Takashi Miike

Japanese New Wave director Takashi Miike is making a name for himself in the west with his brand of ultra-violent movies

by David Fear | Published September 26, 2003

Takashi Miike’s Audition, which stars Shiina Eihi, is well-known for its “stick-a-needle-in-the-eye” torture sequence.

If it is indeed true that a moviemaker’s imagery offers a peek into his or her psyche, then the prospect of meeting current enfant terrible of exploitation cinema Takashi Miike should make one run screaming. The controversial auteur has made a name for himself in recent years by scarring screens with set pieces that often go beyond the boundaries of good taste. What does a journalist ask the man who’s responsible for the “stick-a-needle-in-the-eye” torture sequence in the breakthrough film Audition, the not-for-the-squeamish adaptation of the ultra-violent comic, Ichi the Killer, or the breakneck orgy of mayhem, filth and sex that is the crime epic Dead or Alive? How does one ensure that he or she will leave Miike’s presence intact, at least mentally?

What is perhaps just as shocking as anything in these jaw-dropping, taboo-bursting films is that Miike is not a deranged lunatic, but rather a shy, unassuming artist who reflects a Godardian sense of unflappable cool. Only once during our initial meeting did the stone-faced moviemaker come close any type of emotional outburst. “Oh, yeah, the ‘shit pool’ scene!” he chuckled when reminded of the infamous fecal moment in the first of the DOA franchise. “That sure was a fun day on the set!”

Like most things involving the rising son of Japan’s current New Wave, you never quite know what to expect with Miike. Looking over his rapidly growing filmography (some sources list Miike as the director of close to 40 features and TV shows… in six years!), it’s plain to see that concepts such as genres, labels or boundaries don’t mean much to him. He’s one of the few directors who can lay claim to both a sweet children’s film (The Bird People of China) and a sickeningly violent nightmare of sadistic hitmen and social psychoses (Ichi). Miike sat down with MM while visiting the Pacific Northwest to premiere Agitator, his latest tale of warring yakuzas, and one of 18 projects the prolific director has completed in just the last three years.

“It’s true, I’m not big on rules or being predictable, really,” Miike sheepishly admits when asked about his all-over-the-map aesthetic approach. “I don’t like being told I can’t do something, or that something isn’t right for a picture.” Indeed, his entry into the world of film was mostly accidental, based simply on the fact that he didn’t want a regular job.

“I was always trying to escape from the real world… I didn’t want to work as a businessman or any of that. Then I heard about the Yokohama Institute’s film school, which didn’t have any entrance exams, so I thought ‘Great!’ While I was there, I started working as an assistant to [TV director] Yukio Noda, then later for Shohei Imamura. Eventually, I was promoted to an actual director. It just sort of happened,” he muses, shrugging.

Takashi Miike’s start in TV and video taught him to make films quickly—and frequently. Sources list him as the director of 40 projects in six years.

Though he had apprenticed with one of the nation’s most iconoclastic and esteemed moviemakers, Miike’s real baptism by fire was earned by slogging through TV series and for-hire assignments in Japan’s shoot ‘em-and-ship ‘em “V-cinema” industry. Churning out low-budget yakuza epics and “pink” sexploitation quickies by the dozen, Miike slowly honed his craft working below the mainstream radar. “It taught me to work quick, because there was no money, no anything… There wasn’t a lot of time for thinking ‘Well, maybe we could do this…’ No. It was shoot! Now! Go! And that was a great way to learn the basics of making pictures because—this sounds like a cliché—you’re learning as you go along. It’s much easier to make up the rules as you go along that way.”

Just when he seemed destined for obscurity, one assignment that was slated to be a straight-to-video grinder called Shinjuku Kuroshaki (Shinjuku Triad Society) impressed the production company enough that it was granted a theatrical release. It proved to be Miike’s first success, and even got him a nomination for that year’s Best Director Award from Japan’s Motion Pictures Producer’s Association. “There are very strict regulations on what should go on TV, what should just go to V-cinema and what is good enough to be considered an actual film. So, when the film was released in the theaters, I felt very gratified. Then, when it was successful, I was happy.” Miike pauses, a barely perceptible smile breaking his usual stoic stare. “Very, very happy.”

Dead or Alive has its own logic. It’s also a great example of Miike’s golden rule: There are no rules.

Miike continued to churn out low-budget pictures that were rife with violence and outrageousness, but elements of black comedy, surrealism and even the odd moment of lyricism kept peeking through the breakneck pacing and outlandish imagery.

“I didn’t want to just be ‘that crazy guy’”, he says. “When I made Gokudo Kuroshakai (Rainy Dog), people were surprised it was so slow and pensive in comparison to my other stuff. Painters get to use all kinds of colors. Why not filmmakers, too? Why can’t I shoot on blown-up 35mm, then switch to a Sony VX digital camera on the next? I want to work with different kinds of stories, different kinds of people, different formats. I want to experiment with all of it.” Not content to be pigeonholed, Miike began to pepper his sound and fury with art cinema trappings from traditional and avant-garde Japanese film history. It seemed inevitable that he’d eventually mix the subtle and the psychopathic into one cohesive whole.

Enter Audition and Dead or Alive, two of his movies from 1999 that delivered on the promise of Miike’s raw, earlier works and introduced him to a wider western audience for the first time. The films couldn’t be more dissimilar in tone, but as representations of the director’s yin-yang approach to his material, one couldn’t ask for a better sampler platter.

