the filmmakers felt they were being so overt with their references to Kurosawa’s films throughout “The Duel,” they also wanted to pay proper homage to Lucas’ oeuvre in subtle ways. A few of those examples play out during Ronin and the Sith’s battle throughout the village — at one point they end up on a log floating down a river as they face off. The visuals are a callback to the final lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in the middle of a river of lava in Revenge of the Sith. Later on, as the Sith is searching for Ronin, she taps her lightsaber against a waterfall stream gently — an overt visual reference to a small moment in The Phantom Menace when Darth Maul tests a barrier with his saber while waiting to fight Obi-Wan. “We made “The Duel” with a constant awareness of how Star Wars fans would feel when they saw it,” Mizuno says. “We paid close attention to the balance between the elements of Kurosawa’s movies and those of Star Wars.”
Mizuno admits there was a scene cut from “The Duel” that would have enhanced both the film and Ronin’s character. Before their climactic fight on the water, Ronin escapes the Sith and hides in a field of tall crops lined with what Mizuno calls scarecrow droids. “There was a scene where Ronin fought in a really sneaky way by hitting the droids one after the other [to distract her]. Cutting this scene diminished the concept we were going for of ‘evil against evil’ because Ronin’s sneakiness was no longer portrayed.” To him, this would have made Ronin’s fighting style less honorable than it appears in the finished short. Even though Ronin saves the village, he is, after all, an ex-Sith. The scene was cut to help the film’s runtime and studio staff workload. There’s a vestige of it in a scene where Ronin first faces the Sith. After he draws his lightsaber for the first time, he hits the Sith from behind with a broken droid using the Force.
“The Duel” — like the entirety of Visions — was produced at the height of the COVID pandemic. Like all companies, Kamikaze Douga had to adjust the way it makes films. “All our meetings were held online, so the biggest impact was the difficulty in communicating with each staff member,” Mizuno says. “It made me realize the importance of sharing information through conversations with individuals before the start of meetings. When it’s online, only one person can talk. The fewer the people, the more difficult it is to chat, and the sense of isolation tends to increase. I hope we can soon go back to how things were before.”
Read the rest of our VISIONS coverage:
Tatooine Rhapsody interview
The Village Bride interview
The Elder interview
Producers interview
Star Wars Visions is streaming on Disney+ now
Subscribing to Backstory gives you access to our entire catalog of back issues with tons of past Star Wars coverage including in-depth interviews with Dave Filoni and Rian Johnson, coverage of animated series like Rebels and Resistance, interviews with Marvel comic writers Jason Aaron and Kieron Gillen, and features with The High Republic architects Cavan Scott and Daniel Jose Older.
You can use coupon code: SAVE5 to take $5 off your subscription and get instant access! All you need to do is click HERE to subscribe!
There’s plenty more to explore in Backstory Magazine issue 45 you can see our table of contents.
Thanks for your support and stay safe and healthy!