The last time Takeshi Kitano was on the film festival circuit, it was with 2017’s Outrage Coda. Word had it this yakuza drama, the third in a trilogy, was to be his final film. The Japanese entertainment icon was having none of it. “I have ideas, a lot of ideas,” he told this writer through a translator. “I have the will to continue making movies. If I make a violent movie again, you can assume I have trouble with money!”
Now it seems those rumours of Kitano’s retirement have been greatly exaggerated, as they say. Last week, it was widely reported in the Japanese media that the 74 year-old filmmaker will go into production in May with Kubi. Titled Neck in English, it’s a period action film based on his own 2019 novel of the same name. The subject centres on the real-life Honno-ji Incident, in which famed warlord Oda Nobunaga was assassinated at a temple in Kyoto in 1582.
Again, it’s being suggested Kubi will be Kitano’s final film. In 2018, he stepped down from Office Kitano, the talent agency and production company he co-founded in 1992 with long-time producer Masayuki Mori. Back then, Mori said that Kitano wanted to “lay down the burdens he has been carrying … and increase his personal time.” A workaholic, Kitano has for years fronted nightly shows on Japanese television, often recording two weeks’ worth of episodes in one day.
A former stand-up comic who first came to attention in a double act called ‘The Two Beats’ (lending him his stage name, ‘Beat Takeshi’), Kitano made the switch to directing in 1989, when he took over from director Kinji Fukasaku on Violent Cop, a brutal police procedural that he also took the lead in. Yet it was his fruitful partnership with Mori that established him on the international stage, writing, directing and starring in a remarkable string of films.
Famed for his laconic, poetic style, punctuated by occasional bouts of brutality, Kitano delivered a high point with the 1997 film Hana-bi, which collected the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. Six years later, he was awarded best director in Venice for Zatoichi, his take on the mythical blind swordsman of Japanese popular culture. The film went on to become the most successful of his career, earning US$27 million alongside huge critical acclaim.
Yet beneath the calm exterior, Kitano cut a disappointed figure. In Japan, he was better known for his TV work – satirical shows lampooning Japanese society.
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“My films are acclaimed, fortunately, but commercially, it doesn’t really catch up with the critical acclaim that I got,” he once told me. “And it’s coming as some sort of a standard perception of my filmmaking activity: oh, he’s making all these highly acclaimed films, loved by critics, hated by public! And I am kind of frustrated by that situation!”
It might explain why, in 2010, he made Outrage, returning to the yakuza genre that he so vividly exploited in films like Sonatine in the mid-’90s. “The first Outrage became a hit in Japan, which was rare for me. So I thought to myself, ‘I could make more money if I make a sequel!’” And so he did with 2012’s Outrage Beyond and then Outrage Coda, two films that fared poorly against the original with generic, dull stories of gangland double-crossings.
Coda made US$15 million in Japan, which may have pleased the Kitano craving commercial success. But hardcore fans were left feeling he had reached an artistic impasse. Where was the Kitano of his previous playful trilogy? In Takeshis’ (2005), Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007) and Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), he potently explored the role of the artist, the dilemmas of fame and the desire for success – often playing versions of himself.
If Outrage Coda saw Kitano at his least imaginative in years, it would be foolish to think the well has run dry. A novelist and painter, he remains the true Renaissance man of contemporary Japanese culture.
In 2017, he published Analog, his first romance novel, the story of an interior designer who falls in love with a woman he meets by chance. There was even talk he was considering making it into an anime, although ultimately that proved unfounded.
In the same year, he also appeared in Ghost in the Shell, Paramount’s lavish live-action remake of the classic 1995 Japanese anime, itself inspired by the popular manga series. Just his second major Hollywood outing – he also featured in 1995’s less-than-stellar cyberpunk effort Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves – it was an eye-opening experience, he admitted. “I felt that it was like being in a factory, making a movie, in a much more industrial way.”Now after four years away from the camera – the biggest gap in his filmmaking career – he is set to direct again. Pleasingly, Kubi is reportedly starring Ken Watanabe, one of Japan’s most successful exports to Hollywood. Oscar-nominated for his role opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, he has also twice worked for Christopher Nolan on Batman Begins and Inception. Usually casting himself, Kitano has rarely, if ever, worked with an actor of Watanabe’s calibre.
With Kubi also said to be inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s legendary The Seven Samurai, a film Kitano greatly admires, it seemingly has the potential to be a wonderful swansong for the director before he reaches his 75th birthday next January. And as some have pointed out, Kurosawa was 83 when he directed his film final, Madadayo, so there remains hope that the Kubi experience will reinvigorate Kitano. It might even be accepted for next year’s Cannes – a festival that’s often overlooked his work.
Even if Kitano is on the verge of retirement, he’s on his way out in style, with a Netflix biopic currently in the works. Called Asakusa Kid, this adaptation of Kitano’s own memoir tells of his early days when he was working in a Tokyo strip-joint and was mentored by an older stand-up. Directed by comic Gekidan Hitori, it stars Yuya Yagira as the young Kitano. The global reach of the streaming platform could even inspire a new generation to discover Kitano’s work.
Certainly, his canon of unique movies deserve a fresh audience, although that may have to be outside Japan. As he told this writer, even before the pandemic gripped the world, “I’m very worried about the decline of the movie industry in Japan.” Kitano showed concern for the fate of non-commercial venues. “Art house movies – they are losing the places where they can be shown.”
Perhaps Kubi will be the film to combat that, and finally bring Kitano both the critical and commercial success he desperately desires in his native Japan.
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