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Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike
Agitator.
TheCinemaofTakashi
Miike
/
by Tom Mes
Foreword by Makoto Shinozaki
Afterword by Shinya Tsukamoto
Des& and Layout by Martin Mes
Addiiional photography by Paul Posse
CONTENTS
Foreword by Makoto Shinozaki
8
Introduction
10
1
The Dirt Bik:Kid
2 Themes in the work of Takashi Miike
3
The Video Years (films 1991-l 995)
4
The Outlaw Director (films 1995-2002)
SH~NJUKUTR~AD SOCIEP~
15
21
35
63
63
-SHIN DAISAN NO GOKUD6. BOPPATSU KANSAI GOKUDO WARS!!
69
+ SHIN DAISAN NO GOKllDb Ii
JINGI NAKI YAB6
76
PEANUTS
62
KENKA NO HANAMICHI -OSAKA SAIKYO DENSETSU
65
FUDOH:THE NEW GENERATION
JINGI NAKI YABd 2
KISHIWADA SHoNEN GURENTAI CHIKEMURI JUNJo HEN
RAINY DOG
FULL METAL GOKUDb
THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHlNA
ANDROMEDIA
BLUES HARP
KISHIWADA SHBNEN GURENTAI - B&Y6
TENNEN SHeJO MANN
LEY LINES
SILVER
WHITE-COLLAR WORKER KINTARO
TENNEN SHOJO MANN NEXT
DEAD OR ALIVE
AUDITION
93
103
106
114
121
126
136
141
146
149
154
160
163
166
172
161
MPD-PSYCHO
192
-THE CITY OF LOST SOULS
195
VISITOR Q
207
c FAMILY
216
THE GUYS FROM PARADISE
219
ICHI THE KILLER
226
DEAD OR ALIVE - FINAL
244
THE HAPPINESS OFTHE KATAKURIS
249
AGITATOR
256
SABU
262
GRAVEYARD OF HONOUR
266
KUMAMOTO MONOGATARI
275
DEADLY OUTLAW: REhA
260
5
-6
-7
-8
Stray Dog
lchi the Killer production diary by Takashi Miike
“I can’t pretend to know what I’m doing” - An interview with Takashi Miike
Filmography
299
305
337
359
Takashi Miike films available on DVD
Notes
Afterword by Shinya Tsukamoto
Index
367
394
397
398
DEAD OR ALIVE 2
200
1. The Dirt Bike Kid
Takashi Miike was born on August 24, 1960, in a countryside town on the outskirts of Osaka
called Yao. The town was a rowdy, working class area with a large immigrant population,
which mainly consisted of Koreans. The Miike family originated from the Kumamoto region
on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Before and during World War II, Takashi Miike’s
grandparents had been based in China and Korea (his father was born in Seoul), but they
returned to Japan when the war ended, settling in Osaka.
Miike’s father was a welder by trade, his mother a seamstress who also taught her
craft in a small school she ran by herself. His father spent much of his free time gambling
and drinking, typical interests for working class men of his generation.The image of masculinity
provided by his father held an attraction for the young Takashi, whose working class roots
resulted in an upbringing that was far removed from any form of culture. Miike senior was a
regular visitor to the local cinema, but didn’t take his son until Takashi was a teenager. They
went to see Steven Spielberg’s Due/.Takashi Miike later developed an avid admiration for Bruce
Lee, the only person of which he professes being a true fan.
Takashl Muke, age two, on his
mother’s lap. Clutching a gun..
CHAPTER 1 1 The Dwt Bike Kid
15
As a boy, Takashi spent much of his time
playing with animals. Blowing up frogs with fire-
crackers was a particularly favourite pastime.
