Japanese director Miike Takashi's new film Ace Attorney has its world premiere at the IFFR. He discusses his prolific career with Geoffrey Macnab
Miike Takashi pauses for a moment as he tots up the numbers in his head. He finally calculates that his tally (including the smaller works) is more than one hundred films.
The latest,
Ace Attorney, had a world premiere this week in IFFR’s Spectrum, renewing an acquaintanceship with the festival that began when his Grand Guignol masterpiece
Audition screened here in 2000. (“Rotterdam was where I first screened
Audition outside of Japan, and that was my break with European audiences.”)
“It’s not about the quantity,” the director says of his immense filmography. “It’s just a natural development of the way I’ve been making movies. When I compare myself to others, I don’t wonder why I make that many movies – I rather wonder why they don’t make more!”
Perhaps, he speculates, other directors have a stronger sense of their own identity. “They have their own ideals and their own style. If they’re confronted with a budget with which they think they can’t make their own film, they’ll decline it. If they’re being told to make a love story, they’ll say that is not their kind of genre and decline it. In sharp contrast, I take it on! Even if the budget is very, very low, I’d rather see it as a challenge… I don’t have that very strong sense of a personal style.” He quickly adds that he believes he always manages to “keep something of my own in there” when he is making a new movie. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to do his job.
Miike’s films range in budget from
Visitor Q, a full-blown feature made in 2001 for less than $100,000, to the biggish-budget
Yatterman (2009), an animé-based action adventure. He doesn’t have any hankering to make a film in Hollywood, with a Hollywood budget, however: “That can be mind-wrecking.”
Ace Attorney is a harum-scarum courtroom satire, adapted from a video game and made in the genre-bending style audiences have begun to expect from the maverick auteur. Does Miike have any experience of the Japanese legal system himself? “Not directly,” the director states as he looks back on what was, by all accounts, a very wild youth. “But when I was working as an assistant director for TV drama, we went to the court to watch. It was very inspiring. It was a lot more real than courts tend to be in dramas. The crimes were much more extreme and much more cruel. You really get a very close-to-life picture of what man is. In that sense, it is very dramatic and also very entertaining.”
Miike acknowledges he enjoys the enthusiastic response his movies have elicited from Western admirers such as Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth. However, he also points out that his films have always been aimed primarily at Japanese viewers. “It is very nice when people from outside show interest toward this very Japanese product. Of course, there are also people out there who like it because it is Japanese… we’re making films for Japan, for Japanese audiences. Maybe way back, directors could make their own films, but now we’re more and more in a situation where we are making films demanded by the market.”
In recent years, Miike has worked twice with Oscar-winning British producer Jeremy Thomas (of Last Emperor fame): on samurai epic
Thirteen Assassins (2010) and on
Hara-Kiri: Death of A Samurai (2011). Thomas initiated the collaboration. A “rather old man” in the corner of a bar in Venice waved at Miike, the director remembers, summoned him over and told him that he had bought a book he wanted him to direct. Working with the veteran Brit wasn’t so different from working with Japanese producers. “It’s not that he has his own point of view which is very influenced by the British way of looking at things. He wants to make films from the Japanese point of view… he is very exceptional. He has a huge knowledge of Asia that even I learn from.”
As for future projects, Miike is a little coy. One film he has almost completed is a “youth violence drama” called
Ai To Makato. Various others are on the boil. “But you shouldn’t ask too much about future projects,” he chides. “You never know what is going to happen. Maybe I’ll return to Japan from Rotterdam – and all my projects may be gone!”
More about Ace Attorney
here.