Tokyo day 5 - Masayuki Mori

The current Tokyo trip has come to a close, and our final interview was with longtime Takeshi Kitano associate Masayuki Mori, for BCI's upcoming discs of Violent Cop and Boiling Point, the first two films by Kitano as a director.

Mr. Mori has been associated with Kitano since before he became a film star, directing many of his first TV programs and managing his career from nearly the very beginning. He's also produced all of Kitano's films and is one of the prime creative forces in shaping the career of one of the biggest celebrities in Japan.

We asked Mr. Mori to provide a comprehensive background of Kitano's pre-directorial career for U.S. viewers, and he gave us much more than that. This information is available on the web and elsewhere, but in this interview, it'll be straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and there are some funny stories associated with Kitano's career that I hadn't read or heard about before. Mori took us up through the first two films and skipped ahead to the present day and Kitano's lingering impact on the Japanese entertainment industry. It should make for a very interesting interview when it's all finished.

Look for more information on BCI's discs of these two films within the next few months. I expect they'll be out at some point in the first quarter of 2009, possibly with additional supplements, but definitely with new transfers and looking the best they have yet on home video.