Humour is like violence. They both come to you unexpectedly, and the more unpredictable they both are, the better it gets.

I paint for the sheer joy of painting. I have never sold any of my paintings. I'd rather give them to people for free.

Eventually, this is how I would like to be remembered at the end of my career: He was never the best in anything he did - comedy, acting, filmmaking, writing, etc. But nobody was better at doing different things at the same time than he was.

I intentionally shoot violence to make the audience feel real pain. I have never and I will never shoot violence as if it's some kind of action video game.

In people's minds, I'm a comic, so it took a lot of time before I was recognized as a director. I had to be patient until the public accepted me. As a result, my early films didn't get a lot of attention. As a serious film actor, things didn't take off, either. Only my comic talents were recognized.

I don't really expect much from my life. So when I heard my films are premiering in film festival circuits I was glad of course but I thought it was lucky accident.

My film directorial career has been nothing but repetition of one failure after another!

I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.

Doing TV shows helps me a lot in my screenplay writing and filmmaking, especially since my TV shows are in different formats: comedy sketches, talk shows, debate programs, art variety shows, quiz shows. These enable me to meet interesting people with interesting stories and to learn about interesting subjects, all of which I can reflect into film.

I hate seeing people getting hurt or hurting other people. I hate seeing blood. I am very intolerant of physical pain. I find violence horrifying, so much so that I can't help being intrigued by it.

Cinema is a composite art into which you can include all conceivable art or entertainment forms. In film, I can work with novelistic elements, comedy, drama, music, and other forms of entertainment. Film is a versatile expression, combining all elements into one art form.

I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I'm good at everything but because I'm not good at any of these things.

I think my way of showing violence is unique from that of other filmmakers, in that when I show it, it hurts. It happens unexpectedly and looks painful. That's how it is in real life, and that's how it should be expressed. I don't glamorize it, nor do I depict it without necessity or inevitability.

I always come to conclusions very fast. Well, that is one way of thinking, and the other way would be that I lack the necessary perseverance to stick to one thing that really fits me. I don't know if it's a good thing or bad thing.

Being a TV comedian, actor, writer, columnist, and all that is quite helpful to me in acquiring wide varieties of knowledge, which is crucial for filmmaking.

One thing I hate in movies is when the camera starts circling around the characters. I find that totally fake.

The film is ambiguous, an ambiguity that reflects on Japan today, and a world in which nothing is clear. Once I made the film [Takeshis'], I realized it was about this feeling of vague disquiet in Japan and in the rest of the world, a feeling that is gaining on us, getting less vague.