To describe Japanese director Takashi Miike as prolific is to fail to tell the half of it. His IMDb listing shows 87 directorial credits in the past 20-odd years, which is frankly astonishing. I must confess to having seen very little of his output beyond the more celebrated (and visceral) Audition and Ichi The Killer, though by all accounts his “13 Assassins” of last year was an exceptional entry in his swollen canon.
Miike is now said to be lining up an adaptation of “Lesson of the Evil” (that title is going to need some work, at least in English), a graphic novel about a teacher who decides, in the face of growing problems at his school with bullying and bad behaviour, that he ought to start killing the students, thus alleviating that problem. As you do.
Hideaki Ito, who has worked with Miike before, is set to play the troubled and troubling teacher and Miike is said to want to go into production by April in order to submit the film to the Venice Film Festival in the summer, before a theatrical release in Japan in November. That would be going some, but clearly not beyond someone accustomed to churning films out at the rate Miike does. What if any impact that sort of truncated timescale will have on the quality of the finished product, time will tell.
