SHOCK sits down with legendary Japanese director Takashi Miike to chat about his latest mind-bender, YAKUZA APOCALYPSE.
For those with a weak stomach and a taste for Japanese horror, merely hearing the name Takashi Miike might be enough to prompt an extended bathroom break. With just under 100 films to his name over 24 years of service, Miike might be the hardest working man in the Japanese film industry. Yet, a strong work ethic isn’t exactly why his name is so notorious. Nope, it’s his steadfast dedication to deeply disturbing viewers with some of the most unsettling images to ever come out of a deranged imagination. If you’ve been scarred by the insanity that Miike unleashed in titles like ICHI THE KILLER, AUDITION, GOZU, VISITOR Q or 13 ASSASSINS, then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If not, your eyeballs might be a little cleaner, but your life is certainly a little duller.
Though Miike has managed to maintain his ridiculous work schedule of cranking out 2-4 movies per year, he has settled down somewhat in his old age. Sure, his movies still pack a shock punch, but they aren’t exactly the endurance test of absurdity and grotesquery that they once were. However, Miike clearly had enough of playing polite last year when he announced plans to rescue Japanese cinema from boring productions and return to his rampaging roots in a tongue-in-cheek statement released before beginning production on the appropriately titled YAKUZA APOCALYPSE (read our review HERE).
The final film certainly delivers a high insanity quotient, serving up a surreal concoction of gangsters, vampires, rampaging children, torture-filled knitting circles, anime obsessed kung-fu fighters, and the most hilariously deadly felt mascot you’ll ever see. Though the gorehounds won’t quite get the geysers of fluids and gristle of vintage Miike, there are certainly enough wild ideas, bizarre diversions, and disturbing sights to remind everyone why he is one the premiere brand names in Asian extreme cinema. We got a chance to chat with the legendary shockmaster when YAKUZA APOCALYPSE premiered at this year’s Midnight Madness program in the Toronto International Film Festival. Please join us in this surprisingly subdued chat with one of the wildest imaginations of world cinema.
SHOCK: When you began production on YAKUZA APOCALYPSE, you released a statement saying that Japanese cinema had gotten too polite and you wanted to fight against that and cut loose. Now that you’ve finished the film, do you think you accomplished your goals?
MIIKE: I think that it turned into something weirder than I expected, but I don’t have any remorse about it. When something turns out exactly as you planned, it’s really boring. The magic of filmmaking is that things never turn out like you expect. My movies are never something that I feel like I made. I didn’t make it. It became. That’s the power of film.
SHOCK: Were you worried about diving back into type this brand of extreme filmmaking after so long and whether audience demands had changed?
MIIKE: Well, if the audience has changed then I feel like I have as well. It’s not really something that I concern myself with. I don’t worry about having to be one step beyond them. Actually, my producers always tell me, “You have to come up with something new. You’ve done this before.” But, I don’t necessarily think that making something new is always good. If I have an idea that seems old or like something I’ve done before, I won’t necessarily avoid it. I’m not the type of guy who is always looking for something that’s never been done before. That’s not where my focus is.
SHOCK: When you set out to make a movie like YAKUZA APOCALYPSE that uses the familiar tropes of vampire and gangster movies, how do you find a way to make version unique?
MIIKE: I think that when you strive for uniqueness, you fail. You can’t really make anything unique. Movies should evolve naturally. I think audiences are very shrewd and can see through obvious scares or an attempt to twist something well known. You can’t fake it. What I tried to do is take vampires and digest them through my own filter. That way, the movie becomes something unique because you can never replicate something directly. It always becomes your own.
SHOCK: What made you want to take two elements as benign as knitting circles and felt mascots and turn them into something sinister?
MIIKE: Well, my mother actually teaches knitting. So it was a fact of life for me growing up that there would be large knitting circles in my home. Everyday when I returned from school, I would see her and her students in a similar knitting circle. Actually all of the props used in the movie were from my mother’s students. So that was a very personal inspiration. As far as the stuffed figure, I’m a big fan of stuffed toys and figurines. But I think that even though people put a lot of affection into stuffed toys, as time goes by they’ll loose a limb or some of their stuffing with age. It starts out as something that you can control and love, but that changes and it can become something far more horrible. So, those two elements were personal elements in my life, which is probably how they became part of my film. With stuffed toys in particular, I’ve always found something a bit scary about them after they leave your control.
SHOCK: How do you walk the line when making a movie this deliberately strange? Is it tough to tell when you’ve gone too far?
MIIKE: I don’t really try to strike a balance. Once a movie is made, it’s made and if it’s weird, it’s weird. It’s more a matter of looking at what you’ve made and if it’s too weird, asking yourself if you have remorse about it. For me, it’s more like “Ok, that’s really, really weird, but it’s also me.” I think people are too worried about balance. The Japanese always maintain a sense of balance and equilibrium to avoid anything too extreme. I like extremes. So when I succeed, I succeed and when I fail, I fail really badly. If people think that I’m always failing, they might not want me anymore and perhaps I’ll be freed from the world of filmmaking.
SHOCK: Your films always have one or two really grotesque and striking sequences at the center. Do you start your movies with these sequences or do you tend to work those in once you’ve found a story that interests you?
MIIKE: When I set out to make a film, the goal is never merely to make a violent film. That’s not the point, really. The violence is just a result of how the characters evolve through the process of filmmaking. We tend to start out with a script that’s not that violent, but movies always take on a life their own when you flesh out the characters, depending on their personalities. Obviously that varies a lot depending on which actors are cast. But the violence always comes out of the characters and the scenarios. I don’t impose it.
SHOCK: It almost felt like there was an element of self-parody to Yakuza Apocalypse, where you were playing with things that you’ve done before. Was that deliberate?
MIIKE: Well, if there’s a sense of self-parody or me laughing of myself in the movie, perhaps that’s because I’ve experienced many successes and failures. Obviously, that will be reflected on my characters at this point. I didn’t consciously intend to do that, but if people choose to find that, it’s fine.
SHOCK: How does the schedule of making two to four movies a year weigh on you physically and creatively? Does it get exhausting or do you think it keeps you sharp?
MIIKE: It used to make me sharper to make that many films, but now that I’ve hit 55 I find myself losing concentration all of a sudden. I can tell that my body can’t take as much anymore, but I don’t think it’s all bad. What I do to supplement my own energy is bring in a younger staff. They provide the energy that I can’t. I think by making a masterpiece like MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. George Miller proved that just because a director gets old doesn’t mean that his movies have to.
SHOCK: What sort of movies do you enjoy watching? Is it the same sort of movies that you make or something that would surprise us?
MIIKE: If you were to ask all the film directors from around the world, I’m probably the one who has seen the fewest movies. I never watch movies as a reference point for one of my own projects. I’m never curious to see what kind of movies are out there. But, in Japan when they show a movie for the first time on television, they’ll play it all night long. So I’ll buy two big cans of beer and watch a movie that will let me enjoy those two beers. You might be disappointed to learn that a movie I saw recently and quite enjoyed was TED 2. I heard that the movie HARDCORE [Midnight Madness Peoples Choice Award Winner at TIFF] was really good. Did you see it? Would I like it?
SHOCK: Oh yes. That’s a movie for you.
MIIKE: Yeah, there are certain movies that you watch and wonder where they could have possibly come from. Almost like a mutation. That sounds like one of them and I always get excited for those.
(Note: This interview was conducted through a translator and edited for clarity)
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