Hey folks, Harry here with another wonder rare interview from Anton Sirius up in Toronto... This time he sat down with Takashi Miike... the award winning filmmaker of AUDITION (Edinburgh Review, Brisbane Review and The Lovely Elaine's Review) and FUDOH!!! And now his latest film, CITY OF LOST SOULS (damn fine title) is beginning to first make the circuit rounds of festivals.... Here's Anton with a look at the man...
Takashi Miike Interview
Miike is the director of such excellent films as Audition (recently reviewed on AICN), Fudoh: The New Generation, and his most recent film City of Lost Souls. I sat down with him in Toronto and with the able assistance of a translator conducted this short (alas!) interview.
AS: I have to ask- did you suffer any sort of bathroom trauma as a child? It seems to be a recurring motif in your films.
TM: It’s actually a mystery to me. I never ask the screenwriter to put it in there, it’s never even in the script, but then we’re scouting, and then we’re shooting, and there I am standing, directing someone. It’s a mystery. But when you think about it, all over the world, we eat and we go to the bathroom. We don’t spend a lot of time in the bathroom, but it’s something we all share. It’s not like I’m expressing any particular message with that… I don’t know.
AS: It’s just a neat location.
TM: Yes.
AS: Let me make sure I have this correct for City of Lost Souls. The rights to the novel were purchased, and then you were approached to direct? You weren’t involved in acquiring the project?
TM: In this case it was a publishing company, Tokuma, that created the best-seller, and they went to their subsidiary corporation, Daiei, the movie company, and said ,“Make a movie from this”. It’s a relatively conventional approach in Japan.
AS: But I’m thinking specifically in terms of Fudoh, that there are thematic similarities- new orders replacing old, cultural clashes- with City of Lost Souls. But it’s just a coincidence that you happened to direct both movies?
TM: I think it functions more unconsciously for me. It’s not like I strategically emphasize something. But I think my interests will end up subconsciously emphasizing certain things in the screenplay.
AS: What preparation did you do for this film? Did Swallowtail Butterfly (an utterly fantastic Japanese film from ’96) at all influence how you approached this story? They seemed almost two sides of the same coin.
TM: Well, I did see Swallowtail once in the theater, and Iwai is certainly in a unique position in Japan, so I’m aware of Iwai’s work, but I’m not influenced by it at all. If anything I’m much more influenced my movies I saw as a child, and I don’t now, as an adult, go to movies to absorb things or learn something for my own movies.
AS: What were the big influences on you as a child?
TM: For me, I guess, in junior high and high school I wanted to see movies that would be more fun than anything. I wanted to be able to spend an hour and a half excited, more than anything else. That was my criteria for what was a good movie. I think also what I was originally drawn to about going to a movie was the actual physical process of paying your money at the window and then watching a movie in the dark. It felt like you were growing up. And I have tremendous nostalgia for that. But I can’t say that these days I go to movies strictly for entertainment. I find myself somehow changing. Maybe by choosing film as my work I allow myself to not have to grow up.
AS: There was a credit on City of Lost Souls, a special thanks to the city and county of Los Angeles. Did you do any shooting in L.A.?
(Incidentally, Miike’s response to this question had the translator howling. She prefaced this response with “You have to know Japan well to get the full joke…”)
TM: Yes. The opening sequence with the helicopter in the barren desert, the sign says “Saitama, Japan.” That’s really Los Angeles. There’s no such landscape in Japan- in fact Saitama probably has two million people in the prefecture! So yes I shot in L.A., but I shot it so you couldn’t tell it was L.A. Also in the shootout at the end between Mario and that other guy, in that tight, narrow alley, that’s also in Los Angeles. The one thing I didn’t want to do while shooting there is pull sort of the classic, “Hello, I am in Los Angeles” look with the Hollywood sign, etc. I didn’t want that.
AS: Was that a choice you made to reinforce the theme? Here you were a Japanese director, with Brazilian and Chinese stars, in an American city…
TM: I think that I wanted to stimulate my crew, and myself. I think the effect of that stimulation, of working with other people in another land, may not be immediately visible, but I think they’ll appear in the next film. It’ll show up in their approach to life and to work. I think you did see it here in the actors, though. They weren’t just doing another shootout as usual in Tokyo. So I think there were visible and invisible effects. Too often films are bound down by their subject and budget and place. If you free up some of the constraints in the script that are placed there by location you can have a much more open, airy kind of film.
AS: You speak of the freedom you felt on the shoot, and yet… I realize that the film was based on a novel, but you chose to portray the gangs- Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese- very stereotypically, almost comically so.
TM: I think what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to rely on the way the characters were portrayed in the original book. I didn’t want to push the actors back into their original roles from the book. On this film I used a lot of musicians and other people who aren’t professional actors, and I wanted them to have fun with the roles as they found them. So I’d say I was inspired by the original to create my version of a city of lost souls. Which probably appears quite differently to Western or non-Japanese eyes than it does to Japanese eyes. But I think between building a character and trying to create a film that really works, I am trying to move out of my own background and environment towards something new. I’m not quite sure sometimes where I’m going, but I think in my own way I was adventurous.
AS: What is coming up next for you?
TM: Two films. Both are large, both for Japan and for myself. One is kind of an ultimate violence film, very beyond the pale violence, and the other is a very orthodox period film. I’m developing both in parallel. The ultimate violence one is based on a comic that is considered so violent it’s harmful for you to read it. But I want to remove all such constraints with regard to… to make an almost unscreenable film. The other is completely is completely the opposite. It’s a remake of a very popular film series called the Blind Samurai, so it’s an updating of that.
Signing off,
