On Takashi Miike

"I don't think about genre at all. My films are categorised as being in a certain type of genre. But myself, I don't make the movie thinking about which category the film belongs in." Takashi Miike, interview 2001

Deadpan, surreal, misogynist, funny, brutal, imaginative: Takashi Miike's films are anti-bourgeois excursions into hard-boiled fantasy. In less hyperbolic terms, they're offbeat gangster flics.

One is tempted to explain them by invoking the names of other filmmakers, Takeshi Kitano, the two Davids – Lynch and Cronenberg–- Jean-Pierre Melville. Also JG Ballard, and perhaps – and this is a big perhaps – Franz Kaka. Diffident characters, surreal normalcy, uncertain resolutions.