Kitao Sakurai

Kitao Sakurai is a director whose work on *The Eric Andre Show* helped establish a style built around unpredictable encounters, abrupt interruptions, and reactions that cannot be scripted. The Adult Swim comedy series, which began in 2012, presents itself as a talk show hosted by Eric André, with Hannibal Buress as its longtime co-host. Celebrity interviews are interrupted by chaotic performances and the destruction of the set, while other segments bring the show’s comedy into public places. Sakurai directed episodes of the series before taking a related approach into feature filmmaking.

His best-known feature is *Bad Trip*, released on Netflix in 2021. Sakurai directed the film, which stars André as Chris Carey and Lil Rel Howery as Chris’s friend Bud Malone. Its fictional story sends them from Florida toward New York after Chris decides to pursue Maria Li, played by Michaela Conlin. Their trip creates another problem: the car they take belongs to Bud’s sister Trina, played by Tiffany Haddish. After escaping from prison, Trina sets out to find them.

*Bad Trip* does not simply tell that story through conventional, fully staged scenes. It places its performers in situations involving people who do not know they are participating in a film. The narrative gives Chris and Bud reasons to stop, argue, seek assistance, or make spectacles of themselves in public; the responses of nearby strangers become part of the finished movie. Haddish’s pursuit provides a continuing thread between those encounters. Sakurai’s directing task was therefore twofold: to make the actors’ escalating predicament intelligible as a story and to preserve the spontaneity on which the hidden-camera sequences depend.

That combination connects *Bad Trip* to Sakurai’s television work without making the film another episode of *The Eric Andre Show*. The series can move rapidly between a studio interview, a public stunt, and a sudden visual gag. The film instead needs its encounters to serve a road-trip plot and a friendship between Chris and Bud. Maria’s gallery event gives Chris a destination; taking Trina’s car gives the journey its immediate danger.

Sakurai’s association with André across both projects is a concrete through-line in his career. On television, he directed comedy in which a familiar talk-show format repeatedly breaks down. In *Bad Trip*, he directed performers playing named characters within a continuous fictional story, while unsuspecting members of the public supplied unscripted reactions. The result is a feature defined as much by the real encounters captured during production as by the route its characters take to New York.