Audition tells the story of a lonely, middle-aged widower who decides to screen potential mates through a TV show “audition.” One shy, demure young woman catches the producer’s eye, and he sets about courting her in as sweet a way as one could imagine. Then, as the gentleman’s conscience begins to nag at him, viewers suddenly realize that this doe-eyed gamine might not be quite that innocent. When a laundry bag in the middle of her apartment suddenly starts twitching at the film’s halfway mark, what started out as a blithe take on modern day romance mutates into a twisted psychological thriller.

Interestingly, despite much of the press praising Audition’s Hitchcockian methods of inducing suspense and a gruesomely explicit finale, Miike himself doesn’t consider the work a horror movie.

“The idea was to lull the audience into thinking they were safe,” says Miike of Audition’s deceptively calm first half."

“There are no ghosts or monsters, nothing supernatural in it, so I’m not sure why critics have labeled it as ‘horror.’ There’s nothing that couldn’t have happened in real life. I consider it a love story—it’s about two people trying to connect.” But how many love stories cause half the audience to head for the aisles before the end?

“Yes, but for the first 50 minutes, nothing happens. I did that on purpose. The idea was to lull the audience into thinking they were safe, then to just shake them. It’s an old storytelling trick. I wanted to just keep building the suspense, but you can only do that for so long.” Again, the faintest trace of a grin. “I mean, you have to give them… something.”

No one could accuse Dead or Alive, however, of not giving the moviemaker’s fans “something” from the get-go. Handed a ho-hum script based loosely on Michael Mann’s Heat, Miike turned a stock cops and robbers potboiler into a litmus test of how much a moviegoer can take. Throwing out several pages of exposition that he felt were “basically unnecessary,” the director decided to just cut directly to the chase(s): a gangster snorts a pound of cocaine, two male lovers are assassinated in a men’s restroom, a prostitute is thrown out a window, the remnants of a crimelord’s dinner are shotgun-blasted onto the screen and a clown entertains club patrons with a knife-throwing act. Welcome to DOA’s first five minutes.

After its slam-bang opening, the story settles into a typical story of a power-hungry mobster (Riki Takeuchi) and the policeman (Rainy Dog’s Sho Aikawa) who vows to take him down. Surreal moments start popping up here and there (a hit during a yakuza dinner prominently involves a man dressed in a bird suit). Then Miike drops the final bomb on audiences, in the form of a climax that takes the entire action genre to its inevitable vanishing point.

It seems there is nothing Takashi Miike can’t do. Except, perhaps, gain a foothold in Hollywood...

Much has been made of Dead or Alive’s fantastic, apocalyptic ending, an idea that came to Miike on set the same day he shot it, because “the original ending seemed so boring. Again, I knew it needed something different. Both Sho and Riki liked the idea, and I had some friends who could do CGI effects cheap, so we did it that way instead.” So many previous interviewers still apparentlys don’t get the joke that he’s vowed never to “explain” it again. “It is the end,” is the only thing he can say on the subject. “It has its own logic.”

It’s also a great example of Miike’s golden moviemaking rule: There are no rules.

Almost every movie he’s made since Dead or Alive has followed the pattern of a complete 180 degree turn—the multicultural stew of sordid romance that is The City of Lost Souls (2000); his masterpiece of family dysfunction Visitor Q (2001); the Godfather-style gangster epic Agitator (2001); a black comedy featuring animated musical numbers entitled The Happiness of the Katukuris (2001); and a remake of the late Kinji Fukasaku’s classic Graveyard of Honor.

It seems as if there is nothing Takashi Miike can’t do. Except, perhaps, gain a foothold in Hollywood.

An offer to direct the first movie for Francis Ford Coppola and Wayne Wang’s Chrome Dragon production company fell through, and his dream project of redoing the legendary blind swordsman Zatoichi tales that was to be co-funded with American money also fell victim to schedule conflicts. (Japanese jack-of-all-trades Takeshi “Beat” Kitano is currently filming the remake). Still, Miike is content to churn out six or seven pictures a year in Japan. (When asked by a festival patron how he manages to be so prolific, he merely deadpans “Well, if I don’t work, they don’t pay me.”) He’s managed to thrive creatively in what’s traditionally been a conservative film industry.

“I have had a few run-ins with the censors, especially with some of Ichi’s more, ah, extreme scenes. Mostly though, I don’t worry about censorship. I mean, the films have an ‘adult’ rating. Kids shouldn’t be going to them, anyway! I never let that affect how I make my movies.”

Miike does seem to be on the brink of becoming better known outside his native country. Much of his prodigious back catalog is finally getting a proper DVD release in America and Europe and the first full-length study of his work, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike by Tom Mes, was just released by Britain’s FAB Press (www.fabpress.com).

Speaking with him over the phone on the eve of premiering his latest fantasy-horror hybrid, Gozu, a favorite at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Takashi Miike seemed happy enough that he still gets to make movies.

“I make these movies for Japanese audiences, so when anybody outside of Japan sees them at festivals and likes them, I’m extremely gratified. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve pushed the limits on things, but people still come to see them. The moviegoers even let me fail once in a while. But I like failure. It’s necessary for change.” MM

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