Takashi Miike’s prodigious output can be linked to two factors: the emergence of digital video and a reluctance to become tied to a single genre, showing a flexibility in style and theme that is unmatched amongst contemporary filmmakers. In the last couple of decades he has produced gangster films (the Dead or Alive trilogy) thrillers(Shield of Straw) horror (Audition) superhero movies (Zebraman) dramas (The Bird People in China), through to children’s films, fantastical films, Westerns, dark musicals and manga.
Miike began his career as an apprentice to the renowned director Shoehei Imamura. Miike was assistant director on two films Zegen and Black Rain. Miike struck out on his own making several V-Cinema titles, low budget direct to video product, made with considerable directorial flair. It was 1999s Audition, a disturbing female vengeance thriller that made Miike’s name and brought him to international attention. It highlighted key aspects of Miike’s style: an unflinching focus on the grotesque, a black sense of humour and a willingness to go down an extremely twisted path.
Perhaps his most representative work is the frantic yakuza thriller Dead Or Alive, which follows a lowly yakuza attempting to rise through the hierarchy as an underworld conflict between the yakuza and Chinese triads breaks out, while an obsessive cop tries to bring them all down.
Miike stretches the genre tropes of the gangster film literally to breaking point as the final shoot out between cop and gangster is so intense that the result is an apocalyptic planetary implosion.
Miike’s First Love from 2019 was a return to the formula of Dead Or Alive, with its battling yakuza and triad clans and criminals seeking to rise up the food chain. There’s a gentleness to it that seems more mature, yet there is a relish in cartoon-like violence that is as fresh and youthful as before. Miike’s love of mingling genres is on full display, from the action and gangster categories through to romantic drama and comedy, all underpinned by a multilayered narrative in which disparate characters and story lines coincide. The writer Masura Nakemura who had worked with Miike on several earlier projects is brought back and is largely responsible for the old school feeling in First Love.
Nakumara’s script revolves around Leo, a talented young boxer struggling to come to terms with a medical diagnosis that robs him of a promising future, and Yuri, a drug addict forced into prostitution, who is haunted by her abusive father. The plot turns on a stolen drug consignment which brings a wild assortment of characters into the orbit of the young couple: a yakuza, a crime boss, a crooked cop, and a vengeful girl.
In typical Miike style, the film rapidly transforms with caustic humour from brutal realism to high blown fantasy. Dream like fantasies abound, in which characters roam the night like ghosts, and the quests of the characters are dramatically punctuated by acts of extreme violence. The film swiftly develops into a major pursuit scene filled with bodies, followed by a big fight between competing gangs. It's gorgeously filmed and superbly acted, with hardly a dull minute. The symphonic soundtrack incorporates a jazz beat throughout the climactic scenes, to a thrilling conclusion, resulting in a bizarre, funny, exceedingly violent movie about true love.
After a successful showing at Cannes, Miike was interviewed by bloodydisgusting.com about First Love where he discussed violence in his films, the journey his career has taken, adapting other people’s works, and the experience of watching his own movies.
BD: First Love is such an interesting combination of ideas and themes. What about this story initially caught your interest?
Takashi Miike: “Absolutely. It’s a very simple story where there aren’t that many characters and some of the main characters are considered to be scum. They’re considered to be kind of useless to society. Then you have all of these people that have their desires and things that they want to achieve or obtain. From all of that, these two people fall in love, it becomes a love story, and everyone else kind of dies. But out of all of that death and chaos comes this one love story that will continue into the future, and I like that. I like the story. I like the idea. And so I decided I wanted to make this movie.”
BD: Was it a challenge to balance the romance and violence of this film? Were you concerned that there may be too much of one or not enough of the other?
Miike: “You’re right, there is a lot of violence and romance in the film, but I’m really not interested in objectively thinking about what the balance is like between them. The amount of violence is actually something that I don’t calculate myself. I actually kind of leave that up to the characters, so balance may be lost or completely broken in the film, but I think to some extent that can’t be helped because instead of me making the characters for the film, I focus on the characters in the script and I let them make the film. So honestly, I don’t particularly care if it’s a huge success or if there’s a balance there, but I just want to make a film that I like and I’m proud of how this one turned out.”
