Takashi Miike, the director of Audition who took a kabuki documentary to Venice

Takashi Miike

Photo: K6ka / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 24, 1960 Yao, Osaka Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Film and television director
Known for	Audition, 13 Assassins, Ichi the Killer
Awards	Asian Film Award, Tokyo International Film Festival · Special Jury Award, Sitges Film Festival · Time Machine Award, Sitges Film Festival · Nikkan Sports Film · Yokohama Film Festival · Grand , Sitges Film Festival (lifetime achievement) · Maverick Award, Rome Film Festival · Cinema & Arts (shared)

Within a few days of each other, two films by the same man reached the autumn festival circuit, and they barely look like the work of one director. The first is a patient documentary about a kabuki actor taking on a stage name his family has carried for centuries. The second takes Bad Lieutenant to Tokyo, where a gambling cop and an FBI agent go looking for a politician’s missing daughter. Takashi Miike made both, and earlier in the year he had shot a horror film with Charli XCX in Japan. To Western audiences he is still the man behind Audition and Ichi the Killer. Japanese producers know a different director, the one who turns out manga adaptations and children’s fantasies with the same steadiness. His filmography has never picked one of those two men over the other.

Miike grew up in Yao, on the southern edge of Osaka. His mother was a seamstress and his father a welder; his father had himself been born in Seoul, where Miike’s grandfather was stationed during the Second World War. As a teenager he cared more about motorcycles than films and thought seriously about racing. When university did not take him, film school did. His own account of the path is blunt: “I became a director because I didn’t have another choice.”

Miike, who was born on 24 August 1960, enrolled at 18 at the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film, the school founded by Shohei Imamura, and by his own account hardly went to class. The practical education came on sets: he spent years as a freelance assistant director on television and film productions, Imamura’s among them. His first features went straight to video, in the V-Cinema market that Japanese studios ran on small budgets and loose rules, starting in 1991. The format let him shoot fast and push violence and absurdity past what cinema screens allowed, and he kept going back to it long after theatres opened their doors. His first film to draw real attention was Shinjuku Triad Society, in 1995, a gangster film set among Tokyo’s Chinese mafia that opened what became known as his Black Society trilogy.

The international turn came in a burst between 1999 and 2003. Audition, written by Daisuke Tengan, starts as the courtship drama of a widowed producer who holds a fake casting call to find a new wife, and in its last stretch turns into a torture scene that became the film’s calling card abroad. Dead or Alive came out the same year and took the Asian Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Then came Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q and The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical about a family whose guesthouse keeps losing its guests, and in 2003 Gozu, which won a special jury award at Sitges.

The provocation was partly marketing, and it worked. Ichi the Killer premiered in Toronto with promotional sick bags handed to the audience. The British Board of Film Classification required just over three minutes of cuts, and the film was banned outright in Germany, Malaysia and Norway. A few years later Showtime pulled Imprint, his episode of an American horror anthology for cable television, from its broadcast schedule as too disturbing; it appeared uncut on DVD instead.

Japan, meanwhile, was hiring him for hits. One Missed Call, a ghost story told through mobile phones, spawned sequels and a Hollywood remake, and Crows Zero turned a manga about warring high-school gangs into a franchise. Prestige followed. 13 Assassins, again written by Tengan, who is Imamura’s eldest son, played in competition at Venice in 2010, the year Miike took the Nikkan Sports Film Award for best director. A year later Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was in competition at Cannes. Blade of the Immortal, with Takuya Kimura, was marketed as his 100th feature when it screened at Cannes in 2017, and First Love, a gangland romance with a boxer at its centre, premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight two years later.

That volume is where his reputation comes apart. The Western idea of Miike as an extremist rests on a handful of films from a few years either side of 2000, while the same filmography includes The Great Yokai War: Guardians, a family fantasy, and a long run of studio adaptations that seldom figure in the Western picture of him. The extremist label does not fit the films he makes now, and the reliable-craftsman label fails just as often. Sham, a realist drama, drew a Japan Times review saying it flirts with ambiguity and then picks a side. Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo fared worse in Toronto: The Film Stage called it a lazy, insipid addition to an unlikely franchise, and its first 18 reviews added up to a 39% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes. A filmography this large carries misses, and Miike has never slowed down to avoid them.

Sham, released in Japan in June 2025, stars Go Ayano as a schoolteacher accused of abusing a pupil and adapts a 2007 book by the journalist Masumi Fukuda; it later played in the international competition in Goa. He also directed Blazing Fists, a fighting drama, and the dramatised scenes of an NHK special imagining a major eruption of Mount Fuji, broadcast in April 2026.

Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki is his first documentary feature. The 97-minute film follows Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII and his son, Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII, through the succession ceremonies of 2022, with narration by Anne. In his director’s statement Miike framed it as a plain question: “Who exactly is Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII? That is the simple question I wanted to ask once again.” The film screened out of competition at Venice in September 2026 and shared the best film prize of the collateral Cinema & Arts Award with a film by Hirokazu Koreeda. It opened in Japan on 25 September.

Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is the third film to carry the name, after Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original and a 2009 New Orleans sequel. Shun Oguri plays the title role opposite Lily James, Shotaro Mamiya and the wrestler Liv Morgan, from a script by Tengan. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 14 September 2026 and opens in Japan through Sony Pictures on 23 October; Neon holds the US rights but has not set a date.

Miike rarely discusses his private life. His long-term partner, Misako Saka, is also his producing partner, and her name sits on the credits of the kabuki documentary, the Tokyo thriller and the film that comes next.

That next film is an untitled horror feature set in Kyoto, written by Ross Evans and Yumiko Aoyagi from an idea by Charli XCX and Miike. Charli XCX plays Katie, a woman possessed by a tortured spirit while on holiday with two friends, with Milly Alcock and Norman Reedus in the cast. It was shot in Japan in 2026 and has no release date yet. After a documentary about the weight of inherited names, the director whose Toronto premiere once came with sick bags is making a pop star’s ghost story.

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Blade of the Immortal (2017) — First Love (2019)

Tags: Charli XCX, Shun Oguri, Takashi Miike, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, 13 Assassins, Audition

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