Takeshi Kitano, a rare interview: “There are diverse patterns of queerness in Japanese society”

Two years on from its premiere at Cannes, arthouse auteur and multihyphenate Takeshi Kitano’s latest feature, Kubi, still awaits a UK release, but in April it made its debut on these shores as the opening night film of Queer East Festival. It was a bold programming move from an ever-expanding festival, as Kubi is a provocative and slippery film that evades easy categorisation. Long in development, it explores the overthrowing of daimyō Nobunaga Oda in 1582, and the political and personal machinations that led to his assassination.

Kitano previously took on the period drama in his 2003 Zatoichi reimagining – a director-for-hire project that deconstructed and reconstructed the blind swordsman. Kubi takes a different approach. A jidaigeki epic in micro, Kitano takes advantage of a smaller, focused scale to disrobe the queer reality of the samurai power struggle, revealing a rich meditation on power, desire and death.

Kubi is, above all, a conversation starter, so it’s a pleasure and privilege to sit down with Takeshi Kitano himself on a video call – for a gratifyingly candid conversation that explores the truths, contrasts and parallels at the heart of his latest feature.

Your films are often perceived as emotionally stoic, which makes desire and sexuality an interesting disruptor. Lust is one of the most expressive emotions in your films, its treatment in 1994’s Getting Any? being the most extreme example. Sexuality comes as suddenly and unexpectedly as bursts of violence. Tell me about the role of desire in your cinema.

If you try to represent a person’s entire life within one to two hours, you’ll find you cannot. The form, and the media itself, are compressed, so it’s almost impossible to recreate the temporality, people and atmosphere of human life. We cannot capture everything that we want to express to an audience in a film, which is why I try to pick out the points across the whole tapestry that stand out the most and line them up within the film. Through that, I try to deliver something.

Your past films have predominantly centred heterosexual characters and couples. Does your approach to writing and directing queer desire in Kubi differ from writing and directing heterosexual relations?

There are diverse patterns of queerness in Japanese society. Historically, heterosexual relationships were designed for procreation. Relationships between males were more about power. For powerful people in positions of authority, females were considered as a tool for procreation, but males were there for those in power to demonstrate their authority and protect their status. Relationships between men can be found across the world, but what is unique to Japanese society is that, especially in that period, in order to maintain power, the authority tries to control men physically and emotionally, and through the act of sexual performance.

What led you to focus on the purported homosexuality of these historical figures in this film? It’s a remarkable and provocative focus for a big-budget historical drama.

Japanese people are aware that this kind of homosexual relationship was historically quite common in domestic society, but in the film industry we have a cultural tendency of hiding these relationships and sexual expressions. A lot of Japanese filmmakers avoid depicting the sexual side of Japanese society straightforwardly. Considering the period that we’re in now, where Japanese films are distributed to international audiences, I felt the need to express the reality more honestly and truthfully.

You previously starred in Nagisa Oshima’s extraordinary 1999 film Gohatto, a film that shares thematic DNA with Kubi. Was that film on your mind when you were developing this film?

In Europe, Gohatto has been considered to be a depiction of ‘taboo’ – but it’s something more cultural. It’s not talking about homosexuality as the taboo, it’s talking about homosexuality as a forbidden act within this specific constitution. Gohatto depicts homosexuality within a very specific subset of society. Kubi explores further than that, depicting homosexuality between equals, and between bosses and subordinates. It tries to depict the relationship between power and authority, and how sexuality is used to maintain that authority.

Kubi was in development for a long time, and you initially realised it as a novel. Two years on from the premiere in Cannes, how do you feel about the film within your wider filmography, and how do you feel about its reception?

I always wanted to make a historical drama – specifically one set in the Sengoku period depicting the conflict between samurai. There are already so many historical dramas that focus on Nobunaga or [Tokugawa] Ieyasu, and I wanted to create a film that would surpass those works. But, in this day and age, there are no suitable castle or battlefield locations available to shoot such a film. Eliminating all those impossibilities, the theme I landed on was homosexuality. I thought that could be an interesting theme to explore. I think that this combination of samurai battles and explorations of homosexuality could have been more interesting, but we were constrained by budget.

How do you feel about the programming of Kubi as the opening night film of an LGBTQ+ film festival? It lends your work a categorisation it’s never faced before.

I’m from the production side of things. Any response or comments that the film receives is up to the audiences – I don’t have any responsibility or any opinion about it. But I really appreciate the fact that certain audiences will watch this film.

Your films always focus men in conflict – with each other, with life, or with themselves. Will you ever grant the men of your films a catharsis other than that of the death of themselves or of another? What drives you to repeat this fate as a recurrent necessity in your films?

My understanding of death is that existence as a physical being ceases. Different religions and belief systems have various understandings or life and death, and of the afterlife. Nobody completely believes in the afterlife, but nobody completely denies it either – they have this slight hope for the existence of the afterlife. By focusing on life and death, I hope to discover new perspectives.

Kubi was the opening night film of this year’s Queer East Festival.

With thanks to Kanako Fujita for translating.