The Artist and the Director

By LAUREN A.E. SCHUKER

Hollywood is crashing the art world.

The recent exhibition at London's Tate Modern museum, "Pop Life: Art in a Material World," features in its final room an unusual collaboration between McG, one of Hollywood's biggest commercial directors, and Takashi Murakami, Japan's king of pop art: a four-minute film starring actress Kirsten Dunst singing a cover of "Turning Japanese" by the rock band The Vapors.

Titled, "Akihabara Majokko Princess," the short video shows Ms. Dunst (co-star of "Spider-man" and its sequels), donning a blue wig and bright pink skirt, and dancing through the kinetic streets of Akihabara, a crowded shopping district in Tokyo where electronics and video games are sold. Akihabara also plays home to Japan's "geek culture," also known as "otaku," a Japanese term that describes a subset of people with fanatical interests in anime, manga, and video games.

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Bruce Yamakawa

Artist Takashi Murakami and actress Kirsten Dunst.

"I believe that real art is centered in entertainment and I wanted to show that with this piece," Mr. Murakami said last month while editing footage of the video with McG in Santa Monica, California.

McG, the director behind "Charlie's Angels" and the most recent "Terminator" film, first met Mr. Murakami at the end of last year in the director's Santa Monica office. Mr. Murakami, who pioneered the "superflat" style referring to various flattened forms of Japanese anime and graphic arts, has the same manager, Daniel Rappaport, as McG. Mr. Rappaport, a partner at Los Angeles-based Management 360, thought McG and Mr. Murakami might like working together, despite their varied backgrounds. "They both have a bright color palette and interest in the iconography of anime," says Mr. Rappaport. While Mr. Murakami has previously teamed up with fashion designers like Marc Jacobs and rappers like Kanye West, this is his first collaboration with a major Hollywood director.

The two artists continued to talk over the telephone and met up again when McG was promoting "Terminator Salvation " in Tokyo in mid-May. It was there, in Mr. Murakami's Tokyo studio, where the two began seriously hammering out details for the Tate Modern collaboration.

Shot over two and a half days at the end of August, the video features all non-actors save for Ms. Dunst. Young people dressed up as anime characters surround Ms. Dunst, who is also in costume, singing against a backdrop that at times include plush toys manufactured by Mr. Murakami's KaiKai KiKi production house. McG also dressed Ms. Dunst as a "majokko," a magical princess character from Japanese anime.

"What made us select Akihabara for the film," says McG, "is that it is a unique expression of Japanese culture that's not derivative of an American domination. Of course you flip it by getting a very Anglo woman to play the part of the magical princess."

Mr. Murakami says that he hopes that his piece with McG will erode what he sees as an artificial boundary between high and low art by introducing elements from pop culture into a more formal museum space. "I believe this is a new style," he says.

"There is a fundamental confusion of what a piece like this is doing in the Tate," adds McG. "It seems like a disposable music video, but then you look closer and realize that it is born out of something decidedly more complicated, decidedly Japanese but with a twist."

Write to Lauren A.E. Schuker at lauren.schuker@wsj.com