Takashi Miike

is a Japanese film director, film producer and screenwriter. He has directed over one hundred theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. His films run through a variety of different genres, and range from violent and bizarre to dramatic and family-friendly movies. He is a controversial figure in the contemporary Japanese cinema industry, with several of his films being criticised for their extreme graphic violence. Some of his best known films are Audition, Ichi the Killer, Gozu, the Dead or Alive trilogy, and various remakes: Graveyard of Honor, Hara-kiri and 13 Assassins. Early life Miike was born in Yao, Osaka Prefecture, to a Nikkei family originally from the Kumamoto Prefecture, on the island of Kyushu. During World War II, his grandfather was stationed in China and Korea, and his father was born in Seoul in today's South Korea. His father worked as a welder and his mother as a seamstress. Although he claimed to have attended classes only rarely, he graduated from Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (Yokohama Hōsō Eiga Senmon Gakkō) under the guidance of renowned filmmaker Shohei Imamura, the founder and Dean of that institution. Career Miike's first films were television productions, but he also began directing several direct-to-video V-Cinema releases. Miike still directs V-Cinema productions intermittently due to the creative freedom afforded by the less stringent censorship of the medium and the riskier content that the producers will allow. Miike's theatrical debut was the film The Third Gangster (Daisan no gokudō), but Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) was his first theatrical release to gain public attention. The film showcased his extreme style and his recurring themes, and its success allowed him to work on higher-budgeted pictures. Shinjuku Triad Society was the first film in what is labeled his "Black Society Trilogy", which also includes Rainy Dog (1997) and Ley Lines (1999). He gained international fame in 2000 when his romantic horror film Audition (1999), his violent yakuza epic Dead or Alive (1999), and his controversial adaptation of the manga Ichi the Killer played at international film festivals. He has since gained a strong cult following in the West that is growing with the increase in DVD releases of his works. His film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.