Takashi Miike Quotes

Everyone has complexes about their body or their ability and skills and dream of a rebirth into something different. I myself have always had that secret desire to become something completely different and enact revenge on certain things. So I do that through my movies. My desires become reality in the movie because it can't become real in real life.

I like to be able to play a character and act out a lot of things which I can't or don't do in my normal everyday life.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

I guess I probably make violent films partly because I can't express my anger in my real life very well.

I know that's why I became an actress. In my dream world, I could get mad and scream and yell, and if somebody died, they got up again. In real life, I didn't dare try it.

I'm a very boring person in my real life so I got to act out misbehaving fantasies was really fun.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

Writing music is such a freeing exercise, and it's really nice to play in that world of being confident, vengeful - getting back at all the bad boyfriends.

Everyone gets frustrated and aggressive, and I'd sooner take my aggression out on a guitar than on a person.

In real life, I'm polite and nice all the time. It's fun to play people who aren't. It's escapism.

I noticed that in 'The Revenant,' as much as it is a good story of revenge and endurance, there are times that you get to escape with a story like that.

I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.

Everybody feels up sometimes, they feel down sometimes, sometimes they feel sideways, sometimes they feel weird. And the beauty of music is you can express all those different feelings in all the different songs you write. And hopefully, people can identify with those.

It's nice to be able to play a guy who gets to say all the things that you don't get to say in real life.

When movement isn't enough, you dance, or when speaking isn't enough, you sing. When it's organic, and it's earned like that in a musical, that's when it works, and then there's nothing like it because it's this thing that takes you to a whole 'nother level, you know?

As entertainment, fiction may offer momentary relief from the stresses of reality.

The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?

I suppose that's why we watch dramas: to see the stuff that in real life you'd end up in prison for.

I can express the brooding part of myself on-screen. It's kind of fun to get to do the bratty things I really wouldn't do. And then I get to go back to my regular life.

Fantasy is usually considered an escape, but it's also a way to deal with weighty real-world issues from a safe distance and in a context where you usually have some kind of power that you don't have in real life.

As a younger man, I thought the best thing art could do was to challenge people's mindsets, and I still do, but I've come round to the value of entertainment. A show like 'The Interceptor,' which gives the audience that release, after a hard day, of just sitting down and enjoying themselves - that adds value to lives, too.

Questions don't easily die within me until they're answered, and so being able to write a song and put words to complex feelings is part of my process of understanding and letting go of things.

I'll keep venting my anger through my films.

I've been writing a lot of songs about my personal life and identity. That can be a real healing process.

When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all.