Miike Takashi

Age: 64

Birthday: August 24, 1960

Nationality: Japanese

Gender: Male

Miike Takashi is a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker. He has directed over ninety theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions in the years 2001 and 2002 alone. His films range from violent and bizarre to dramatic and family-friendly. Miike was born to Korean parents in Yao, Osaka, Japan, an area inhabited by poor working-class immigrants from the Korean Peninsula. His family originally emigrated to Kumamoto Prefecture. During World War II, his grandfather was stationed in China and Korea, and his father was born in Seoul in today's South Korea. His father worked as a welder and his mother was a seamstress. Although he claimed to have attended classes only rarely, he graduated from Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (Yokohama Hōsō Eiga Senmon Gakko) under the guidance of a renowned filmmaker Shohei Imamura, the founder and Dean of that institution. One of his most controversial films was the ultra-violent Ichi the Killer (2001), adapted from a manga of the same name and starring Tadanobu Asano as a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer. The extreme violence was initially exploited to promote the film: during its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, the audience received "barf bags" emblazoned with the film's logo as a promotional gimmick (one typically flamboyant gory killing involves a character slicing a man in half from head to groin, and severing another's face, which then slides down a nearby wall). However, the British Board of Film Classification refused to allow the release of the film uncut in Britain, citing its extreme levels of sexual violence towards women. In Hong Kong, 15 minutes of footage were cut. In the United States, it has been shown uncut (unrated). An uncut DVD was also released in the Benelux. In 2005, Miike was invited to direct an episode of the Masters of Horror anthology series. The series, featuring episodes by a range of established horror directors such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and Dario Argento, was supposed to provide directors with relative creative freedom and relaxed restrictions on violent and sexual content (some violent content was edited from the Dario Argento-directed episode Jenifer). However, when the Showtime cable network acquired the rights to the series, the Miike-directed episode Imprint was deemed too disturbing for the network. Showtime canceled it from the broadcast lineup even after extended negotiations, though it was retained as part of the series DVD release. Mick Garris, creator and executive producer of the series, described the episode as "amazing, but hard even for me to watch... definitely the most disturbing film I've ever seen"..