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Director’s Cut: Takashi Miike
Director’s Cut, Torontoist’s series of TIFF filmmaker profiles, gives you the skinny on some of the legendary directors and more freshly minted masters at this year’s festival.
Name: Takashi Miike
Nationality: Japanese
Film: 13 Assassins
Program: Masters
Born: August 24, 1960 in Yao, Osaka, Japan
Selected Filmography: Audition (1999), Dead or Alive (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001), Zebraman (2004), Sukiyaki Western: Django (2007)
With over seventy productions under his belt over the span of a twenty-year career, Takashi Miike has certainly put in the legwork to become one of Japan’s top auteurs. Although he’s gained particular notoriety for his censor-defying tributes to hyperviolence, gore, and sexual perversity, Miike’s oeuvre runs the genre gamut from family friendly adventures to more introspective art house fare. His projects are nothing if not unpredictable; in his last visit to the festival he presented Sukiyaki Western: Django, which not only fused samurai traditions with spaghetti western conceits, but also included an English-language script performed by his largely Japanese-speaking cast.
Miike has been a perennial presence in the the festival’s Midnight Madness program, with eight of his nine previous visits landing in its late night lineups. This year the controversial cult hero graduates to TIFF’s auspicious Masters series, defying expectations by placing a director who once handed out barf bags at his screenings in the company of Ken Loach and Jean-Luc Godard. With that said, anyone who might doubt how deserving Miike is of such accolades would have to answer to his legion of devoted fans, despite their disappointment at losing the paragon from their midnight screenings.
The film set to mark Miike’s debut to the festival’s upper echelon of auteur is 13 Assassins, a historical film set towards the closing of the Edo period and based on a 1963 film of the same name. Thirteen unemployed samurai are enlisted to assassinate a tyrannical young lord, a story at least nominally reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Though word on the street is the film is more solemn than slasher, one can still expect plenty of Miike touches—particularly during the blood-splattered forty-five minute climactic battle.
Want more TIFF 2010? Torontoist’s complete coverage of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is all right here.