Quotes from Takashi Miike

The position of an assistant director in Japan is a handyman who does everything if necessary. They must overcome the unreasonable demands of hard-hearted and whimsical directors, and staff with different personalities or habits.

I am discovering myself as a director all the time.

When I'm facing an issue or a challenge sometimes, it's easier for me to avoid really facing that or dealing with it, and just go make films.

I wanted to make '13 Assassins' in the old manner, to use old techniques and not to rely on modern-day ones such as CGI, or editing that changes the speed.

Boxing fascinates me.

When I'm watching one of my movies in a festival with fans who are just into it and they love it? I end up feeling like my film is more interesting, it becomes more fun to watch and I get a special energy that feeds back into my process.

I don't set out to make a film for festivals abroad.

I feel that the smallness of the filmmaking environment is somehow connected to the freedom of creating film.

One Missed Call,' it was regarded as a mainstream film for my career because it was big budget and filmed in Japan and it really opened wide in Japan, it did really well commercially. So I was really surprised.

When you see the violence of Hollywood movies, there is a tendency that the hero is combating and confronting many people, without much harm to himself. But in my films, the hero takes a lot of hits so the very act of the hero being the one on the receiving end, makes the audience cheer and connect with him.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

Bigger-budgeted films have more restrictions and less freedom to create. Because of this, I try to find freedom in the people I work with. I often work in ways I don't want to. It's more about controlling the situation. Lower-budget films are freer.

People tell all sorts of lies in order to live. That enables friendships to form and love to blossom.

I believe that when people try to live their life at the fullest, there's a certain laughter that comes out of it. The more they try to live their life seriously, the funnier it is.

For me, no matter what movie I make, no matter what the genre or the budget, they all have the same theme at their core: fear of death and happiness about living.

In film, in general, you have just so many cliche themes or stories that are told over and over again.

I don't think a film that has no effect on people or society is a good film.

My generation was a special generation. I was born in 1960 and in my childhood we were all big manga consumers that was the culture. We were brought up in manga. Manga evolved around what was being made to cater to kids. All children at that time read ridiculously thick manga books every week.

I'm just trying to make movies simply about life. Naturally, when I'm doing that, horror, violence, and all those kinds of things get mixed in. All those things happen in reality.

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

If you're trying to be realistic and bring real life to the screen, you are going to have different elements. That's what I'm trying to do. As I make the movie, different elements come in naturally.

Maybe '13 Assassins' is the mortal agony and death rattle of a Japanese film industry that has abandoned its creative talent.

I think everyone really wants to just be happy and live the life that they want to live. But they come up against all of these obstacles and sometimes the way that react we react to that can be very hilarious. To me. It's hilarious and laughable.

You know when I was a high school student I wasn't a very good student. Upon graduation we were asked if we would become a full working adult or go to university. I decided to go to film school and still to this day I try to avoid being a full working adult.