Kitamura, Ryuhei

Born in Osaka. Ryuhei Kitamura showed great interest in cinema as a child, spending more time in cinemas than in a secondary school. He left Japan at the age of 17 and moved to Sydney ^[3] .

He considered such Australian masters such Australian masters as Peter Weir , George Miller and Russell Mulkahi . At 17, Kitamura dropped out of school in order to become a film director. Having left for Australia, the young man studies there at the School of Visual Art. At 19, he graduated from it. Kitamura's thesis, the short film Exit , brings him the title of "Best Director of the Year" of his release and the Kodak Award .

Returning to Japan, Ryuhei Kitamura founded the independent film studio Napalm Films . In 1997, with a minimum budget (300 thousand yen) and a team of 6 people, he shot a 50-minute film Down to Hell . Filmed by an 8mm movie camera, the film won the grand prize of the Indie's Movie Festival . At this time, Kitamura met with film producer Atsuro Watabe . Watabe took over the cost of creating the next Kitamura film, Heat After Dark (1999), and starred in it. Due to the small number of Japanese action films, Kitamura begins to work in this area of ​​cinema. As the director and screenwriter of the low-budget film Versus - originally conceived as a sequel to Down to Hell - Ryuhei Kitamura first attracted widespread attention of both film critics and well-known producers of the film industry. Among the subsequent works of Kitamura, one should note the psychological thriller Alive staged in the manga Tsutomu Takahashi with Hideo Sakaki in the lead role, as well as the participation in the project of producer Xinyi Kawai Jam Films in 2002. In this project, Kitamura was one of the 7 directors of the film, composed of separate episodes (a section of Kitamura's work - The Messenger ).

In 2003, Kitamura’s first budget film, Azumi , based on the Yu Koyama manga series, was released . The film was produced by Mataichiro Yamamoto , who admiredly accepted one of Kitamura's past works, Versus . Japanese pop singer Aya Ueto , who starred in one of the main roles of the film, was nominated for a prize by the Japanese Academy of Motion Picture Arts as the best female lead actor. Kitamura’s next big success was the 28th Godzilla movie incarnation . The premiere of the legend of this monster Godzilla: Final Wars ( Godzilla: Final Wars ), released on the fiftieth anniversary of the year, took place in the United States on November 29, 2004. A week later, the film was shown in Japan, where it collected more than 1.2 billion yen. In 2008, such a classic horror movie as “ Midnight Express ” appeared on the wide screen.

Ryuhei Kitamura was the director of cut-scenes for the game ( Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ,. Contrary to popular myth, and according to IMDB, Ryuhei Kitamura is not related to the franchise ( Devil May Cry . The real director of the so-called cut-scenes is Yuji Shimomura, who worked with Ryuhei Kitamura on the film Confrontation.

Kitamura's favorite films are Godzilla vs. Mehagodzilla in 1974, and King Sizar's favorite character. The best Japanese film of all time, he considers the crime drama Shunji Iwai "Swallowtail Butterfly", which was released in 1996 ^[4] . Ryuhei Kitamura is fluent in English.

• 1996: Night Scramble
• 1997: Straight to Hell
• 2000:
• 2002: Bomber
• 2002: Cinemajam
• 2003: God of war
• 2003: the distance of heaven
• 2003: Azumi
• 2003: Hell Baseball (producer)
• 2004: Spear of Fate
• 2004: Godzilla: Final Wars
• 2007: Love and Death ^[5]
• 2008: Midnight Express ^[6]
• 2013: No one survived
• 2014: Lupine III

• Ryuhei Kitamura's official website (in Japanese and English)
• Ryuhei Kitamura on the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Darker Magazine