Takashi Miike was born in the small town Yao on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan. His main interest growing up was motorbikes, and for a while he harboured ambitions to race professionally. At the age of 18 Miike went to study at the film school in Yokohama founded by renowned director Shohei Imamura, primarily because there were no entrance exams. By his own accounts Miike was a undisciplined student and attended few classes, and when a local TV company came scouting for unpaid production assistants the school nominated the one pupil who never showed up. He spent almost a decade working in television, in many different roles, before becoming an assistant director in film to, amongst others, his old mentor Imamura. The 'V-Cinema' (Direct to Video) boom of the early 90s was to be his break into directing his own films, as newly formed companies hired cheap young film makers to crank out low budget action movies. Miike's first theatrically distributed film was Shinjuku kuroshakai: Chaina mafia sensô (1995) (Shinjuku Triad Society), and from then on he alternated V-Cinema films with higher budgeted pictures. His international breakthrough came with Ôdishon (1999) (Audition) and Miike has an ever expanding cult following in the west. A notoriously prolific director Miike has directed (at time of writing) 60+ films in his 13 years as director, known for their explicit and taboo representations of violence and sex in films like Bizita Q (2001) (Visitor Q), Koroshiya 1 (2001) (Ichi The Killer) and the Dead or Alive Trilogy: Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha (1999), Dead or Alive 2: Tôbôsha (2000) and Dead or Alive: Final (2002).
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