banjalukaforum.com

Fans of Asian cult cinema bemoaning Takashi Miike's recent turn away from the cult fare that built his name for more serious projects, take heart. Things could be getting very, very weird.

The ever busy Japanese director has apparently found an unlikely collaborator for an upcoming project in Hardware and Dust Devil director Richard Stanley.

Whispers began to circulate of the collaboration when Stanley appeared at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal, talk repeated amongst fans of Stanley within the industry at the American Film Market. And, surprisingly, though the film does not appear on either Stanley or Miike's IMDB pages confirmation of its existence comes via Stanley's Wikipedia entry.

Titled The Secret Life Of Lord Musashi there is a strong possibility that this is an adaptation of the 1931 novel of the same name by Junichiro Tanazaki, in which the author claims to have discovered secret documents detailing the masochistic sexual preferences of the samurai warrior who wrote the famous book of tactics, strategy and philosophy The Book Of Five Rings.

In other words, if you loved 13 Assassins but wish it had more kink, this could be the movie for you.

There is no word yet on who is producing or of a firm start date but given Miike's working habits it is not at all unreasonable to think that he will shoot the Stanley-penned script sometime in 2012.