Who would've thought that a cue from Psycho, of all films, would end up in Star Wars ? Well, it did, here's the how and where of it.
Kurosawa was an obvious influence on Star Wars, but Psycho? From The Making of Star Wars (p266):
Hirsch did something similar as they were creating the temp track for Star Wars. "The scene where they pop out of the hatch in the Falcon, I laid in a very famous piece of Psycho music there," he says. "It was a three-note motif that Scorsese had insisted that Benny use in Taxi Driver. It was a dark, ominous three-note motif. Curiously enough, Johnny—I don't know if he did it deliberately or what—but it's now incorporated into his cue for that moment in the film. He's got the very same notes that appear in Psycho. they appear in Taxi Driver—and now they're in Star Wars.
In his biography, Christopher Frayling called him 'the first post-modern film maker', and as such Sergio Leone has had an arguably underrated and largely overlooked influence on Star Wars . A lengthy discussion of Leone's approach to film making, and how a samurai became a cowboy who became a bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away.
Despite being substantially older than Star Wars, the Hero's Journey, also known as the mono myth, will forever be a part of Star Wars lore. But did Lucas actually employ it to 'design' Star Wars, or did he stumble upon it, and only later use it as a structuring tool?
With a career stretching almost 60 years, Akira Kurosawa remains one of the most influential directors in the history of the medium. The pinnacle of his popularity however was perfectly timed with a batch of impressionable USC students ready to take on the world, and his impact on George Lucas in particular is the stuff of legends.
To this day, the most financially successful film score of all time, and arguably one of the most influential, John Williams' throwback to romantic adventure films of yore became a defining part of Star Wars, as much as if not more than any other part of the phenomenon. It too borrowed from the past.
