[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," writers and creators, Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, speak on their process crafting the Emmy Award-winning historical drama, "Shogun."

- For one reason or another, all the characters in "Shogun" are seeking their own agency in a world that is kind of flying in their face.

- We just have to hand it to Clavell.

We could only do "Shogun" today because he actually succeeded at asking questions that mattered to people, and to ask about existence, and how do we encounter other cultures?

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] From a meticulous adaptation to treacherous battle scenes, the duo outlines how to captivate an audience.

[typewriter ding] - Looking for the themes that you pointed out, which are actually pretty accurate today, a lot of them, you know, and the crashing of a new world, I'm just curious how you then looked at it, especially looking at it as a duo with completely different perspectives.

- There was this theme that was an emergent theme, this idea of agency and entrapment.

And I think that for one reason or another, all the characters in "Shogun" are seeking their own agency in a world that is kind of flying in their face, and like right, you know, running against the wind, so to speak, or sailing against the wind.

And we started looking at it through that lens.

The reason, I guess, that lens was interesting to me was because I think that that was interesting regardless of culture.

I think that it kind of transcended the idea of culture, which while a very strong adornment for the story, and certainly, the original miniseries made a lot of that clash of cultures notion.

It didn't feel like it was like the first foot we should lead with.

It feels like in a world where, you know, you can go anywhere in the country, and probably find a sushi restaurant somewhere, there wasn't this sort of novelty factor that it could coast on anymore, 40 plus, 50 years- - Yeah, 50.

- Yeah, years later, that you know, oh my gosh, they live in houses made of paper and eat raw fish.

It's like, "This is not new.

This is something we live in a globalized world."

And so- - But I think it's important to also say that we just have to hand it to Clavell, 'cause a lot of, of course, it was very new then, but we could only do "Shogun" today, because of, not because he actually did it.

Yes, but because he actually succeeded at asking questions that mattered to people, and asked about existence, and how do we encounter other cultures?

How do we encounter ourselves in that process?

- So to take it back to the original concepts where this guy is really landing in a place that he is utterly alien, you know, how did you put yourself into that?

You know, I know it's in the book, but your characters actually transcended some of the book.

- I remember that first conversation with FX.

I said, when we decided we did want to do it, 1,200 pages later, you know, was to say like, you know, "So what do you want to do with the book?"

I said, "Exactly what this story is.

Like, we don't wanna change a thing."

But I said, "The one key change we wanna make is that we wanna invert the gaze."

And I think, you know, at the time, it felt really good.

We were like, "Yeah, that's a good, that's a good nice turn of phrase, feels right."

And we were completely wrong about that.

Not because it was wrong to try to attempt some inversion, but because-- and this is like five, six years later through the rabbit hole of understanding how little we know, how little we don't know.

And you know, mounting this adaptation that required a casting crew from all around the world, and realizing that there's no way that we as Western, you know, American filmmakers with a granted Asian American, but American nonetheless, writers' room, could successfully invert the gaze of a story like this from the European to the Japanese point of view.

What we could do, and this is what we had a lot of fun doing, was subvert the gaze.

That's what I think were really after, because it's like, you show up to a show like this, and you think you know what you're gonna get with the stranger in a strange land, white savior archetype, all these things.

And so we could just play that up, and instead of letting it just sit there, we could just have fun with it.

You know, there's a scene in episode seven, the sword training scene.

This is a scene that you've seen 1,000 times in movies and TV shows of the guy coming to Japan or anywhere else, and learning how to fight with the sword and showing his great nobility.

And everyone's really impressed by his ability to fight with the sword.

And we just had like, to Cosmo that day, "Just go out and have fun with it.

Like, you don't know how to use this thing.

You're a sailor, you know?"

And he's just picking it up and he's yelling at Yabushige who's yelling back at him, and it's getting knocked out of his hands.

And he's like, "Why are we even doing this?"

[speaks in foreign language] [Barbara] The level of respect that is happening again and again and again on both sides of it in so many episodes where somebody has earned something, and kind of would like to hear about how you were thinking about that because it seems intentional, and obviously, it is a theme in the book.

But even starting with that first big one where it's on the cliff.

