Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 28, 2011, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Just prior to shooting the splattery sports epic Deadball (which they discussed in the first part of this article), director Yudai Yamaguchi and actor Tak Sakaguchi collaborated on another Sushi Typhoon production, the bloody, over-the-top actioner Yakuza Weapon (pictured above). For this one, the duo shared the reins, as Sakaguchi recalls.
“Originally I was slated to be both director and lead actor,” he says of Weapon, which we reviewed here and, like Deadball, played the New York Asian Film Festival and Montreal’s Fantasia fest this month. “But it has a lot of action sequences and there was a fear that if I got injured, the whole shoot would stop, so we brought in Yamaguchi to co-direct. I’ve known him for a really long time and we have a great working relationship. When we’re together, it’s not about who’s the boss, who’s the director; we really create things together. We both have our opinions but we create something as a unit, and we have a working history that made it very easy for us on Yakuza Weapon.”
That history stretches back to 2000’s Ryuhei Kitamura-directed cult fave Versus, and even earlier. “Tak Sakaguchi and the action director Yuji Shimomura and I were working on jishu eiga—Japanese independent, self-made films—together at that point, so we actually met well before,” Yamaguchi reveals. “That’s how we met Kitamura in the first place and got him to work on Versus. We were working part-time jobs together, so we could make the movies we wanted. Sakaguchi is someone who really understands what I want to do with film.”
What he wanted to do with Yakuza Weapon was make a film that, while certainly violent and over-the-top, doesn’t go to the stratospheric splatter extremes that other Sushi Typhoon titles do. “I really wanted this movie to have a wider appeal,” the director explains. “There are definitely people who will shy away from a film when they hear it’s a splatter movie, so even though I really love those films—the blood’s fake, so what’s the problem?—there are people who are turned off by that kind of label. So I was aiming for a film that more people could get into and a wider audience could be interested in. So the gore elements are not as emphasized as in some of the other [Sushi Typhoon] movies. With Versus, even though there are zombies and blood, a lot of people who normally wouldn’t see splatter films went to see it and really got into it, so I’d thought I’d like to do something similar.”
The inspiration for Yakuza Weapon came from the manga by Ken Ishikawa, which in turn was a sort of parody of Japan’s classic yakuza cinema, most specifically Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity (which is perhaps best known to U.S. fans for the music cue Quentin Tarantino borrowed for Kill Bill and its trailer). Yamaguchi notes that he mixed in a few cues from those earlier movies as well. “We definitely paid attention to the conventions that were used in those films; for example, Yakuza Weapon opens with narration being written out on the screen against a backdrop of Mt. Fuji, and in the opening sequence where you see the credits come up, we’ve made that look like a traditional Toei film from back in the day. And also, I think this might be hard to tell if you’re just reading the subtitles, but Sakaguchi also studied the Hiroshima dialect, so he sounds like Bunta Sugawara in the old movies.”
Given that Yakuza Weapon’s story centers on a murdered crime boss’ son, Shozo Iwaki (played by Sakaguchi), who loses an arm and leg in the course of avenging his father and has them replaced with a powerful machine gun and rocket launcher respectively, devotees of the current trend of outrageous Japanese cinema might also draw comparisons to Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl, but Yamaguchi notes, “That manga was originally written over 20 years ago, so people who aren’t familiar with it might see some similarities, but this is [based on] the predecessor.
“One of the big differences between this film and a movie like Machine Girl,” he adds, “is that you’ve got Tak Sakaguchi in the lead role. When you take an actor who is actually a martial artist, who really is an action star, and then you attach weaponry to that body, that’s a whole different thing.”
Most particularly where Yakuza Weapon was concerned, that meant the hero could engage in a four-minutes-plus action setpiece that sees him dispatch one squad of villains after another with different fighting techniques, all without cuts—and on a low budget and tight schedule. “When any film has that kind of action sequence, it’s a huge undertaking,” Sakaguchi says. “In Tony Jaa’s film Tom Yum Goong [a.k.a. The Protector], there’s a four-minute single-take action sequence, and they prepared for three months to shoot it. We prepped for one hour, we practiced for one hour and we got it in two takes, so it was really challenging. And I broke a bone in my neck in the first minute, so for the next three minutes I just continued with it.”
Sakaguchi will be continuing to risk his neck in a pair of upcoming co-directing collaborations with Sion Sono, another member of the Sushi Typhoon stable (his Typhoon film Cold Fish plays Fantasia and limited U.S. screens in August). The actor notes that he doesn’t usually seek to share the helm, adding, “If it’s people I’m already friends with, I can have a co-directing relationship with them, for example on Mutant Girls Squad with Iguchi and Yoshihiro Nishimura. I don’t think, if I was not friends with someone, that I could be a co-director on a project with them. Out of all of them, Sono is the one I’m closest with, in fact.”
He adds that their two pending features will not have the humorous elements seen in Sakaguchi’s recent work. “There’s nothing even the slightest bit comedic about them. They’re darkness itself. I’m focused on making them the ultimate samurai films. I don’t think there has been a real, proper samurai movie in Japan for a long time, so I’m working on honing my personal swordfighting techniques.”
And as for talk that has occurred of a follow-up to Versus? “I’m contractually not allowed to comment on that,” the actor says. “All I can say is that it’s a film everybody loves, and there will be a sequel coming out for it.”
Meanwhile, Yamaguchi is currently prepping a horror/mystery film for T.O. Entertainment, the backers of Iguchi’s RoboGeisha. While he can’t share details of this production either, he does say, “It’s not really a splatter film; it’s more of a thriller. I was able to work out a lot of my aggression and frustrations through these Sushi Typhoon movies, so now I’m able to move on a little!”
