BRINGING OUT THE DEADPAN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Is America ready for Takeshi Kitano?

That remains to be seen, and it will be when Kitano's brutally violent, cross-cultural gangster movie ``Brother'' opens on Friday.

Conversely, though, the ultrapopular Japanese media personality and internationally acclaimed director/star of ``Hana-Bi'' (``Fireworks'') and ``Kikujiro'' had to make some serious adjustments in order to shoot his first movie in the United States.

Some of this had to do with language differences - Kitano, 53, speaks hardly any English, and conducts interviews, as he did the L.A. portion of ``Brother's'' production, through interpreters. But Kitano's methods are so uniquely his own, making a movie by any nation's conventional means would be a kind of shock to his system.

The face of Kitano

Known for his great stone face (the impassive but very cinemagenic result of a near-fatal motorcycle accident seven years ago), it's hard to tell whether Kitano is just joking or really complaining when he talks about the travails of making ``Brother,'' and of the later difficulties of making it marketable in the minds of his Western co-producers. Overall, though, it's pretty clear that the experience was one that the modern-day Renaissance man is eager to try his hand at again.

``I think that Kitano was apprehensive at the beginning because, of course, it was all unknown territory,'' says ``Brother'' co-producer Ann Carli, a Japanese American who performed extensive liaison duty between the film's Asian and U.S. collaborators. ``He was worried about whether he was going to be able to actualize his vision for the film, since his style of filmmaking is incredibly organic to the moment. But I think he is going to do this again; he's actually thinking about using all foreign (to him) actors the next time.''

``It took about three years of coordination and preparation before we could start,'' notes Kitano, who is used to putting out a self-starring film every year or two in Japan - while he's also producing and appearing in an average of seven different weekly television programs, writing magazine and newspaper columns, fiction and poetry, recording albums, painting paintings, managing other performers and sponsoring baseball teams, for which he sometimes plays.

``In Japan, I always shoot the films in story sequence, which I couldn't do here because of location rentals,'' he continues. ``So I had to work on the script a lot more carefully than I usually do.''

A good skill to learn, especially since most other filmmakers consider shooting out of sequence a given. But Kitano is used to an improvisational style of filmmaking that's the direct result of an even more unusual production method. Due to his busy television workload, he's gotten in the habit of shooting his movies in single-week stretches interspersed with weeklong stints on his other commitments.

``The good thing about altering film and TV work every other week is that during TV weeks, I would finish recording the shows by 6 or 7 p.m. and then be able to go into the film editing room to see the prior week's rushes, which gave me time to objectively observe the footage and rethink what I might shoot the following week,'' Kitano explains. ``It gave me space to come up with good ideas. But in this case, it was very hard for me to feel fresh every time I arrived on set, and that can be miserable.

``On the other hand, concentrating on a film for seven consecutive weeks can surely be advantageous. But since this was the first time for me, adjusting myself to the unfamiliar pace was about as much as I could do.''

Personalizing the product

Of course, he did more, imprinting his distinctively deadpan brand of humor, emotionalism and shocking violence on what, in most other hands, would be a by-the-book gang war thriller.

Under his stage name Beat Takeshi, Kitano plays a tradition-bound Japanese gangster, or yakuza, named Yamamoto, who escapes with his life to Los Angeles when his Tokyo gang is defeated by a rival faction. Once stateside, he hooks up with his half-brother Ken (Claude Maki), who is part of a small-time, multiracial group of drug dealers that includes Denny (Omar Epps). Though their first encounter is brutally antagonistic, Denny and Yamamoto develop a mostly unspoken bond as the crusty yakuza whips the street punks into the most viciously efficient criminal organization in L.A.

Having brought many of his longtime key collaborators with him from Japan, Kitano was able to stage ``Brother'' in the manner to which he is accustomed. He reports that U.S. crew members, conversant in the international language of film, were easy to work with. Directing the American actors was, of course, a different matter.

But maybe not as different as one would expect.

``I concentrated my attention on facial expressions and movement and the whole feeling of the actors' performance,'' he explains. ``Basically, I let the actors be their characters without many instructions or anything. Occasionally, I wouldn't like how someone looked in a scene, but rather than try to make them correct their performance, I'd try to come up with a different way of filming it, say reposition the camera so that we don't see what wasn't working.

``That seemed preferable to doing extensive rehearsals over and over again to correct a performance. But, come to think of it, that's the way I direct my actors in Japan as well. Some actors find that a little awkward, but at the end of the day, they usually get comfortable with it and find it a great challenge.''

One of Kitano's greatest challenges came after principle photography - after he thought post-production was completed, in fact.

``When I'd done the editing, I was told that our (U.S.) distribution deal required the movie to be two hours long, and my original cut was three hours and 10 minutes! I was like, wait a minute ... But I managed to get it all done.''

The editing knife

That led to another complication, though. Takeshi, who started his show business career as half of the wildly successful comedy team The Two Beats (hence his stage name), structures the action in his crime films as a comic would a joke's punchline, for ultimate surprise value. Hence ``Hana-Bi's'' and ``Sonatine's'' digressions into humor, sentimentality and even childishness occur between spasms of violence. But that trademark pacing fell to the editing knife in ``Brother,'' rendering the film a more concentrated dose of Takeshian cruelty - so much so that he had to cut the movie a second time to avoid getting slapped with a commercially restrictive, NC-17 rating.

This came on the heels of a huge controversy in Japan over a film in which Kitano appeared, ``Battle Royale,'' in which misbehaving schoolchildren are sent to a remote island, issued weapons and ordered to kill each other or be killed.

``Ratings boards are pointless,'' protests Kitano, who varies his own film output between the bloody crime films and warmhearted comedies such as ``Kikujiro'' and ``Kids Return.'' ``There are certain people who want to blame kids' bad behavior on something, and films are an easy target. If film did not exist in this world, kids who commit brutal acts of violence would do the crimes anyway. They blame it on films, they blame it on video games, they blame it on music or TV. But my personal opinion is, let kids see anything that is available and educate them to have their own judgment and discernment to tell that what they see in a film is not something they can imitate in real life. Nurture the kids' ability to make their own decisions, don't try to hide something from them.

``When I depict violence on film, I always keep in mind to do it in a way that conveys the painfulness, to some extent, as an aversion for the viewers,'' he adds. ``Violence in real life is an unpleasant thing to watch, and it's my policy to show it as it is.''

And Takeshi Kitano sticks to his policies no matter how diverse his work keeps getting. With a winning humility, the frozen-faced tough guy suggests that, until he feels he's really learned how to excel at something, he'll keep plugging away at it all.

``Probably, the reason why I involve myself in such diverse activities is because I am not excellent at anything that I do,'' he chuckles. ``Not bad, but ... It's like a playboy guy who flirts with all kinds of girls, but will probably never find the love of his life.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Claude Maki, left, Takeshi Kitano and Omar Epps play members of a highly efficient Los Angeles crime syndicate in ``Brother,'' directed by Kitano.

(2) Kitano, center, a busy star in his native Japan, says he had to break the habit of making movies in one-week stretches to direct ``Brother.''