How a fast food advert became instrumental in Takashi Miike’s 100th movie
If you’ve never seen a film by Takashi Miike before, then sorry, but you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. The Japanese filmmaker brings a whole new meaning to the word ‘prolific’, as between his first direct-to-video film in 1991 and time of writing (end of 2024), he has directed a whopping 106 different movies. All of that is on top of his TV work and the two plays he’s directed. Basically, Miike is nuts, and everybody loves him for it.
The film that tipped the maverick into triple figures was Blade of the Immortal, a samurai revenge story that came out in 2017. It’s very much within Miike’s wheelhouse; a bloody, action-oriented affair with plenty of dark undertones and lots of mad fight sequences. It got great reviews, picking up a nomination for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Austin Film Critics Association Awards, alongside pictures like Raw and Okja. However, without a very strange incident, the movie would have looked very different.
Miike explained to HeyUGuys how he discovered Hana Sugisaki, the actor who played the female lead in Blade of the Immortal. “About three years ago, I first saw Hana in a TV commercial for instant Chinese stir fry food,” he said. “She must have been about fourteen or fifteen. I noticed she was eating the food very enthusiastically and with an animalistic quality like it was really delicious. When women actors eat they usually try to do it nicely, not messily but as nice as possible. Hana had a very happy eating look. I think that’s what really attracted me to her.”
Sugisaki, also known as Hana Kajiura in some circles, began her career as a child actor. After building a healthy career in film and TV, she took on the role of Rin Asano in Miike’s movie. Asano, a character ripped straight from the Blade of the Immortal manga series, is a young woman who enlists the protagonist, an immortal samurai named Manji, to enact revenge on the gang that murdered her parents.
Sugisaki was just 20 years old when the movie came out and was praised for her performance, earning a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Asian Film Awards. Miike was clearly pleased with his decision to cast her, as she would go on to appear in his 2021 film The Great Yokai War: Guardians, the sequel to another movie he had made back in 2005.
The young performer would have had to have gotten used to her director’s unusual method of capturing footage. “Sometimes I start filming in the middle of the action instead of at the top of the cut and work a certain way with particular lighting and positioning,” Miike explained. “Rather than simply telling the cast via instructions, they are made to simply fit into our manner. This can happen during the preparation stage when we are fitting the wigs and the costumes. There is a subtle way of communicating to them and through that we develop a trusting relationship.
The ability to spot a future superstar in a stir fry commercial is one of the many reasons why Miike has enjoyed such a long and fruitful career. He lives and breathes movies and it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else, so fingers crossed he can make it to another 100 films before he decides to hang up his camera for good.
