| Takeshi Kitano A Violent Man? | |
| Which brings us to the
touchy subject of Takeshi's relationship with the press. There is a story were Takeshi and some friends attack an editorship to a newspaper
with raised umbrellas. "A paparazzo had hunted my girlfriend for a long time. I was upset and waved with an umbrella. After that people say I'm violent. But I'm not. Ten years after this, those guys still dog me. They're still at it. But I will say this about the Japanese Mass Media, they are very sensitive to the way the outside world things. They may not have taken me seriously at first, but since Violent Cop and Sonatine received such a positive response in Europe, the Japanese Mass Media have started to take my films more seriously". |
| Boiling Point, A Scene At The Sea and Sonatine | |
| After Violent Cop,
Takeshi made Boiling Point in 1990. This time he wrote the script himself, and co-edited it with Toshio Taniguchi. 1991 came A Scene at the
Sea, which became the first feature Takeshi collaborated with music composer Joe Hisaishi. "The Japanese journalists are not interested in my movies. They only want me to tell a joke". When Takeshi visited Goteborg Film Festival in February 1998, a Swedish journalist also wanted him to tell a joke, to see what made him so popular in Japan, that when the young generation were asked who they wanted to see as Japan's leader answered: Takeshi Kitano. "Ok, here is one. I was looked up one day by the Japanese mob, yakuza, who were wondering why my third movie, A Scene at the Sea, weren't about them. I answered that it was impossible, cause the main character in the movie is a surfer, who must be able to paddle on his board with help of his hands. Since almost everyone in the yakuza has lost some fingers, the surfboard would only spin around and around, if they tried". Boiling Point and A Scene at the Sea were about apparent losers winning through by sheer persistence and force of will. Boiling Point was about a weedy garage mechanic taking on a local yakuza gang. And in A Scene at the Sea the main character was a deaf garbage collector that was teaching himself to surf. Then in 1993 came his best movie to date, Sonatine. "A Sonatine is the kind of piece you play when you're learning to play piano. I figured I was about that stage in my directing career, so it seemed like an appropriate title". Sonatine was about the highly successful yakuza hit man, Murakawa. (Played by "Beat" Takeshi himself) This reversed the pattern from his preview movies that were about big losers, to a movie about a successful yakuza. "We don't know exactly how the hit man Murakawa has achieved his success, but it's clear that he has done a lot of very violent things. And now he wants to quit. In Japanese society, though, quitting is almost a dishonorable act. If you're a yakuza, you have to cut off a finger or something. But Murakawa want's to quit anyway, he's tired. When he gets sent to Okinawa, he realizes very quickly that he's going to be killed. And so what I wanted to show was what goes through a man's mind when he knows that he's about to die. It seems to me that life and death have very little meaning in themselves, but the way you approach death may give a retrospective meaning to your life. The point of setting it on the beach like that is that the context makes all Murakawa's personal problems seem so minor and unimportant. That wouldn't have happened if he had stayed in the city. It was essential to give him that space. And the beach scenes from the core of the film; the violence (much of which is offscreen anyway) comes before and after. It's like a sandwich, but not like an English sandwich- those guys put too much importance on the bread and not enough on the filling". |
| Page 4 >> | |