Takashi Miike is an interesting filmmaker for many, many reasons, one of which being his tendency to bounce from genre to genre. The same guy who could make something extremely graphic like Audition is also capable of turning out a family-friendly movie such as Zebraman. How he’s capable of this is a mystery to me (just like his ability to make projects at an astoundingly quick rate), but it’s something that he seems fond of doing. While his last movie, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, didn’t impress us at Cannes, he doesn’t seem affected by this, as he’s already at work on his next film.

That next project, however, is something I couldn’t have ever imagined him taking on. While speaking to The Huffington Post (via /Film), the Japanese filmmaker said that he’s currently filming a movie version of the popular video game series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

The director’s quote on his next film is as follows:

“It is a very light comedy that I am filming now, a court drama, based on a video game, the Nintendo game DS.”

While he doesn’t name the series by name, I’m not sure that there are any other court drama Nintendo DS games. Thus, it’s difficult to imagine that he doesn’t mean Phoenix Wright. Sure, there’s also games with the title of Apollo Justice and Miles Edgeworth, but Phoenix is the name that most people (including myself) know the series by.

Considering that he said that it will contain “very little blood,” in addition to the games themselves only being rated T for Teen, one imagines that this will have a somewhat wider appeal. If he adapts the cartoonish, hyper-stylized look of the series or sticks to a more traditional way of storytelling remains to be seen, but I think there’s better odds that he goes with the former option. If you’re going to adapt a game, it seems more likely that the adapter will be taking cues from the source material. I think this could turn out to actually be kind of neat, and in some ways it may very well end up being the first good video game adaptation. For now, I’m actually intrigued by the whole thing.

Is this something you want to see Miike take on? Have you played the games, and do you think they could be properly adapted into films?