Takashi Miike never had the look of a man who’d reach 100 films. Rather, he had the look of a man who’d one day spontaneously combust behind the camera while filming a yakuza cheese-wiring off someone’s foot. Yet here he comes, the respected auteur, with his centennial film Blade of the Immortal; another recent work of the one-time provocateur swearing allegiance to that most orthodox of Japanese traditions, the samurai film. Even if his version of orthodox features the odd lute that converts into a gnarly nunchucks staff.
With Blade of the Immortal, Miike inches closer to the top of the list of cinema’s most prolific directors. He will probably have outstripped his countryman Kenji Mizoguchi (101) by the time you reach the end of this paragraph. But a few more gonzo chanbara will be needed before he’s matching the likes of Casablanca director Michael Curtiz (175), John Ford (140-odd, including various shorts) or Jean-Luc Godard (well over 100, depending on how you count various video and TV credits).
Curtiz and Ford worked in cinema’s early days, when feature lengths were shorter, as well as under the Hollywood studio system during the production-line frenzy of its golden age. You suspect those numbers would be impossible for anyone starting out in film now. Miike himself chalked up his first 10 credits working on the even more rough’n’ready Japanese video circuit. By the mid-1990s, as he was transitioning to celluloid, he was making five films a year. He claimed that he had an annual appointment in January to get his head shaved because he’d be too busy for haircuts during the rest of the year.
He’s also living proof that quantity doesn’t necessarily mean sacrificing quality. No one would deny that his work has had its dips and its rough edges; even in the relatively lavish Blade of the Immortal, some of the costumes look as if they’re straight out of the cosplay shop. But Miike has produced accomplished work in a surprising variety of genres, including ones outside of the ultraviolent shockers – such as Ichi the Killer, Dead Or Alive and Audition – that got picked up in the west. Not many people are aware of Miike the chronicler of Osakan working-class life in Young Thugs: Nostalgia, or Miike the family entertainer (Ninja Kids!!!).
Not being precious has gifted him this consistency. It’s almost an alien idea in a time dominated by the overthought film-making-by-committee of the blockbuster industry, or in which we venerate scarcity merchants such as Kubrick and Tarantino (who says he’ll tap out after 10 films). There’s a lot to be said for getting on with it, like Miike. It breeds the kind of mother-of-necessity invention Werner Herzog (around 50 full-length films) has made his watchword. Hitchcock (53 films) proceeded in more calculated steps, but maybe keeping a three-a-year average in the 1930s was what geared up his creative metabolism to effortlessly turning out three classics in 1958-60: Vertigo, North By Northwest and the artistic breakthrough of Psycho.
There’s no doubt the quick-fire approach fuels a certain kind of director. Refusing to stand on the formalities of either fiction or documentary, preferring improvisation and the roving digital style, Michael Winterbottom apparently can’t stop sprouting new projects – 25 features in 22 years. Who knows what’s driving that – but sometimes it’s obvious when a hot streak is drawing its energy from some psychic heat source. There was scant separation in the violent anticonformism in the life (37 years) and art (40 films) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Racking up Alien prequels like web-browser tabs as part of his rally over the last decade, it’s hard not to believe intimations of mortality aren’t driving Ridley Scott, now 79 years old.
Being prolific doesn’t work for everyone – or for ever. You get the impression that Woody Allen might have detrimentally scienced the recent run of films that has carried him over the 50th feature mark. Proxy for younger self: check. Mild philosophical noodling: check. Postcard Euro-capital setting with added tax-production credits: check. Making more films this decade (five) than in the previous 40 years (four) seems to have made the ever more self-parodic Terrence Malick forget what editors are for. Both should either consider a pause – or maybe stepping things up to Miike levels. There’s no bad habit a blast on the nunchucks staff won’t cure.
• Blade of the Immortal is out on 8 December.
