Museum Home   The Last Samurai: Navigable Panoramas   Production Design for The Last Samurai   About Production Design   The 360° Image   About Digital Navigable Panoramas

Production Design for The Last Samurai The Last Samurai is a remarkable visual achievement. It presents an historically accurate and dramatically compelling vision of Meiji-period Japan, realized through superlative production design, costume design, and cinematography. Production designer Lilly Kilvert was responsible for this painstakingly accurate and beautifully detailed recreation of late-1870s Japan. Kilvert supervised an art department that worked on three continents. In addition to utilizing several historic locations in Japan, Kilvert and her team built a bustling Ginza-district Tokyo street on a Burbank studio backlot, and constructed a Japanese country village in rural New Zealand. Kilvert used books, photographs, drawings, and documents to conduct extensive research about 19th-century Japanese architecture and landscape, and nearly every item in the film was either built from scratch or found in antique shops in Japan and Los Angeles. The production design work on the film included farming; trees and flowers were grown in the New Zealand countryside, and vegetables, soy beans, rice, and tobacco were planted in the samurai village, which included thirty buildings made from wood, bamboo, plaster, and stone. Kilvert set out to show a Japan in flux, balancing age-old traditions and modern influences from the West. The challenge was to design sets that were not only realistic, but were also photographable. In some cases, architectural license was taken to allow for clean, dynamic compositions. Kilvert has worked on a wide range of contemporary and period films. Before The Last Samurai, she designed two films for director Ed Zwick: The Siege, a contemporary drama about a terrorist attack on New York City, and Legends of The Fall, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. Other credits include four films for Rob Reiner (The American President, The Story of Us, The Ghosts of Mississippi, and The Sure Thing), Kathryn Bigelow's futuristic thriller Strange Days, Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fire, and Nicholas Hytner's The Crucible. Copyright 2003, American Museum of the Moving Image

Center village from The Last Samurai Tokyo street from The Last Samurai