In junior high he picked up rugby, which he
played for three years until he went to high school
and an interest in pachinkol and motorbike rac-
ing took over. He became part of a group of
friends who all shared a passion for racing
motorcycles. Accidents inevitably happened,
some of them lethal. “You would be talking
cheerfully to one of your friends before a race
and several minutes later he would be dead.Two
or three people would die in bike accidents like
that every year.“2 The loss of so many of his
friends was an experience that shaped him. “I
lost much, but at the same time I would experi-
ence many emotions from constantly being so
close to death. Just after an accident you feel
fear and you sense the danger of what you’re
doing. But probably because we were so young,
after one week we would really start to miss
racing. When I got back on my bike on those
occasions, it would be twice as exciting as normal.”
There was one guy in the group whose racing skills were far above those of the oth-
ers. When this person became a professional, Miike realised that becoming a professional
racer would be an unachievable goal for him: in a professional race on the Suzuka circuit,
he watched his talented friend struggle in the back of the field, achieving a result that was
average at best. “Twice I tried to race my bike on the circuit myself. Not in competition, but
just to try it out. It was really difficult. You need all your concentration just to handle your
bike, so actually overtaking someone is almost impossible.“Miike changed his plans and aimed
to become a mechanic instead, hoping to at some point join a racing team. But he realised
another thing about himself, which was that he lacked the will to make an effort to study.
Particularly the math and physics that were required for a mechanic in training.
Now out of high school and with no ambition to further his education, he was left with
only the adolescent desire to escape the clutches of his parents and lead his own life. Some
of his friends had opted to join the yakuza, whose presence in this working class area was
a part of everyday life. “It was quite normal for people to have a yakuza member in their fam-
ily, a father or brother for instance.” But Miike felt that even becoming a gangster required
too much effort.
The opportunity to leave finally presented itself quite by chance. “I was listening to the
radio one day and by coincidence they played a commercial spot for the Yokohama H6s6
Eiga Senmon Gakko [Yokohama school of broadcasting and films], which said the school
had no entrance exams and that basically anyone who couldn’t get into university could
enter. It really sounded like the ideal chance to escape home and do nothing.” Aged 18 he
left Osaka to study at the film school founded by renowned director Shohei Imamura. With
his parents paying for part of his tuition, Miike
settled in a small apartment in Yokohama and
found a job in a night club called Soul Train. The
club was frequented mainly by American Gls on
leave from the military base in nearby Yokosuka.
“It wasn’t a real job to me. It was a disco and I
got the chance to talk to the black soldiers and
listen to the music. It was fun, a lot more fun than
the school, in fact.” In his first year of film school
he attended only the first two months. The sec-
ond year he only attended two classes. “On my
first day at the school, the teacher wrote on the
blackboard: ‘The screenplay is art’. I thought:
‘What kind of place is this?’ It was so far removed
from what I knew, like these people came from a
different planet.”
It was at one point in his second year in
Yokohama that the school sent him off to work
on the production of a television series. A repre-
sentative of the production company came to the
school to look for a student who would work as
an assistant for free. Since all the other students
were busy shooting their graduation films, the
Playing with animals:
the local wild life.
five-year
school decided to sacrifice the one student who never attended classes. Literally plucked
away from his part time job, Miike found himself an unpaid production assistant on the set
of the television series Black Jacka. “Most of the crew on those TV series were salaried
employees of a production company. They had union rules to make sure they didn’t have to
work too many hours. After they went home, us freelance people would have to work really
hard to make sure the production finished on schedule. The regular crew were normal peo-
ple who had finished their education and were doing this as a job. Those people and the
movies they made were completely uninteresting. What they wanted most was to lead com-
fortable lives, not to create something special. When I realised that, it really put me off ever
wanting to work as an employee for a production company.”
The restrictions on employees’ working hours meant that there were many jobs avail-
able for freelance film crews, and Miike continued working on the production of television
dramas like The Hangman, G-Men and Tokuso Saizensen [lit: Special investigations unit
frontline]. Many of these series were produced by film studios and motion picture produc-
tion companies and over the years Miike developed a strong dislike for their employees and
for the film world in general. “We had to work so hard as freelance crew because the regu-
lar crew didn’t want to work in the daytime. And despite the fact that they didn’t have any
talent they were very arrogant. So I would make it a matter of principal to not work in film
and stay in television.”
