A one-man league of deviancy, Takashi has made over twenty features in six years as well as numerous straight-to-video movies and TV miniseries. Last year alone he directed seven films. As well as Ichi the Killer and the final installment in his unconventional action trilogy Dead or Alive, there was Visitor Q – a low-key Dogma-style satire on family values featuring a lactating housewife with a debilitating heroin habit and a salaryman husband overwhelmed by deviant sexual desires. Another classic is The Happiness of the Katakuris, a mainstream musical with a cast made up of famous Japanese actors and pop stars that come off like a gene-spliced remix of The Sound Of Music and Dawn of the Dead.
“It’s the story of a perfectly happy family who find themselves burying dead bodies,” Miike explains. “But the cast will mislead people into thinking it’s a family film.”
The speed with which Miike works is largely due to his unorthodox entry into the film business. A former teenage tearaway from Osaka who cut school to cruise the streets on motorbikes, Miike simply saw filmmaking as a way to avoid getting a real job. He spent seven years working full-tilt as a freelance assistant director on TV series and straight-to-video fare before finally being offered his own shot at directing with Toppu Minipato Tai (which translates into the improbable Sudden Gust of Wind: Mini-skirt Patrol). Working on tightly scheduled, low-budget productions in an overcrowded straight-to-video market meant making the most distinctive product possible with limited resources. Miike’s trademark style is characterised by a cavalier attitude to plot logic and scenes that test the bounds of bad taste. In Fudoh: The Next Generation (1996) – an adaptation of a popular manga series about a gang of teenage Yakuza – maidenly high school girls moonlight as strippers with a unique act: shooting darts from blowpipes inserted into their zip-fronted, white-cotton panties.
“I don’t set out to shock people,” Miike maintains. “I just tend to see these things when I’m reading the scripts. Everybody else uses a similar amount of sex and violence, but in a cowardly and manipulating way. These guys are really cold-blooded because they’ll just exploit anything for effect, like the anguish of a small child or a parent’s despair. But I don’t see any point in emotionally blackmailing the audience whilst they are watching a film. For me, the most important thing is whether I enjoy making a film from the beginning to end, because I believe that if you enjoy doing something, it will be reflected in the final result and the audience can appreciate that as well.”
Ichi the Killer official site: www.whoisichi.com
Dead or Alive official site: www.viz.com
Miike Takashi’s movies are available in Europe through Tartan Video.