In the West, Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano is generally known as the director of violent yakuza dramas like the surreal Sonatine or the mathematically-structured Hana-bi. But there are many more sides to this unpretentious director. As shown by the reflective passages of his gangster dramas - or the periods of "calm before the storm", as he once described them - there's his meditative side. Take the sedate A Scene At The Sea (1992) for example, and the life-affirming boxing drama Kids Return (1996).

Then, of course, there's Kitano's prankish side - his TV comedies are far more popular at home than his films, which prompted him to make the little-seen comedy Getting Any? (1994).

Now, for his eighth film, Kikujiro - named after his father, although the character is not based on him - Kitano has embarked on another departure. It's a road movie of sorts, centring on a sullen, nine-year-old boy, Masao, who decides one summer to search for the mother who abandoned him. Concerned for the boy's safety, his grandmother's friend volunteers her husband Kikujiro (Kitano himself) to accompany the boy on his quest. But the brash, loud, opportunistic Kikujiro doesn't appear to be too fond of children. Inevitably, over the course of their journey, the two find out that they have rather more in common than they expected.

Western viewers may be surprised at the uncharacteristically gentle nature of Kikujiro, but this wasn't a conscious move on the director's part.

"There's no violence in Kikujiro," he admits. "That's simply because it was not in the script I originally wrote. But I think the emotional detachment of the characters is almost the same as that in my earlier films. Basically, the mentality of the characters in Kikujiro might have a lot in common with my earlier characters.

"The rough script of this film had been around for quite some time. Out of the films that I have made so far, there certainly have been more films with violence than without. But even during that time, I have written many scripts without violence. After Hana-bi, I just thought it might be as good a time as any to make a different kind of film." Kitano often likes to augment his narrative structure with idiosyncratic visual flourishes - the paintings in Hana-bi, or the scenes in Sonatine of people larking around on the beach - and Kikujiro shows the same level of invention.

"This film is a picture book," Kitano continues. "And like picture books, Kikujiro only says, 'there once was a story like this', and that's all. So the dream sequences are supposed to be just like dreams in picture books. I didn't want to shoot them realistically. I wanted them to look like paintings where the plastered paint is plainly

visible. So I shot them consciously in a way that they are obviously shot in studio sets. Since the format of the film is a picture book, it wouldn't have made sense if the dreams were shot realistically."

To help him achieve this look, Kitano turned to his regular director of photography, Katsumi Yanagishima, who wasn't available to work on the acclaimed Hana-bi. "I knew that he wanted to achieve even better photography than in his previous films," says Kitano, "so out of politeness I asked him to do something extreme, to shoot things that had not been visualised elsewhere. And what you can see in the film was as far as he could go.

"It's pointless asking a cameraman to do what he has done already. If you ask a good chef, 'can you make this spicier?', he'll try even harder than he usually does. So I purposefully made unreasonable demands on Katsumi to see if he could handle it. Just to have some fun."

Kitano also reveals he had no difficulty working with a child actor. "It was pretty much like when you are shooting a stray dog and you want a shot of the dog with a pretty smile," he says. "You just have to put the nice-looking bone in front of the dog. So I bought him some toys to get his attention once in a while." Richard James Havis