“I’m a very lazy person by nature”: more than 100 films in, Takashi Miike is anything but

At time of writing, Christopher Nolan has directed 12 movies. Martin Scorsese has 26 feature films to his name, Steven Spielberg has 34, and Clint Eastwood has a whopping 39. This is all very impressive, but, compared to Takashi Miike, all of these legendary filmmakers are rank amateurs.

The Japanese director has released over 100 movies across his career, which only began in 1991. The 64-year-old is perhaps best known for the brutal horror Audition, about a man trying to find love who ends up in the clutches of a sadistic torturer. His other major projects include Ichi the Killer, which is based on a manga series about a Yakuza enforcer, and 13 Assassins, a samurai drama set during the fall of Japan’s feudal age. Recently, he has helmed movies inspired by major franchises, including a live-action adaptation of the popular manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and a film in the Great Yokai War series.

Whilst promoting his 100th film, 2017’s Blade of the Immortal, Miike spoke to The Skinny and summed himself up in one surprising word. “I’m a very lazy person by nature,” he said. “Making a film, with one scene you have to move on in order to shoot the following day; move on and carry on doing things, and I think if you’re really dedicated in personality, you spend so much energy on one thing, so it’s probably difficult to move on and carry on. I think, by nature, for making films, you need to have a certain level of laziness to just let go, for the filmmaking process to work.” So, in summary, even when he’s being ‘lazy’ Miike is actually serving the greater good.

Miike’s work is often identifiable by its insane level of violence. Sometimes, this is played straight, but it is often used for comedic effect. His 2001 film The Happiness of the Katakiris is categorised as a musical comedy horror and features karaoke, claymation, and elaborate dance numbers alongside horrifying murders and suicides. 

Blade of the Immortal, which is also based on a manga, is not a deviation from Miike’s bloody oeuvre. Takuya Kimura plays Manji, a samurai who betrays orders from his masters to care for his sister. Unfortunately, assassins arrive and kill his sister, prompting Manji to brutally slay each and every one of them. He is mortally wounded in the fight, but is imbued with the power of immortality by an 800-year-old nun and her magic bloodworms. That’s only like a six on the ‘Miike Madness Scale’. If you want something really crazy, watch Dead or Alive. 

Throughout his over a century of movies, Miike has done everything from low-budget indies to mammoth studio pictures. When asked if he missed the good old days, he admitted that he harboured a certain nostalgia for his earlier, cheaper work. “A lot of the films I shot, especially in my early career, were on 16mm,” he revealed. “Partly because I couldn’t afford anything else for budgetary reasons. 35mm was a real luxury, so I shot an awful lot on 16mm. In those days, I mainly made Yakuza films and, by nature, Yakuza is gritty. The grainy look suited the Yakuza, rather than using 35mm with the high-quality picture. And so I feel that if there’s an opportunity to make another Yakuza film, I would like to insist on making it using 16mm.”

As it stands, Miike’s most recent film was 2023’s Lumberjack the Monster. It stars Kazuya Kamenashi as a lawyer who, upon surviving an assault by a brutal serial killer, goes down a dark path of revenge in order to find him.

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