Miike Takashi Talks Japanese Horror, Extreme Violence, Audience Reactions: Movie Theaters Offered Sick Bags to Audience Members
Lauded Japanese auteur Miike Takashi sat down for an in-conversation event with longtime collaborator and producer Misako Saka at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he is also screening “Blazing Fists.” The duo discussed their partnership as well as the impact of the director’s work in Japanese and international cinema.
On 1999’s “Audition,” Miike said he still believes the film to be “terribly violent” despite not having “set out to make a violent film.” “It became a violent movie as a result of the main character and working with actors who wanted to release this kind of feeling. I wanted to support actors to do more — if you want violence, just please go ahead.”
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Speaking of actors, the director recalled working with Tadanobu Asano on the seminal “Ichi the Killer,” which, upon release, saw movie theaters offering sick bags to audience members due to the extreme content. Asano recently won a Golden Globe for best supporting male actor for his work on FX and Hulu’s hit series “Shōgun.”
“He has appeared in Hollywood [before] but always focused on what he loves, what he wants to do and what he feels he should do,” said the director. “In that sense, he has always chosen roles that actors usually wouldn’t, and he has lived his life that way. He is a unique person in Japan and I hope he continues to take on more unconventional roles and make a splash.”
Miike, who has directed everything from action thrillers (“13 Assassins”) to musicals (“The Happiness of the Katakuris”) and children’s films (“The Great Yokai War”), credits his wide-spanning work through multiple genres to a life of encounters with different people and different sources of art and creativity.
“[Films] come to life by getting opportunities to do things you never even thought of,” he added. “It’s about trying it out. By meeting various people, their personalities blend with mine, and diverse works come into being, so to speak.”
He continued: “When you stand on set as a director, you have a strong desire to make people in the world see you in a certain way through your film. However, once you start shooting, you become completely absorbed, and you don’t care at all about how others perceive you. In Japan, we call it ‘losing oneself,’ or forgetting one’s ego and existence, and immersing oneself in the work. Then, surprisingly, commonalities emerge, and the true self, the one that isn’t the self we are consciously aware of, comes to the surface. So, even though the various genres are different, I think that somehow the same kind of blood flows through the [work].”
Saka said that, from a producer’s point of view, in Japan the industry usually narrows down a genre and the target audience during the development stage. The producer thinks it is counterproductive for filmmakers to be so aware of the audience in the earlier stages, especially because audiences have “different sensibilities.”
“For producers to perceive the audience as a single entity, as a monolithic group of customers, is just wrong. If I were on the audience’s side, I would want [filmmakers] to create without thinking about [me],” she added. “I think it’s actually rude to consider the audience, so I try not to be conscious of them.”
Commenting on the current standing of women in the film industry in Japan — a notoriously male-dominated industry — Saka said there are “probably more women than you think” with numbers increasing every year. “On set, thanks to lighter equipment, there are indeed more women, and the number of female producers at TV stations and film companies has also significantly increased.”
Still, top positions such as heads of department and studio executives are still almost entirely fulfilled by men, a reality Saka believes will still need a few years to see change. “Older men are still in charge but there are quite a few women below them. In 10 years, it might become a world dominated by women.”
Asked if he believed to have been part of an “Asian Horror Wave” in the late 1990s/early 2000s alongside directors such as Hideo Nakata and Takashi Shimizu, Miike recalled how “when horror movies became popular in Japan, everyone was watching Hollywood movies” and filmmakers began to “rebel against that.”
“The feeling that only Japanese [filmmakers] could break new ground existed in the context of those times,” he added. “Filmmakers were creating their own space and, in Japan’s case, it happened to be horror. If in ‘Star Wars’ people were having incredible battles in outer space, Japanese directors were ripping tatami mats and fingernails apart. We don’t get budgets like Hollywood but we were pushing back and saying, ‘We, too, can make something like this.’”
“From a producer’s perspective, horror movies are something that can be made very cheaply,” contributed Saka. “When one of those becomes popular, there’s a phenomenon where it keeps gaining popularity, and I think that might have been happening during that time. In the past, in Japan, when it came to scary things, it was usually a ghost. At that time, I feel like there was a trend where women were considered scary, and the fear of their resentment was prevalent.”
As for “Blazing Fists,” which premiered in Japan at the end of January and tells the story of two young boys in a juvenile reformatory who join a fighting sports tournament, Miike said he wanted to speak directly to the Japanese youth. He observed that young people in Japan today “blame society and their parents” for their problems and, with the film, he wanted to say: “Don’t blame others. It’s up to you whether you work hard and step into the ring.”
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