Takeshi Kitano tells Richard James Havis about his directorial and editing career, which has moved from "embarrassing" to sublime, with his latest, Hana-bi, a festival hit all around the world. 

In movies like 1989's Violent Cop or 1993's Sonatine, Kitano brutally prods, kicks and shoots his enemies into submission. But on Japanese TV programmes like We Are Wild and Crazy Guys! he is a consummate prankster and a barbed satirist. This seeming contradiction is not lost on Kitano himself, a tough-looking 51-year-old who seems as internalised in the flesh as in his movies. "Some of the audience might find my TV programmes stupid compared to my films," he says. "They would probably wonder why I was doing this kind of thing. But others may realise why I find it necessary to do it." 

It's a matter of emotional release, it seems. Kitano's screen characters, whom he usually portrays himself, are silent outsiders who follow a tragic destiny. Often, after completing their tasks, they commit suicide. In Violent Cop, the cop Azuma takes bloody revenge on gangsters who have turned his sister into a heroin addict, before getting killed himself. In the elegiac Sonatine, the ageing gangster Murakawa blows his brains out after taking out the yakuza gang who have betrayed him. It's a modern reading of the Samurai code that says a man should choose the time, place and method of his death. No wonder Kitano likes to tell jokes on the small screen. 

In case you hadn't heard, Takeshi Kitano is the name to drop in film circles nowadays. Sonatine won much critical kudos, as did the socially orientated boxing drama Kid's Return. But last year's Hana-bi proved nothing short of a sensation at festivals around the globe. Critics and audiences alike have been talking about the film's complex, mathematically layered structure, Kitano's own implosive performance and an editing style (Kitano edits his own films) that makes lyrical transitions from calm to storm in the flicker of an instant. 

Hana-bi (which translates, with the hyphen, as "fire and flower", and without it, as "fireworks") looks at a tough cop who takes revenge on the gangsters who crippled his partner. In true Kitano style, his hero is all the time moving closer towards his own date with destiny. Nishi, played by Kitano, is a hard-boiled, taciturn cop who leaves the force after being dealt a cruel double whammy. His partner Horibe is badly wounded in a shoot-out; and Nishi discovers that his wife has a terminal disease. He buys an old motor, refurbishes it as a police car, and drives out to seek revenge on the criminals who shot his buddy. 

As he dispenses some very rough justice, Nishi takes time out to look after those he cares about: his sick wife; his crippled partner; his partner's wife; and a young police widow. Hana-bi creeps around you and gets under your skin like a terrible, beautiful melody. 

Storms and serenity 
Hana-bi sees Kitano bring to perfection a style of editing that flows gently from scenes of serenity and calm to scenes of fast, explosive violence. The brutality is punctuated with quiet shots of the seaside, for instance. From tranquillity comes a violent storm, which subsides back into calm as quickly as it arose. 

"It's like causing an explosion with dynamite," he explains. "Scenes where you find soft or calm are there to compress the tension to make a big explosion. These silent scenes put the pressure on. It's like pulling the switch on the dynamite. The audience is thinking, 'When is he going to pull the switch and cause the explosion.' Like a bomb, everything goes inside, then bang!" 

It's a very musical approach to filmmaking, with the action swelling and decaying like the notes of an orchestra. The form is as important to Kitano as the content: "I am very aware of the rhythmic elements of the film," he explains. "I am very careful about achieving a certain rhythm when I edit." 

The Japanese audience has usually preferred his TV work to his films. A magazine poll saw him voted the country's favourite TV celebrity for five years running. Yet his early life suggested that Kitano was destined to become a drifter rather than a superstar. Kitano was born in 1947 to an alcoholic housepainter of a father and a mother who worked in a strip club. 

He became interested in comedy, and by 1973 had seen success as part of the comedy duo The Two Beats, which is where his nickname "Beat" originates. By 1980 he was well on the way to becoming a star. The anarchic 1981 show We Are Wild and Crazy Guys! sealed his success, and 1983 saw him move into film with Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. The film starred David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Kitano plays the prison camp sergeant who utters the words of the title at the end. 

Kitano's first movie as director was 1989's Violent Cop, which finally got a release here late last year. Kitano took over the directing job when the original director, Kinji Fusaku, resigned. It's a great film, but Kitano seems a little embarrassed by it today. "It was shot a long time ago when I had no knowledge of how to make a film," he remembers. "I didn't know anything about film at that point. And now I feel that I am beginning to grasp what filmmaking is all about – gradually. I watched Violent Cop recently on video so that I could comment on it during interviews, as I had forgotten almost everything about it. Frankly, I cannot bear to watch it. It's like being forced to see yourself in younger days. I feel so embarrassed." 

A new departure 
His next film was 3-4x10 Boiling Point, a yakuza movie that saw him further hone his bad-guy image. This was followed by the little-seen A Scene At The Sea, a big departure for the actor/writer/director. The story is about a deaf-mute surfer's search for the perfect wave, and Kitano did not feature in it. 

Sonatine, in 1993, saw him back directing himself, this time as a yakuza who knows that his time is up. The film was a critical hit in Japan, but didn't perform very well at the box office. Unexpectedly, it was a cult success in Britain, although problems with the  
film's producers (they accused Kitano of wasting money during the Okinawa part of the shoot) saw it get less international exposure than it deserved. 

"At that time, I was taking piano lessons," he says. "Before you learn the sonatas, you do the sonatine. It's like a little sonata. The sonatine is the point where you make a decision about yourself as a piano player. It's where you decide if you want to be a classical pianist or not. If you give up on classical training, you move on to popular music or jazz." 

"It's the point of decision," he continues. "And the main protagonist in Sonatine gets to a similarly decisive point in the film. It's a metaphor of the protagonist – and of my own filmmaking. I was thinking about whether I wanted to become more popular or mainstream. Sonatine is a complex mixture of things." 

Getting Any?, a gag-laden sex satire, perhaps provided the answer, and was his first movie to perform well at the home box office. But in 1994, a near-fatal accident changed his view of life for ever. After a night on the town, he smashed his motor-scooter into a guard rail in Tokyo's Shinjiku nightlife district, an accident that partially paralysed one side of Kitano's face. 

"Before the accident, I intentionally destroyed my body by drinking all day and going to the baseball game the next morning, and that kind of thing," he says. "At that time, I thought that I was not afraid to die. Looking back now, I think that I was so shit scared of death that I damaged myself to convince myself that I was not afraid to die. 

"After the accident, I began to take care of my own health a little more than before. But I am not sure if this will last. When you are told by a doctor that you only have one month to live, you will give up smoking and start to study something – science or art or whatever. But hopefully I still have 20 or 30 more years to live. So I may go back to my  
wild life again." 

Is the hero bonkers?  
Kitano's response to the accident was one of his best-ever films, the boxing drama Kid's Return. Although the two young heroes – a gangster and a boxer – fail to achieve their dreams, they remain hopeful. They "choose life", as it were. 

Hana-bi, which opens in Hong Kong later in the year, sees him back on familiar tragic turf. This time, though, Kitano says he feels that the character is challenging death rather than accepting it.  

Is his obsession with death an essentially Japanese way of looking at the world? Not today, he answers. "In modern Japan, I think that some people may regard the character in Hana-bi as a complete fool for doing something like this," he laughs. "He is completely bonkers." 

That, of course, is the comedian in Kitano talking. He did, after all, casually entitle his autobiography Takeshi Kitano's Method Of Living To Death. One suspects that Kitano, the director, thinks that there is absolutely nothing bonkers about his character's fatalistic obsessions at all.