BBC article discusses the influence that Kurosawa's film The Hidden Fortress had on George Lucas and Star Wars.
Nicholas Barber, "The film Star Wars stole from," BBC, January 4, 2016, accessed March 7, 2023
It’s a brilliantly unconventional angle for a galaxy-spanning sci-fi adventure, but George Lucas, the writer-director of Star Wars, didn’t have to think too hard to come up with it. As he has often acknowledged, he simply borrowed the idea from Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic, The Hidden Fortress. “The one thing that really struck me about The Hidden Fortress,” he said in 2001, “was the fact that the story was told from the [perspective of] the two lowest characters. I decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story, which was to take the two lowest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from their point of view, which in the Star Wars case is the two droids.”
...
Lucas even considered Mifune for the role of Ben Kenobi, who had formerly been a general himself during the Clone Wars.