For nearly ten years he continued to work as a freelance crew member on television
dramas, at a pace that he professes nearly did him in. he took an average of forty to fifty
jobs a year, working in various guises but gradually climbing up the ladder to the
position
of
AGITATOR -The Cinema of Takashi Miike
CHAPTER 1 1 The Dirt Bike Kid
A Japanese cowboy.
assistant director. But even for someone who had an almost militant pride of working in tel-
evision, the TV world started to lose its lustre. “After ten years in television I had come to
realise that the creation of TV dramas didn’t allow for much creativity. I worked for many
interesting directors who had made some very peculiar films, IikeYukio Noda, but when they
worked within the confines of a television series the results usually weren’t so special. In
cinema you had the chance to create something particular and unique. I thought it would be
an interesting experience to work on a project like that, with a director who was trying to put
his own vision onto film.”
That director would be none other than Sh6hei Imamura, the dean of the film school
which Miike had hardly attended. For his 1987 production Zegen, lmamura was looking for
three assistant directors to complement his regular crew. Takashi Miike started work on his
first film as third assistant director. After Zegen, he continued to work in film, as assistant
director to Toshio Masuda, Shuji Got6, Hideo Onchi and Kazuo Kuroki, some of whom he
Left:
Miike’s knowledge of motorcycles came in handy while working as assistant director on
Kono Ai No Monogatari
(1987).
Right:
With the crew of
Kono Ai No Monogatari.
Left:
On his first film, helping out the costume department
Right:
On the set of Imamura’s Black
Rain,
with two extras.
of ShBhel
lmamura’s
Zegen.
serious sums of money in film production. Most tried to get a piece of the fledgling market
for straight-to-video films, which had exploded in 1989 whenT6ei released Crime
Hunter( Crime
Hunter
-
Hikari
No
Jbdan)
on video with great success. Realising they had struck gold, T6ei
started producing films solely for the video market under their V-Cinema banner. Other stu-
dios and production companies followed suit and started their own line of made-for-video
films, mostly action films with a dash of sex and/or comedy modelled on Crime
Hunter.
This
wave of straight-to-video film production, known as original videos (OV) or more commonly
as V-cinema (the T6ei moniker quickly came to represent the entire phenomenon), offered
chances for new directors to emerges. One of those new directors was Takashi Miike. “To
these new, inexperienced companies, established film directors seemed too arrogant to deal
with, so they would ask the assistant directors to direct films for them.” A company called
Vision Produce asked him to direct
Eyecatch Junction (Top@! Minipato 7% - Eyecafch
Junction),
a comedy about policewomen in leotards who defeat criminals with gymnastics.
“It was a new experience to actually direct a film myself, so I agreed.”
During pre-production, two months before shooting on
fyecafch Junction
was to com-
mence, Vision Produce asked him to replace director Toshihiko Yahagi on an action film enti-
tled
Lady Hunter (Lady Hunter
- Koroshi No
Prelude).
Setting a pattern for his later career,
Miike shot the film within the two-month period before filming on
Eyecatch Junction Was
scheduled to start. Though released on video two months after his official debut EyeCatCh
Junction, Lady Hunter
was Takashi Miike’s first film as a director.
had previously worked for in television. He would work with lmamura again two years after
Zegen, on the Palme d’Or winner Black
Rain
(Kuroi
Ame).
It would also mark Miike’s first
appearance in front of the camera: he played a factory worker in two scenes (for more infor-
mation on Miike’s acting appearances, see chapter 5: Stray Dog). By 1991 he had climbed
up to the position of first assistant director, on Hideo Onchi’s
Shimantogawa.
It was the last
film he would work on in that capacity.
Around the late 1980s and early 1990s Japan’s bubble economy, the ever-expanding economic
growth the country had experienced since the end of World War II, was at its peak. The
amount of money available for filmmaking had increased thanks to the involvement of out-
side businesses. Companies that had no experience in filmmaking were willing to invest
AGITATOR -The Cinema of Takashl Miike
CHAPTER 1 ) The Dirt Bike Kid
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