[dramatic music] [water rushing] [dramatic music] [dramatic music] [grunting] ♪ ♪ - The scene on the cliff was important because, to us as a writers' room, because it was our first foray into the very important cultural ritual of seppuku, that led us to say, "Okay, there are certain elements of this book that belong to the Japanese."

And so one of the big changes we made was in the book, I believe Blackthorne approaches or attempts seppuku in what would've been like episode four.

- Yeah.

- And it seemed very early to us, and we didn't want the character of Blackthorne to come off as unknowing about it, or we wanted him to be as respectful of that journey as we felt we had been compelled to be.

And Michaela Clavell, who is the daughter of James Clavell, she was with us from the very beginning on that journey, and she gave us her blessing to shift things around ultimately.

- She's really good at being a voice that is respectful of changes we wanted to make when it came to fitting it within the confines of 10 episodes.

But also just, you know, modernizing certain ideas and updating.

I mean, I think that James Clavell wrote a book with the best research he had available to him in 1975.

A lot has changed since then with our globalized world.

We have a lot more primary sources available to us as English language readers, because translation is a thing now, and so all of this is an advantage we have.

And rather than sort of condemning the past for not having the advantages we have, we just said, "Well, look, there's a brilliant mind at work that did this.

What would he do if he had the information that we had?"

And you know, when it came to the idea of seppuku, and our kind of lack of understanding of it, 'cause it took us years, I think, as Americans to sort of get to this place of feeling comfortable rendering it on screen.

We really just, you know, the analogy that I would give would be, do you remember like "Pee-wee's Big Adventure?"

And there's like the scene where the pet store is on fire and he's rescuing all the pets.

And there's the thing of snakes that he's always running by.

And every time he runs by, and he just like keeps going, and he grabs another animal, that was seppuku for us, and Blackthorne committing seppuku was that pile of snakes.

And every episode is like, "Is now the time?"

It's like, "No, we're just gonna keep running by it."

And until the finale when we just grabbed and screamed and ran out and passed out on the sidewalk and- - What a metaphor.

[audience laughing] - But the point is that sometimes the things that scare you the most, are both things that yes, you should confront, but maybe wait till you're ready to confront them.

[typewriter ding] - Trying to figure out how you're writing in English, and then taking it to a translation, which is hard with anything, and preserving what you're trying to do in the story, preserving the layers of what you are running through the 10 episodes.

- Incredibly, trial and error field.

But I mean, here's the trick, and it's the thing that I especially felt like I learned from a place of process and running shows, and how to ensure your vision to the end is like, "You don't, when you do that, you let go."

And that is what TV is, that's what makes TV great.

What I learned with "Shogun" is that ultimately, the process is the author of the show.

And the nice thing about television is that the writer gets to author that process.

And the process with dialogue on this show, was very unlike anything that at least I had done before, because it required a fair amount of letting go, of getting beaten down, and beaten down, and beaten down, until you finally just like, have to sort of submit yourself to things that you can't control.

And if we are truly determined to tell a story that feels like, well, it can't be entirely from the Japanese point of view, because we are an international casting crew making this show together.

But something that doesn't feel like it comes from us, then the way you do it is you have to relinquish control.

We sent it to a team of translators thinking this is it, you translate it.

It's like there's a simple answer.

We should have known better in a show about translation that there is never one way to translate anything.

But more to the point, like, you know, it would come back, and Hiro who's a producer, and Eriko Miyagawa, another one of our producers, you know, they're like, "You know, it's translated, the fact of makes sense, but this is not performable."

And we found a Japanese playwright and speaks no English by the name of Kyoko Muyawaki, who then polished the translated dialogue into a Shakespearean Jidaigeki Japanese, and you know, one that Hiro would work with to find bits of modernity and send it back to her.

And then it would come into sides, and they'd continue working on it while we're all sitting on set for tomorrow's sides and things, little adjustments for the actors.

The actors would improvise and add their little flare because they're performing in their first language, they should be able to.

And then that which is what was shot- - And then we're done, right?

- That's it.

- Good job.

- No, we would translate.

- That's what Justin said.

- Yeah, that's true.

