Takashi Miike
- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Takashi Miike was born in the small town of Yao on the outskirts of
Osaka, Japan. His main interest growing up was motorbikes, and for a
while he harbored ambitions to race professionally. At the age of 18 he
went to study at the film school in Yokohama founded by renowned
director Shōhei Imamura, primarily
because there were no entrance exams. By his own account Miike was an
undisciplined student and attended few classes, but when a local TV
company came scouting for unpaid production assistants, the school
nominated the one pupil who never showed up: Miike. He spent almost a
decade working in television, in many different roles, before becoming
an assistant director in film to, amongst others, his old mentor
Imamura. The "V-Cinema" (Direct to Video) boom of the early 1990s was
to be Miike's break into directing his own films, as newly formed
companies hired eager young filmmakers willing to work cheap and crank
out low-budget action movies. Miike's first theatrically distributed
film was
Shinjuku Triad Society (1995)
(Shinjuku Triad Society), and from then on he alternated V-Cinema films
with higher-budgeted pictures. His international breakthrough came with
Audition (1999) (Audition), and since then
he has an ever expanding cult following in the west. A prolific
director, Miike has directed (at the time of this writing) 60+ films in
his 13 years as director, his films being known for their explicit and
taboo representations of violence and sex, as seen in such works as
Visitor Q (2001) (Visitor Q),
Ichi the Killer (2001) (Ichi The Killer)
and the Dead or Alive Trilogy:
Dead or Alive (1999),
Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000)
and
Dead or Alive: Final (2002).
