“Kyoto Nocturnes, Part I: Elegant Slaughter” should probably be classified as a yakuza (Japanese gangster) film since it deals with a psychotic mob boss’s desperate machinations to stay on top of Kyoto’s underworld, but the film’s creative team is quick to point out the movie is much more than another gangster story.

“Elegant Slaughter is not your typical yakuza film,” says writer-director John Foster. “It owes as much to American film noir, Japanese kabuki theater, and Hong Kong action films as it does the great yakuza movies of Tai Kato and Kinji Fukasaku.”

“The film won’t disappoint genre fans because it contains the requisite crime/gangster film elements of murder, betrayal, and revenge,” says associate producer Kozue Tanaka. “But it also deals with madness and the supernatural, themes you’re more likely to find in Macbeth or a Philip K. Dick novel than a gangster film.”

The film begins as Boss Watanabe (Keishu Tsumagata) starts to lose his grip on reality after most of his men are massacred in a sneak attack masterminded by his lifelong rival, Boss Aihara.

“My character is an old-style oyabun (yakuza boss),” Tsumagata says. “Of course he’s interested in money and power, but he also prizes honor and loyalty. He treats his men like part of his extended family. When most of them are brutally murdered, his mind just snaps.”

Boss Watanabe, his lieutenant Uchida (Manabu Inoue), and his last few men hole up in a small bar to plan their next move, but the pressure starts to get to the yakuza boss. “I see the ghosts of my dead men, and their bodies are horribly mutilated. They’re still bleeding and are full of bullet holes and gaping wounds where they were slashed by swords,” Tsumagata says. “They blame me for their deaths, and they want me to join them, one way or another.”

“Susumu Nakatani of Kid’s Company did our ghost and other special effects makeup,” Foster says. “I had heard he was the best in Osaka before I worked with him, and that’s definitely true. The ghosts look very realistic and very gruesome. They scare the hell out of Boss Watanabe.”

“Uchida can’t see the ghosts, so he thinks his boss has just taken a dive off the deep end,” Inoue says. “He has to keep what’s left of Watanabe-gumi (Watanabe’s Group or Gang) together, and the only thing he can think of to do is hire K to kill Boss Aihara.”

K (Rakendra Moore) is an extremely confident and deadly American hit woman. She’s also part of a secretive organized crime syndicate called the Consortium. “The Consortium wants to move in on the yakuza, and they’ve sent K and a few others to get the blood flowing,” Foster says. “Nobody knows much about the Consortium except that if you’re interested in what they’re interested in, you’re gonna be dead or working for them real quick.”

Tsumagata continues: “Boss Watanabe doesn’t want to hire K. He doesn’t trust anyone outside his family. He doesn’t trust Americans, and he definitely doesn’t trust an American woman. He doesn’t want a girl fighting his battles. It goes against everything he believes in.”

“So, when Uchida tells Watanabe that their only way to get back at Boss Aihara is to get K to assassinate him, the you-know-what really hits the fan,” Inoue says.

What possesses an American filmmaker from New York to travel 7,000 miles to make a film in a foreign culture, especially when he has only conversational ability in that country’s language?

“Unlike Boss Watanabe, I can’t claim temporary insanity,” Foster says. “Making a film takes too long to get away with that.”

“I think the thing that I love most about Japan is the incredibly beautiful visual culture you find here. From the architecture of temples and tea houses to the kimono and makeup of kabuki actors and geisha to the woodblock prints of artists like Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Kawase Hasui - it’s just amazing. There’s no place else in the world like it, so elegant and striking.”

“I wanted to capture that visual beauty in a movie, and that’s why I came back to Japan to make Elegant Slaughter,” Foster says. “I couldn’t have made this film anywhere else, not even in the biggest studio in Hollywood.”

All the film’s exteriors were shot on location in Gion, the oldest and largest geisha district of Kyoto, and Fushimi-Momoyama, a section of Kyoto famous for its traditional sake breweries and warehouses.

“You can’t duplicate the atmosphere you find in Gion at night,” says cinematographer Akihiro Matsuura. “The chochin (red lanterns), noren (curtains covering tea house entrances), and ochaya (tea houses) - they are all beautiful, and all unique.”

“The only problem we had in Gion happened on our first take,” Matsuura says. “We were filming a maiko (an apprentice geisha) walking down the street, but the sound was no good. It turns out that a real maiko was coming down the street behind us, and we could hear her okubo (wooden clogs) and the tinkling of her kanzashi (hair decorations) just as clearly as our actress’s!”

The filmmakers were lucky enough to be able to use the Gekkeikan sake factory in Fushimi-Momoyama as their main exterior location. “I loved the Gekkeikan building the moment I saw it,” Foster says. “It’s not a tea house, of course, but architecturally it is very similar. It’s made from the same wood and the windows have the same latticework slats that instantly remind you of Kyoto. Since it’s a factory, the building is much longer and bigger than a tea house, which made it more interesting and imposing.”

Shooting on location in Japan’s ancient capital helped the film’s crew give the story a bit of kabuki style as well. Kabuki is Japan’s most popular form of traditional theater, famous for its sumptuous costumes and makeup as well as stories of both historical and mythical Japanese heroes. “The place you’ll really notice the influence of kabuki is in our costumes and music,” Foster says.

“Boss Watanabe is very traditional, so he doesn’t wear a modern business suit. He wears a man’s kimono, haori (kimono jacket), and geta (wooden sandals),” Tsumagata says. “My costume in the film has a little more flare and color than what a real yakuza boss would wear, but it still looks realistic and fits in with the film’s unique color scheme.”

Two maiko appear in the film, and they also provide a bold splash of color to “Elegant Slaughter’s” heightened sense of reality. “We were shooting in Gion, the heart of Japan’s geisha culture, so I couldn’t make a film here and not have a maiko or geisha in it,” Foster says. “They are icons of both Kyoto and Japan. However, this is a noir film, and in noir, people are not always what they seem. Not even a beautiful geisha.”

Kabuki’s influence on “Elegant Slaughter” can also be found in the film’s music. Kentaro Nojima, the film’s composer, has worked on many yakuza films, and he’s familiar with both Western music and traditional Japanese music. “Nojima-san and I agreed from the beginning that music should be a mixture of styles. Some of the music uses Western instruments like the piano, strings, and brass, but other tracks incorporate traditional Japanese instruments like the shinobue (wooden flute) and odaiko (a large drum). We also used tsuke (wooden blocks), which are used for sound effects during fight scenes and other highly dramatic moments in kabuki plays,” Foster says. “I think the music really adds to the film’s originality.”

“Elegant Slaughter is a yakuza film, but it’s so much more than that. I don’t really know how to classify it - and that’s what I love about it,” Foster says. “What I’m also very proud of is that the story has enough madness and mayhem to fill a feature, but it’s only the first part of Kyoto Nocturnes. We still have four parts to finish, four more stories that are just as wild and inventive as Part I is. Elegant Slaughter is just the beginning.”