Tak Sakaguchi

Tak Sakaguchi wandered into film as a martial artist and never bothered to separate the two careers. He arrived in Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus in 2000 as Prisoner KSC2-303, a part with almost no dialogue and an enormous amount of swordplay, and that film built the circle he has worked inside ever since: Kitamura, the actor Hideo Sakaki, the directors Yudai Yamaguchi and Yuji Shimomura.

He performs his own stunts, choreographs fights and directs, and his training runs through Bajiquan, Shorinji Kempo, boxing and kickboxing, with Zero Range Combat added while he was making Re:Born. That last one matters, because Re:Born is where his screen fighting changed. The earlier work is theatrical, all big arcs and camera-friendly geometry. The Re:Born style is compressed and unpleasant to watch in the right way, closer to how a knife fight would really end than to how a movie usually stages one.

The rest of the record is the Japanese genre underground at full volume: Tokyo Gore Police, Mutant Girls Squad, Battlefield Baseball, Deadball, the splatter and prosthetics boom of the late 2000s, alongside bigger jobs like Godzilla: Final Wars and Azumi and a late detour into a feature built around a single unbroken sword fight. He is not a conventional actor and the films that ask him to be are the weakest ones. Point a camera at him fighting and very few people alive are better.