Joker among the killers

Japanese cinema's hard man is also a TV star, stand-up comic, author and painter. Lee Marshall meets Takeshi Kitano

TAKESHI KITANO has a face that s been around.

If you were planning to drive over it, you d need a Jeep. Not that I would recommend driving over his face; he once took an umbrella to the editor of a gossip magazine who had printed a picture of him leaving a love hotel in the company of a starlet.

But the hard man of Japanese cinema is also a joker with a heart of gold. To prove it, he does a little tap dance before settling down for our cosy chat.

Then, while he is answering my first question, he and his interpreter start laughing. Kitano nudges the interpreter and they both fall about. When the deadpan answer finally comes, I search in vain for the funny bit.

It might be a translation gap, or it might be a culture gap; it s probably a mixture of the two. Whichever, it s a gap that goes to the heart of Kitano s new film, Brother. On one level this is a violent gangster movie with one of the highest body counts in recent memory. On another, it s a film about culture shock.

The film centres on Yamamoto (played by Beat Takeshi - the name he uses when he s acting), a Japanese yakuza gangster who, on the death of his boss, is forced to flee his homeland and take refuge in Los Angeles with his half-brother, a small-time drug dealer. Yamamoto, though, is not remotely interested in adapting to the American way of life and death; instead, through force of will and firepower, he makes the LA gangster underworld conform to his own warped samurai worldview.

In much the same way, Kitano the director makes Hollywood actors and Hollywood structure dance to his own peculiar tune. The film s long silences - mostly those of the taciturn, impassive hero himself, whose eloquence is confined to a prominent facial twitch - make the sudden outbreaks of violence all the more unsettling. Kitano likes to unsettle his actors, too, by concealing key plot details from them.

Of course, this is only possible if the film is shot in sequence - a potentially costly operation - and here, says the director, he was forced to compromise in order not to stretch producer Jeremy Thomas s already extended budget. Another problem was length: it was only after completing the original three-hour cut of the film that Kitano s attention was drawn to a clause in his contract specifying that it had to run under two hours. So he was forced to lose an hour - and in the process, he says, the film became a little bit more violent .

A little? gasps co-star Omar Epps, who has been listening in while waiting for a photo-call.

But Kitano defends himself against the charge of glamorising mindless slaughter.

Violence is a painful thing, he says. I show that pain on screen. I wonder aloud whether there is anything in common between the yakuza brotherhood - the Japanese version of the Mafia and Kitano s intensely loyal team of assistants and technicians, known collectively as Office Kitano. He laughs at the suggestion. When the real yakuza hit you, you know it, he says.

If you ve seen anything by Kitano up to now, chances are it was either Hana-bi - which picked up the Golden Lion at the 1996 Venice Film Festival or Kikujiro, released in the UK last year. Both were difficult to pin down.

Hana-bi could be filed on the bad cop shelf except that there is no easy redemption in Kitano s film, and no easy plot springs either. Kikujiro is equally oddball. An old man helping a fostered child to search for the mother he has never seen sounds like a recipe for schmaltz but not when the old man is played by Kitano as a grumpy old sod with a sadistic sense of humour.

Kitano s reputation in the West as an experimental filmmaker who is so out there he s practically in orbit is, he would have us believe, a trick of perspective. In Japan, he is a far more everyday genius not so much oddball as just plain funny.

There, Kitano is a TV personality (on air four times a week), a stand-up comedian, successful author of more than 40 books, a newspaper columnist and a painter. Film directing is, he says, a hobby though an extremely satisfying one.

In fact, it was not until Kitano started winning festival prizes and accolades in the West that his fellow countrymen began to take him seriously as a director that one could mention in almost the same breath as Nagisa Oshima (whom Kitano the actor has worked for twice the first time alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence) and Akira Kurosawa.

WITH so many hats to juggle, does Kitano never get confused? Well I often feel like there s another me looking from above and controlling the doll or marionette, saying Oh, it s time for the TV personality Beat Takeshi or OK let s put out the director Takeshi Kitano , or Time for the Yamamoto character .

Not that I suffer from multiple-personality syndrome or anything, but I often feel strangely objective towards everything I do.

Kitano says he will go on doing TV however hallowed his auteur reputation becomes; one uspects that he sees these knockabout TV comedy shows as a way of deflating that whole serious cineaste aura.

I do television because I ve got a family to support. I don t know any other profession that allows you to play around or even sleep for two hours and get paid for it. They even let me drink on camera.

Walker s review of Brother: page 31.

Copyright 2001
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