William Friedkin on Kinji Fukasaku (July 3, 1930 – January 12, 2003)

“He wasn’t worried about happy endings. He didn’t have to redeem the good guys. He didn’t have to say that the good guys triumphed at the end and that was a profound influence on me. You can’t do that today in American film. Audiences have to be totally clear as to who the good guy is, who the bad guy is, and there’s no variations. It’s gotten to point even where they’re comic book characters. Comic book heroes, comic book villains. But in the Fukasaku universe, the great films of his, he had no judgement about the characters. The heroes were not always triumphant, so they had much more of a relationship to actual life.”