- I mean, the truth is that he tricked me.

He said, "We did a great job, good job.

Now we're done.

Except, I need you to do one thing, which is come into the editing process, and let's just have this first episode.

We just wanna get it right for this first episode.

Let's sit here while every word is retranslated back into English.

The spoken word from the actors' performance is given back to us in English."

And so I thought, "No problem.

Anybody can do anything for a week or so."

And that quickly turned into what I thought was years, but Justin said was months, of meticulously going through the retranslation, reading what we had, and then fighting about what the intention should, well, just fighting over what's best and- - Yeah, 'cause it was telephone.

That's what started to happen is that when we had a Japanese-speaking assistant editor translate the words back from screen into the subtitles we used in dailies, the lines were changing, the words were different, the little ideas were being introduced, metaphors were coming about that we had not written.

And you have a choice, you can ignore it, and just say, "Do the thing that I think most localization does," which is look the script, the words are written in the script, so just put it on screen, and let's move on to the next line.

Or you can say, "Can we make the show better by inviting it?"

And when we started to do that, then we had to polish it and fight over the polish.

- I just hope that you felt that we narrowed the gap, between a language you don't understand and a performance that you can.

- I would like to hear about, in particular, the women because they had very little dialogue, but impactful dialogue.

- And I think everybody would agree that you can't really come to anything, and apply what matters to you really.

Like, which would be, I guess, a personal agenda.

And it was a dawning, you know, it occurred to us that, "I'm sorry, but this whole story hinges on one woman's character."

And I didn't think that from the start.

I had no idea.

It took me years to understand how subtle Clavell was with that.

But what we were finding was that the women were incredibly limited back then.

There were some things that were quite cool.

They could request divorces.

We took their limitations and made it their empowerment, not us.

The story made it their empowerment, and made it their narrative, that they had to find the most creative way to make a statement with their lives.

And how cool is that?

I mean, I can't even figure that out, and I can divorce him any day, you know?

[speaks in foreign language] - Sake, the orange juice!

Get up, you bastard, on your feet!

[eerie music] [speaks in foreign language] [typewriter ding] - I've seen I'm just absolutely still heartbroken by, and when you first meet with Usami Fuji's character, that this person develops in front of us.

She was a particular interest to me in that sense that she goes through something that is beyond tragic, it's just beyond tragic, and it's so hard to even imagine how you move forward with that, and how you essentially weave her character into it.

And I really wanted to hear about that.

- Yeah, the answer is comic relief.

You make her comic relief, no.

But kind of, we kind of did.

- She made herself comic relief, I think.

- Yeah, you know, I remember Moeka Hoshi who plays Fuji was just, you know, before we were shooting one day, you know, you kind of go in and check on the actors in their tents to see what the mood is like that day.

And she was kind of in a mood, and sort of feeling like that nothing she was doing was working, and this is pretty late in production too.

And that she was like, she said, "She just feel like she was letting everyone down because she really loved Fuji on the page, and she feels like she doesn't do anything in the scenes except sit in the room and listen."

And I said, "I wanna show you something."

And I pulled out my phone, where there's a text message thread between myself and Sophie, who was my assistant at the time, which is just an entire thread devoted to gifs, you know, of Fuji responding to different things with different varying levels of horror, because it was how iconic her reaction shots were.

And you know, it led us in the cut to lead with those shots.

You know, I think of the scene from episode five, Aika Miyake cut it, where we call it "The Dinner Date from Hell," where, you know, Fuji is just essentially, you know, and it goes back to what Rachel was saying about this sort of agency, or the lack of agency that these women have, and the ways in which they take agency away.

That starts with the camera, that starts with the cutting style, that starts with where we put ourselves forward in terms of whose scene it really is.

And to us, that scene belonged to this poor woman who has to sit there and continue to put on a smile while these two people seem like they're about to kill each other, and you know, all of the sort of like sipping tea and hmm.

You know, like where it looked like someone else's hand, jumping into frame to lift the cup in front of her face.

I mean, it was masterful.

But yeah, I could probably count the number of lines she had in those group scenes on one hand, let alone two.

- Tell this milk tripling [bleeps] I'm ready to go.

