Crashed With Getting Any? And His Moped (!)
 
After Sonatine, Takeshi made his first comedy feature which he named Getting Any?, due to the story of the movie, a man who hunts women so he can to the "dirty deed". The same year, 1994, when he just finished working on this movie, Takeshi almost killed himself. On the night August the 2nd 1994, Takeshi got very drunk. He got on his moped wearing a helmet with its chinstrap unfastened, fell asleep and crashed. Takeshi miraculously survived but spent almost four months in Isolation in Tokyo Medical College Hospital, suffering from scull fractures and a broken jaw. When Takeshi was released from the hospital on September 27, he had nervdamages making the right side of his face temporarily paralyzed.

"It's embarrassing", he confesses. "I was trying to visit one of my girlfriends. When I finally saw her, nearly a year later, she said: 'What took you so long?'"

He can joke about it now, but it took ten days before he recovered consciousness, and for a while the doctors couldn't rule out the brain damage.

"When I woke up, I had a battle with my brain; I didn't know how much of my memory I had recovered. My two closest associates, Mr.Mori and Mr.Miyagi, came in and I wasn't sure, which was which. So I looked at Mr.Mori and said, 'hey, Mr.Miyagi', and they panicked. That reassured me. Obviously this was Mr.Mori. So I played that game for a while".

After the accident, Takeshi gave up drinking and golf in order to devote more time to painting, reading, studying science and music.

"People around me say that having come through such a traumatic experience, you can live a better life. Personally, I don't think so. It was just an accident. I hate the notion that because I was able to live, I should do this or do that, I don't accept that. Time is very valuable to me. In order to make time; I had to cut back. Golf take's a day...In order to read, to study, to play the keyboards, the guitar, do all the thing's I wanted to do, I had to omit drinking and golf. So it's not because it's bad for my heath or anything. Right after the accident, even in the hospital, I drank- probably twice as much as I used to. I wanted to show that Takeshi hasn't slowed down. Six moths later, I realized how much time it took. So it's hard for me to say it was the accident that changed things. I'm like a sponge, trying to get in as much information and experience as possible. When I squeeze that, in form of a film or whatever, sometimes shit may come out, but that's my rational for doing so much".
 
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".
 

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