Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi Kitano was born on 18 January 1947, the youngest of a Tokyo working-class couple’s four children. Prodded by his mother, Takeshi excelled in math and art at a top state high school, then studied engineering in college before dropping out to pursue he-wasn’t-sure-quite-what. In 1973, after stints as an elevator boy and emcee in Asakusa’s France-za comedy-slash-strip club, Kitano, together with Kiyoshi Kaneko, formed a standup duo called The Two Beats. Irreverent and bawdy, the manzai pair achieved a degree of national recognition. A decade later, Nagisa Oshima cast “Beat Takeshi” as the brutal Sergeant Hara in his surreal 1983 POW camp drama Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and then, in 1989, Kitano became a first-time director when veteran filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku withdrew during pre-production from a project in which Beat Takeshi was to star. Kitano rewrote the script and, though he had no film-directing training, imposed on his debut an unusually austere visual and aural aesthetic. Since then, the two Takeshis (Beat and Kitano) have managed parallel careers. While Beat Takeshi regularly hosted two handfuls of absurdist, vulgar, silly, reactionary prime-time network shows each week—one of them, Takeshi’s Castle, a game show in which milk industry workers challenge midwives, or real-estate agents challenge high school baseball coaches, to humiliating tests of coordination and daring, has even been dubbed and syndicated worldwide—Takeshi Kitano, our focus here, made seventeen more feature films and one short. The director received increased international attention in 1997 when his seventh film, Hana-bi, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures picked up his fourth, Sonatine, for North American distribution. But the films Kitano directed after Hana-bi have typically been read as attempts to defy the authorial persona his earlier films conjured.