Lucas and Coppola just helped pay for Kagemusha, since Kurosawa was at that point just starting to re-couperate from an all-time career low (which included his suicide attempt in 1973). The film is dazzling in moments and visually stunning but overall pretty boring. Its significance, however, is that it was essentially a testing run for Ran, perhaps Kurosawa's largest masterpiece, in 1985.