By Phil Hoad
Translator: Zhu Puyi
Proofreading: Issac
Source: The Guardian
Translator's Note: In everyone's cognition, Takashi Miike always uses extremely violent films to spread word of mouth among film fans, such as "Killer A-Ichi", "Survival or Destruction", "Skin Love", and it is these films that challenge the limits of our senses that have made him get the attention of the West. His new samurai film, Infinite Dweller, is his 100th work.
The Infinite Dweller (2017)
This isn't his first time testing the waters of samurai films, as early as 2010, Takashi Miike remade the classic 1963 samurai film "Thirteen Assassins". In an interview with the author in 2011, Takashi Miike said that when he first watched 1963's "Thirteen Assassins," he was amazed by the sheer power of the Japanese film industry at its peak, but now that the Japanese film industry has lost the ability to make such a magnificent film, he wants to rekindle that creative spirit, so he decided to remake it.
The old version of "Thirteen Assassins" was only three years old when Takashi Miike was released, and this film is a classic of his father's generation. Takashi Miike loves the Humpback City series about blind swordsmen, especially the 1962 one, and a number of Films by Heroes of the Five Societies, which are a bit of a B-movie, but also interesting, calm and stylish. Of course, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai must be listed. Takashi Miike felt that no Japanese director could escape the influence of Akira Kurosawa.
The Thirteen Assassins (1962)
Known to the Western world for his extreme violence and border-breaking gore, The Japanese director Takashi Miike continues to hone his skills in genre films (including family themes) to reach the peak of his career.
Takashi Miike has never shown the posture of "I've made 100 movies", but rather, he is the kind of person who involuntarily stays behind the camera all day to study how to shoot "gangsters cut off other people's feet" shots. Now the respected director has come to us with his 100th work, Infinite Dwellers, and the former "saboteurs" have once again sworn allegiance to the traditional samurai films of Japanese cinema. Even the pipa, which represents the orthodox samurai piece, was replaced in Takashi Miike's version with a rude weapon double-cut stick.
With Infinite Resident, Takashi Miike is getting closer to the top of the list of "the world's most prolific directors". By the time you read this passage, he has probably surpassed the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (101 works). However, Takashi Miike may still need to make more Gonzo samurai films to match the directors of Casablanca who have made 175 films, Michael Curtis, John Ford (about 140 films, including many short films), and Jean-Luc Godard (much more than 100, but it depends on how you calculate the various videos and TV shows he made).
The era of Michael Curtis and John Ford was the early days of cinema, when feature films were much shorter in length than they are today, and in the prime of the Hollywood studio system. They work on crazy "assembly lines" and make such a number of films is understandable, but you wonder that such a number is almost impossible for people who make films in this era.
Takashi Miike's first ten works were crude video films, and it wasn't until the mid-nineties that he began to switch to film shooting, when he was able to make five films a year. He claims to shave his head every January because the days ahead will be too busy to get a haircut.
He proved to us that a large number of films does not necessarily mean sacrificing quality. No one can deny that there are indeed absurdities and imperfections in his work, and even in the relatively gorgeous Infinite Dweller, some of the clothes look like they were taken directly from the cosplay store.
But Takashi Miike's astonishing range of genres, including extremely violent films—such as Killer Aichi, Survival or Destruction, and Skin Love—has garnered him attention in the West. Not many people know Takashi Miike's identity as a recorder of the life of the Osaka working class (Kishiwada Shonen Fools: Wangxiang) or the director of a family entertainment film ("Ninja Chaos").
Killer A Yi (2001)
The unpretentious attitude allowed him to keep shooting. In an era when production committees dominated the film industry, or for the one-of-a-kind masters we worshiped—such as Kubrick and Tarantino (who said Takashi Miike would come out on top after 10 films), it was almost an out-of-place idea.
There is much more to say to continue this topic. This gave rise to the idea that "need is the mother of creation," which was the motto of Werner Herzog ( who made about 50 standard-length films ) .
Hitchcock's (53 films) filming process was more planned, and it may be that the average speed of making three films a year in the 1930s kept his creativity at a high level, so that he was able to effortlessly launch three classics in succession from 1958 to 1960: Ecstasy, North by Northwest, and "Psychopath", which had a major breakthrough in art.
The Psychopath (1960)
There's no doubt that a one-shot approach can inspire certain directors. Michael Winterburton refused to cling to fictional, documentary dichotomy, preferring improvisation and fluid digital photography. He obviously couldn't stop working on new projects — 25 feature films in 22 years, and who knows what his driving force really was. But when a creative director draws inspiration from some kind of spiritual source, we can clearly know where his driving force comes from.
Reiner Werner Fassbinder's unconventional life is inextricably linked to art, making 40 films in his only 37 years of life. Over the past decade, Ridley Scott has been amassing prequels to Alien like a tab with multiple web browsers open, and it's hard not to believe that death didn't rush ridley Scott, 79.
Alien: The Covenant
Prolific doesn't apply to every director, or prolific doesn't always work. You might have a feeling that Woody Allen, who has made more than 50 films, will probably not be able to make his most recent film.
As a young agent, philosophical thinking, picturesque European live-action shooting, and more production money, Terrence Malik has made more films (5) in this decade than in the past forty years (4), and he is more repetitive than ever, I am afraid that he has forgotten what the editor is for.
Terrence Malik
They should both consider taking a break or aligning themselves with Takashi Miike. There is no bad habit that a double stick cannot solve.