We learn that he started as an employee of a shoemaking company but that he’s very good at what he does, so they put him in charge of the factories. There isn’t a filmmaker from Japan who has not been influenced by his work.Īt the start of High and Low, an executive named Kingo Gondo, played by Toshiro Mifune, is living high on the hog in a house on a hill. Kurosawa’s role in all of that is absolutely undeniable.
This had a role in pulling up the Japanese spirit, and during that time Japanese cinema reached a peak. But then there was a switch that flipped, and a decision was made to use entertainment as a vehicle to encourage and motivate Japanese people to work together. Before this period, you wouldn’t have seen poverty or anything negative on screens film and TV were very insular. policy but also because of the success of the film industry.
But it wasn’t too long before Japan enjoyed a sudden economic rise-partly due to U.S. People had to come back from less than zero, because the country had been destroyed by World War II. Japan had lost the war a couple decades earlier, Tokyo was still in ruins right before then, and the Korean War had also just started. I was three years old when the film was released in 1963. So when we get to the point when we see where the criminal is living, I thought, that’s my town! Realizing that I’d ended up moving where all this took place was a very shocking moment for me. High and Low had been filmed years before I moved there, and the locations no longer existed, but it takes place in that city.
I didn’t have much money and couldn’t afford the film school in Osaka, where I was born and raised, so I ended up moving to Yokohama, where there was a school I could afford. What was special about seeing it for the first time was that there were some parallels between the filming locations and where I lived.
The memories I have connected with the time in my life when I saw High and Low are very important to me. In this article, edited together from our conversation, Miike explains why he feels a kinship with Kurosawa and how the master’s 1963 film High and Low slyly melds classic suspense with trenchant social commentary. During a recent visit to the Criterion offices, Miike talked with us about one of the filmmakers who first got him excited about cinema, Akira Kurosawa, whose work he discovered on television as a boy growing up in Osaka. Throughout his ferocious, often controversial body of work, he has contorted disparate genres into extreme portraits of violence and chaos, and his latest film, First Love, extends that tradition: it’s a hyper-stylized yakuza noir set over the course of one night on the streets of Tokyo. Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has directed more than a hundred features, and almost three decades into his career he’s showing no signs of slowing down.
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