Exclusive Interview with Takashi Miike

Amazing Photo Taken from Oddity Cinema's Myspace page

While I didn’t have the chance to see Takashi Miike’s spin on Yatterman, the ‘70s anime hero that many of you know and love, I will say this: the man knows how to hype you up. After talking with him and receiving some surprisingly straight-forward answers, I was pretty excited to catch the film and hopefully the boys at the New York Asian Film Festival will give me and my fellow New Yorkers the opportunity to bask in its glorious camp glow without having to risk bodily harm thanks to the vicious Sho Sakurai fangirls that apparently turned up en force for the film’s premiere at last week's New York Comic Con.

While I’m still not sure what comic Miike was talking about—crab western?! CRAB WESTERN?!—I loved his answers to my last two or three questions and the rest are pretty good, too. So face front, true believers because if you wanted to know what Miike’s favorite hard drug (note: I did ask) was, this may not be the place to find out, but it’s damn close!

Simon Abrams (SA): You’ve become notorious in America for making an average of 3-4 projects per year. With that in mind, why did you choose to make Yatterman and why make it now?

Takashi Miike (TM): When I first started, the people who allowed me to work in such a way that I wanted to work were making films released straight to video which would get a little bit of polish for a very small theatrical release. We worked with very low budgets but it was an environment where I could work exactly the way I wanted to and make the kind of films I wanted to make.

As time has gone on, the people I was working with got older and their careers developed. Now, we’ve gotten to the point where we can work with larger budgets but still the same way we used to when we were working on these low-budget, straight-to-video films. When a film gets to be made with a larger budget, there’s the impression that it has to be softer and more mainstream but with Yatterman, the people I’ve made this film with and I have developed (a relationship) to the point where we can create an environment for ourselves where we can make the kind of films we want to make while working with larger budgets. For us, it’s been a continuum of development.

SA: Unlike almost all of your other films, Yatterman is different in that it is based on a popular character that has an extensive history and following with fans. In the past, you’ve said that you don’t care about anticipating your audience’s reactions. Is that still true and if so, how has that influenced your take on the character?

TM: I wasn’t so conscious about what Yatterman might mean to other people but rather what Yatterman was to me when I was watching it as an 18 year-old kid. Back then, I was just another audience member. I know what I enjoyed about the work then so that’s something I try to stay true to. But I think what I loved about the show is not so different from what it meant to other people as well. Hopefully that will mean that everybody will enjoy the film as much as I enjoyed making it. As for kids today, I want to give them the kind of hope that they can do this kind of work and get paid. That’s actually a dream you can have as well.

SA: In the past, you’ve cited filmmakers like Shohei Imamura and Sogo Ishii as your influences. Yatterman however is a decidedly different kind of film than most of your previous other films. Who would you say influenced you while you made this film?

TM: I’m not the type of director that over-analyzes or over-thinks situations in approaching filmmaking. To tell you the truth, I’m still not sure I know what a director does. As a director, Sogo was different in that he was doing work that was unknown at the time and really revolutionized that. As for Imamura: the way he interacted with people and himself. His relationship with his films and his work were very different and I was very influenced by that as well. Beyond that extent, I wouldn’t say that there are a lot of directors I was influenced by.

SA: Your films tend to have a very disjointed sense of humor. After making films that make excessive gore funny in a campy way, how difficult is it to take a superhero protagonist seriously?

TM: It wasn’t difficult at all. As a kid, I grew up watching the show and the sensibility and the humor of the show, which is quite wacky in itself, I think influenced the way I grew up as an adult. Not that Yatterman is everything but it did greatly influence how I grew up as an adult. Perhaps if I didn’t watch the show as a child, I would be a very different director now. That’s something that’s been ingrained in me as a person and a director. I don’t think there’s a big gap there.

It is a superhero movie but there’s no action hero in the world like Yatterman. They are heroes but they don’t have superpowers. They’re not super-strong and even their sense of right and wrong is a little bit child-like so it might be a little bit off and not stand up to adult scrutiny. In a way, they’re a little bit confused, like children are. They’re heroes because no matter what happens, they’ll recover the next day. They’re still themselves. No matter how badly they’re defeated, a week later, they’ll be fine. He’s not damaged or traumatized by his experiences.

The message is that you just have to be yourself and live your life everyday and just be true to yourself. There’s no need to grow up and change and adapt to things that have happened, which I think is the opposite of a lot of superhero genres. This is really appealing to kids, the idea that you don’t have to change, that you could just be yourself. Even if you forget your homework, it’s ok. Just do it tomorrow and go to school and smile and say, “I didn’t do my homework.” That’s the appeal and the difference of Yatterman.

SA: The commercial and critical success of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight seems to suggest that if superheroes are going to be taken seriously, they need to be portrayed as being more realistic. Yatterman is definitely not a serious character; what do you like about this kind of more light-hearted hero?

TM: Yatterman was originally created 30 years ago and in a way, it’s a message from the adults of that era to their kids. That era for Japan was quite dark and difficult. It was not so long after the loss of the war. The economy was improving but it was still quite shaky. As a message from the country that lost the war from adults to these kids, who were losers, it basically says, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about that. For your generation, don’t worry about it.”

I think Dark Knight was made in a very different era, almost the opposite. Of course, it was made a little while ago, in a time when you could have dreams and have them come true but with unexpected twists and turns. At the end of every episode of Yatterman, there’s a big mushroom cloud, like from an atomic bomb. No matter what happens, even though there’s this big mushroom cloud, the characters say, “Ok, that didn’t work out, but next week we’re going to win!” They wanted to convey that sort of attitude because it was such a dark and difficult time for Japan. Dark Knight was created in a very different environment. I don’t think the over-all or underlying ideas are that different, it’s just that they were born in different eras and different environments.

SA: What kind of manga or anime has most influenced your work on Yatterman or any of your other films?

TM: When Yatterman came on air, I was 18 years old and the same company that produced it, Tatsunoko Productions, did Speed Racer, which was recently remade as a live-action film. That was very popular; every child in Japan watched that. Before that era, most of the anime that I grew up with were a lot of sports-related anime. The themes were about self-sacrifice, unending self-sacrificed and having to work very hard. There’s not a lot of fun in that. There was Kyojin no Hoshi: Star of the Kyojin, Tiger Mask. These pieces have very serious ideas.

I think I was influenced by them but I found them a little bit suffocating in that I might work really hard like they would in these shows but I didn’t always get the results that were wanted. Then, when I started to have these doubts about that kind of structure, Yatterman came out as a total opposite. Still, as far as things that I was influenced by, it’s really those earlier anime. They’re much darker in nature and much closer to The Dark Knight, actually. There an animator called Ikki Kajiwara and I liked his works very much.

SA: Do you follow American comics at all and if so, what do you like about them?

TM: There’s a comic—I don’t know the title. It’s made by the production designer of The Matrix films. It’s a crab and it’s a western?

SA: Um…that’s a hard one (laughs)! That’s one I don’t know.

TM: As far as animated series for our age goes, South Park is really popular and we like that (laughs).

SA: Oh, ok (laughs). I’m being told that I have one more question so I have to ask: what’s your favorite hard drug?

TM: (laughs). No, no. Um…my movies.

SA: (laughs) Your movies?! You’re not doing any drugs anymore?

TM: Not in Japan (both laugh).