Takeshi Kitano stars as Yamamoto, the big brother who comes to Los Angeles in search of little brother Ken (next page) - and has no problem adapting his yakuza ways to Southern California.

LITTLE TOKYO STORY

Imagine Clint Eastwood making a film in Japan and you have a pretty good picture of Takeshi Kitano shooting one in Los Angeles. Both men have developed a style of acting which is laconic to the point of sub-zero coolness. Both usually act in their own films, Eastwood under his own name, Kitano as, for some reason, ‘Beat Takeshi’. And both have a reputation for an extremely economic, straight-to-the-point approach to directing movies. “He’s almost impatient with the process of actually making the film,” says Omar Epps, who plays the American lead in Brother, Kitano’s first film to be shot outside Japan. “He wants it all on film right away.”

What happens when Japan’s most stylish director makes a film in Los Angeles? Hal Hayes reports on Takeshi Kitano’s Brother.

The same might be said of Eastwood, who zips through the shooting day with as few retakes as possible. But it’s hard to imagine the former Mayor of Carmel making a film as cool, modern, complex and, yes, funny as Brother. The first film Kitano has shot outside his native Japan, it is a gangster movie combining the rituals of the Japanese yakuza (somewhere between the codes of the Old West and the Mafia notion of homertà) and the sheen of Los Angeles where most of the film was shot.

Some of Kitano’s approach to film-making has to do with his hyper-stressful way of working. Since he is pretty much of a fixture on Japanese television (he also, for the record, writes novels, short stories, poetry and essays; paints; makes recordings; and sponsors an amateur baseball team in which he occasionally also plays), Kitano has developed a unique and highly disciplined way of fitting everything in. On Week One, he will do TV, recording enough material to cover the next two weeks. Then, on Week Two, he will work on his latest film (not that this means that the films are low-budget, shoot-and-run affairs: his last, Kikujiro, was in competition at Cannes; the one before, Hana-bi, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1997). Then, on Week Three, it’ll be back to television again. Exactly where the recordings, writing and baseball come in is anybody’s guess.

Making Brother, however, seems to have been a slightly more leisurely process, if only because the fact that it was largely shot in Los Angeles made it impossible for Kitano to pop back home on alternate weeks to do his TV show. Instead, he stockpiled enough material for seven weeks of TV and got on the plane in January of this year for the LA locations of Brother (the Japanese flashbacks were shot in one hectic week in November 1999).

Watching the finished film, one would never have guessed that it was filmed in anything other than the most relaxed of circumstances, nor that Kitano’s command of English is, as he puts it, “mixed”. It is an action-packed gangster story (Kitano reportedly took special pleasure in the kinds of action scenes that would have been impossible in Japan) with a string of fully developed characters and an extremely complex plot. But there is one thing that does point to the circumstances of its production: Brother is a fish-out-of-water story about Yamamoto, a Japanese yakuza who is forced to leave Tokyo for Los Angeles. Once there, he seeks out Ken (Claude Maki), his ‘little brother’ from some earlier, more innocent time.