Japan Zone and Tokyo Graph have short articles on the recent University of Southern California screening of The Last Princess, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress that opens in Japan on May 10.

After the screening, Jun Matsumoto apparently commented that he modelled his role as Takezo after Spiderman (of the Spider-Man films), Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp’s pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and other “Hollywood heroes”. He added that he “wanted to capture the essence of Hollywood” with his performance.

Overseas releases for The Last Princess have apparently already been negotiated for Thailand and Taiwan, while talks with North American and European distributors are currently in progress.