Takashi Miike (三池 崇史, Miike Takashi?) (born August 24, 1960) is a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker. He has directed over seventy theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. In the years 2001 and 2002 alone, Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions.
Miike was born in Yao, Osaka, Japan. Although he claimed to have attended classes only rarely, he graduated from Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (Yokohama Hoso Eiga Senmon Gakko) under the guidance of renowned filmmaker Shohei Imamura, the founder and Dean of that institution.
Miike's first films were television productions, but he also began directing several direct-to-video V-Cinema releases. (These were purportedly financed as money-laundering operations for the yakuza, although there has never been any conclusive proof of this.) Miike still directs V-Cinema productions intermittently due to the creative freedom afforded by the less stringent censorship of the medium and the riskier content that the producers will allow.
Many people mistakenly believe that Miike's theatrical debut was Shinjuku Triad Society (1995), but the film The Third Gangster (Daisan no gokudô) was actually in the cinema some months before. However it was Shinjuku Triad Society that was the first of his theatrical releases to gain public attention. The film showcased his extreme style and his recurring themes, and its success gave him the freedom to work on higher-budgeted pictures. Shinjuku Triad Society is also the first film in what is labeled his "Black Society Trilogy", which also includes Rainy Dog (1997) and Ley Lines (1999). He gained international fame in 2000 when his romantic horror film Audition (1999) and his violent yakuza epic Dead or Alive (1999) played at international film festivals. He has since gained a strong cult following in the West that is growing with the increase in DVD releases of his works.
Miike has garnered international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes of extreme violence and bizarre sexual perversions. Many of his films contain graphic and lurid bloodshed, often portrayed in an over-the-top, cartoonish manner. Much of his work depicts the activities of criminals (especially yakuza) or concern themselves with non-Japanese living in Japan. He is known for his black sense of humor and for pushing the boundaries of censorship as far as they will go.
It should be noted that, despite his somewhat notorious reputation, Miike has also proven himself to be capable of directing lighthearted children's films (Zebraman, The Great Yokai War), touching period pieces (Sabu), and subdued, moving pictures such as the road movie The Bird People in China. Even in his more violent work, he is given to moments of surprising sentimentality, as in Dead or Alive 2. His dabbling in every sort of genre and emotional range is a testament to his versatility as a director, though a lot of his output is genre-defying. For example, The Happiness of the Katakuris is an unconventional farcical musical-comedy-horror involving bizarre claymation sequences, zombies and b-movie pastiches.
Other less controversial works include Ley Lines and Agitator, character-driven, serious crime dramas. Graveyard of Honor (2002) is a remake of the 1975 Kinji Fukasaku film by the same name. Andoromedeia, perhaps one of his less renowned films, is a teen drama starring the J-pop girl-band SPEED.
Critics have sometimes noted the puzzling discrepancy of Miike's artistic development noting that he appears to be simultaneously becoming more radical and more mainstream a director. Films like One Missed Call and The Great Yokai War are his most commercial works to date while films like Izo and the "Box" segment in Three... Extremes are less accessible and target arthouse audiences and fans of extreme cinema.
Despite Miike's voluminous output, it would be erroneous to consider him a dilettante or a director for hire. Academics have recognized Miike as an auteur, noting much depth as well as stylistic and thematic consistency in his body of work. Recurring themes and imagery in his work include reincarnation, birds, family, chaos and order. Films like Visitor Q and Izo are highly philosophical beneath their violent, taboo-laden exterior. This mingled with his imaginative and often idiosyncratic cinematography makes his work instantly recognizable regardless of the genre he works in.
One of his most controversial films was the ultra-violent Ichi the Killer (2001), adapted from a manga of the same name and starring Tadanobu Asano as a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer. The extreme violence was initially exploited to promote the film: during its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, the audience received "barf bags" emblazoned with the film's logo as a promotional gimmick (one typically flamboyant gory killing involves a character slicing a man in half from head to groin, and severing another's face, which then slides down a nearby wall).
However, the British Board of Film Classification refused to allow the release of the film uncut in Britain, citing its extreme levels of sexual violence towards women. In Hong Kong, 15 minutes of footage was cut. In the United States it has been shown uncut (unrated). An uncut DVD was also released in the Benelux.
In 2005, Miike was invited to direct an episode of the Masters of Horror anthology series. The series, featuring episodes by a range of established horror directors such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento, was supposed to provide directors with relative creative freedom and relaxed restrictions on violent and sexual content (Some violent content was edited from the Dario Argento-directed episode Jenifer). However, when the Showtime cable network acquired the rights to the series, the Miike-directed episode Imprint was deemed too disturbing for the network. Showtime cancelled it from the broadcast lineup even after extended negotiations, though it was retained as part of the series' DVD release. Mick Garris, creator and executive producer of the series, described the episode as "amazing, but hard even for me to watch... definitely the most disturbing film I've ever seen".
"While Imprint has yet to air in the United States, it has aired on Bravo in the UK and on FX in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, The Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela. Anchor Bay Entertainment, which has handled the DVD releases for the Masters of Horror series in the US, released Imprint on R1 DVD on September 26, 2006. American guitarist Buckethead made a song for his album, Pepper's Ghost titled "Imprint (Dedicated to Takashi Miike)."
Miike is almost never publicly seen without wearing sunglasses.
He wrote the foreword to Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto by Tom Mes and provided a commentary for his segment "Box" from the film "Three Extremes" on the Region 1 DVD release.
Miike claims that Starship Troopers is his favorite movie. He admires film directors David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Paul Verhoeven.
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In 2005 Takashi Miike directed a Kabuki style stage-play entitled Demon Pond. The DVD recording of this has been released by Cinema Epoch.
"I go to the dentist, not a shrink." (interview with Daniel Robert Epstein)
"Me, a 'Master of Horror'? I'm the guy that made 'Salaryman Kintarō'!" (Miike about his movie for the Masters of Horror series).