BD: I love the animated segment at the end of First Love. It made me think of the insane ending to Dead or Alive. Is it fun to sometimes make these crazy left turns at the end of your movies?
Miike: “Honestly, that scene in First Love speaks a lot to the current insecurities in the Japanese film industry. It’s because by the time that we got to that scene—and we added that scene at the end of the film in post-production—we were already over our budget. At the same time, there’s a big aversion to risks right now in the industry. Maybe there could be a car accident or something while we’re filming the scene. So because there’s an aversion to risk right now in Japan, a lot of the movies that are made are these big, warm, fuzzy movies that don’t really have any danger—like real physical danger—for the actors. So there are very few new stunt men that are being developed in Japan.”
“We could have said, “Okay, we can cut that scene because it’d be difficult to do with the current situation in the Japanese market. In a way, a car chase scene is almost clichéd for an action film, anyways.” But instead of cutting it, we decided that we’d find another way to do it and still honor that idea that was in the script. Now, if we had not filmed the movie in Hong Kong, we would have actually shot it, but we were, so we got creative.”
BD: That’s so interesting. To make something less physically dangerous, you turn it into what’s probably the most stylistically dangerous moment in the movie. On the topic of animation, a lot of directors struggle with bringing anime or manga series to life, but your adaptations are some of your best films. What’s so appealing to you about adapting anime?
Miike: “A lot of this can also be said about if I were adapting a novel as well, but specifically when dealing with a manga, when you’re turning that into a live-action film you’re doing that because you think that it’s just going to be fun. Or sometimes you read the original work and you’re like, “Okay, the original work is fun, so it’d be fun to turn that into a film while still respecting the intent and style of the original work and the writer’s intention. But at the same time, it’s more important for us to have fun with it than to rigidly stick to exactly what the original work was. When adapting someone else’s work you’re also freed in a sense because you want to respect the writer, but we don’t actually have that many meetings with the original writer—maybe just one “meet and greet” and that’s it, but what we do want to do is make something that the fans are going to love, even if we don’t specifically cater to them, but also a product that feels like it has my voice in it as well.”
BD: With the wide range of films that you have made, it really feels like you can literally adapt anything. Are there any projects that you’ve turned down out of fear?
Miike: “So this is maybe related to my experiences as an assistant director too, but what’s scary when you’re making a film is just realizing that it’s going to cost way too much money in some cases. At the same time, I’m not the one who’s funding the film, so I have to work within the constraints of my co-producers and sponsors. Now if they don’t think that we’re capable of making a certain film with the money we have, that’s fine, but what I try to always do is instead of cancelling or not accepting a project, I’ll brainstorm over modifications to make things cheaper, which usually also make things more interesting, too. We’re looking for a synergy there. A lot of people are usually funding these films, so we try to look at all of the possible ideas from everyone involved. Again, during my time as an assistant director I saw a lot of troubleshooting to pull off interesting ideas within budget.”
BD: You’ve done some very memorable work in the horror genre, but what do you think is your scariest film and why?
Miike: “I’m actually quite a scaredy cat, myself. Since a child I’ve been this way. I’ve even a little afraid of the dark. If I’m alone in the dark I’ll sometimes feel that there’s a presence behind me and I’ll even be afraid to turn around, but then if I do get the courage to turn around, I’ll just be scared that whatever was there has just jumped over to the other side of me. This sounds really silly, but as a child I’ve always been a bit of a coward so I don’t watch many horrors films myself. I personally think I don’t want to pay money to go to a theater to get horribly frightened! So even after I finish making horror films, I usually don’t go to a theater to watch them myself.”
“All of this being said, the scariest of the projects that I’ve worked on is “Imprint,” my episode from Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. Everyone kept telling me that America’s a free country and that I could really do whatever I wanted. It’s cable TV, so don’t hold back at all and make it as scary as possible. So I did that and then when I showed it to the producers in Japan, they were like, “I know we told you that you can do anything, but this is going too far. This is way too far.” We even had to publish this article in the New York Times apologizing that said that this was supposed to be a 13-episode series, but an episode’s been cut because it was too scary, so now it’s just twelve episodes. “Imprint” was definitely the scariest project that I’ve worked on.”
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