Takashi Miike

Miike was born in Yao, Osaka, on August 24, 1960.^[2] His mother was a seamstress and his father was a welder.^[3] His father was born in Seoul, which was then part of Japanese Korea, as his paternal grandfather was stationed in Korea and China during World War II. He was interested in motorcycles during his childhood, and considered racing professionally.^[4] At the age of 18, he joined the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (now the Japan Institute of the Moving Image), where he came under the guidance of the school's founder Shohei Imamura.^[4] When a local television company came looking for unpaid interns on a production, he was nominated by the school, despite his later claim that he only rarely attended classes.^[4][5]

Miike's first films were television productions, but he also began directing several direct-to-video V-Cinema releases. He still intermittently directs these due to the creative freedom afforded by the less stringent censorship of the medium and the riskier content that producers will allow.

Miike's theatrical debut was the film The Third Gangster (Daisan no gokudō),^[6][7] but Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) was his first theatrical release to gain public attention. The film showcased his extreme style and his recurring themes, and its success allowed him to work on higher-budgeted pictures. Shinjuku Triad Society was the first film in what is labeled his "Black Society Trilogy", which also includes Rainy Dog (1997) and Ley Lines (1999).

Miike gained international fame in the early 2000s when his horror film Audition (1999), his violent yakuza epic Dead or Alive (1999), and his controversial 2001 adaptation of the manga Ichi the Killer all played at international film festivals. He gained a strong cult following in the West that grew with the increase in DVD releases of his works. During the international premiere of Ichi the Killer at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, the audience received "barf bags" emblazoned with the film's logo as a promotional gimmick.^[8] The BBFC refused to allow the release of the film uncut in the United Kingdom, citing its extreme levels of sexual violence towards women, and it required just over three minutes of footage to be removed before its release.^[9] In Hong Kong, 17 minutes of footage were cut.^{[10][unreliable source?]} The film was outright banned in Germany, Malaysia, and Norway.^[11]

In 2005, Miike was invited to direct an episode of the anthology series Masters of Horror, intended to provide horror directors with creative freedom and relaxed restrictions on violent and sexual content. However, when Showtime acquired the rights to the series, Miike's episode "Imprint" was deemed too disturbing for broadcast. Showtime cancelled it from the broadcast lineup even after extended negotiations, though it was retained as part of the series' DVD release. Mick Garris, creator and executive producer of the series, described the episode as "amazing [but] hard to watch" and "definitely the most disturbing" production he had ever seen.^[12] "Imprint" has yet to air in the United States but was shown on Bravo in the United Kingdom,^[13] Nelonen in Finland, Rai Tre in Italy, and FX in multiple other countries. Anchor Bay Entertainment, which handled the American DVD releases for Masters of Horror, released the episode uncut on September 26, 2006.^[14]

In his later career, Miike has shifted towards work more acceptable to the mainstream; his samurai film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival^[15] and his spy thriller film Straw Shield (2013) was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.^[16]

Miike rarely discusses his private life.^[22]