Shusuke Kaneko | |
---|---|
Born |
Tokyo, Japan |
June 8, 1955
Occupation |
Film director Screenwriter |
Years active | 1982 – |
Website | http://www.shusuke-kaneko.com/eng/ |
Shusuke Kaneko (金子修介, born 1955) is a Japanese screenwriter and director, best known as the director of the Heisei Gamera trilogy and Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.
Shusuke Kaneko was born in Tokyo on June 8, 1955. According to the biography on his official website Kaneko was interested in science fiction, particularly Godzilla and Gamera films, from a young age. He became involved in amateur film making in his teen years, but majored in education when he attended Tokyo Gakugei University. After graduation, he found a job at the major Japanese movie studio Nikkatsu. By 1982 he was a screenwriter and assistant director for Nikkatsu's line of Roman porno films. He made his debut as a director with Nikkatsu in February 1984 with Kōichirō Uno's Wet and Swinging, part of a long-running Nikkatsu series based on the works of erotic novelist Kōichirō Uno. That work along with two other Roman porno films he directed for Nikkatsu that year, OL Yurizoku 19-sai (OL百合族・19才?) and Eve-chan-no hime (イヴちゃんの姫?), won him the Best New Director award at the 6th Yokohama Film Festival. The next year, his manga-based April 1985 movie for Nikkatsu, Minna Agechau, took the award as the 9th Best Film of the year at the 7th Yokohama Film Festival. In July 1986, still at Nikkatsu, he directed Mischievous Lolita: Attacking the Virgin From Behind (いたずらロリータ 後からバージン Itazura Lolita: Ushirokara virgin?), which despite its strange title, was a fantasy about a sex-doll coming to life as a woman. Kaneko's final film for Nikkatsu was the appropriately named Last Cabaret, the second to last of the studio's Roman porno series. The film, released in April 1988, about a cabaret forced to close has been taken as a metaphor for the demise of the studio itself.