[speaks in foreign language] [speaks in foreign language] [speaks in foreign language] - Hmmm.

[birds chirping] [birds chirping] That was very good.

[Barbara] She was a big presence there.

- And it took over in such a way that that scene at the end of, spoilers, I guess, but, you know, burying her or putting her baby's ashes into the water was not in the book.

It was something that we wanted to put into the show, and, you know, feel like she deserves an ending of some kind.

- It would be remiss not to talk about John Blackthorne's dialogue.

- Yeah.

- And a), like fan question, how much fun did you have writing those?

- It's interesting because a lot of it was a tactic that we would find on the day to keep Cosmo engaged with the scene.

In 104, when they first come to the beach, they come back to Jiro, and they're standing on the beach, and you know, Blackthorne's now standing there with Mariko and Omi comes over, and you know, you're just watching in a rehearsal.

It's like, it just feels like he would say something to him, this is the guy who peed on him last time they were together, and like, what do we do with it?

And Cosmo just looks, he's like, "I'm just standing in a crowd, just like, okay, and everyone's speaking a language I don't speak, and he's giving a big speech, and they all seem very impressed by it, but I don't know what he's saying."

And so, you know, why don't you say something, you know, like what do we do here?

Like, why don't we say something to him in this way?

And Cosmo's really fun.

He's always game.

And so we'll just start playing around, and then even when rolling, start playing around just actively, just throwing him another idea, and doing the thing you get to do in comedies a lot, right?

[slurping] [slurping] - Hmm.

[speaks in foreign language] [slurps] - You know, where I come from, only women drink from a tiny cup like that.

[speaks in foreign language] - Poor Tommy, he's so beautiful.

- I didn't really honestly remember him very much from the book.

And so in here, he felt like a huge presence.

I mean, you felt his presence when he wasn't in episodes, you know?

And which I'm assuming is something that was thought about.

- Buntaro, Buntaro.

[Barbara] Buntaro, yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, you know, he's an interesting one because I feel like both in the book and in our early depictions of him, I think there was a little bit of like Stanley Kowalski or whatever to the depiction, because I think that's, as Westerners, is a place we go to.

One of our consulting producers, I brought on an editor and writer by the name of Mako Kamitsuna, had you know, and she's Japanese born, had a lot of concerns about like, you know, but he's Samurai, and to be Samurai, you're still, you're not a brute.

You know, that there's these other qualities, and that both of those things could be true at the same time about someone that he fires arrows, two inches past his wife's nose, but he's also really good at poetry and tea.

- Tea making.

- Yeah.

- He's a tea master.

- He's a great tea master.

- His historical counterpart was renowned as a tea master.

- Yeah, Hosokawa Tadaoki.

- Yeah.

- And who was not by any kind a brute in the way that he's depicted in the book.

But like, so gets a bad rap.

- Markosam, you should move.

Markosam, move, Markosam.

[dramatic music] [speaks in foreign language] - Markosama, get outta the [bleep] way.

[arrow thuds] [dramatic music] - The great thing about all history, but especially, like Japanese history, and the single Kujidai, and into the early days of the Edo period, is just how crazy it is that you would never believe this stuff that actually happened.

You know, and things people actually said, and you know, that's stranger than fiction component, which is like, "Great, this is perfect.

This is the show."

You know, we see ourselves, I believe, like writing a comedy a lot of the time, you know, it's a very tragic comedy, and it's got moments that will also break your heart.

But there's an absurdity to it that plays into the kind of story we're trying to tell.

And you know, this is a world where the real life Lady Ochiba has a great line, when she was asked after this is in the history, you know, Yasu, when he became "Shogun".

He invited her and her son, the person who was supposed to be the heir to come visit him in Kyoto.

And she said, "I would rather kill my son and then kill myself, than attend your party."

And it was like, that kind of stuff is just such, you know, that's the sort of RSVP that we're looking for in "Shogun", you know?

And so it's like, the joy that you find when you find these moments, and the sort of the humor and the tragedy, right?

You know, it's what makes this show and the book too, what it was.

So we just hope to kind of carry that forward.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching "Shogun", a conversation with Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, that also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittcliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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