Hiro Murai - 'Widow's Bay'

15:52Hiro Murai:it's funny like at that time there were so many filmmakers and musicians just kind of like hanging out with each other and so i i knew the odd future guys through another director and i don't know it It was like a very organic process. You know, I connected with Earl Sweatshirt early on, and at the time he was like 17 or something. And I just really connected with his music. You know, he's just such like a wise beyond his years, especially back then, but was carrying so much tension and kind of sense of isolation in him. But he was making these sort of laconic, kind of like hazed out hip-hop you know and so I don't know there's something about that his sound that I just felt like I could contribute you know visually and we we ended up making like three or four videos together and through that I met I met Frank and yeah we we did a we did his Grammy performance visual which was a big LED set that he performed in front of and you know and he He had a little table in front of him that also had a projection of his feet running.

17:04Hiro Murai:Looks like he's running. Right. So it's like this very bizarre concept where, you know, it's a stage show, but it looks like he's running outside, basically. And this is while he's doing Forrest Gump.

17:14Donald Glover:Forrest Gump. I know you're farthest.

17:19Hiro Murai:I know you wouldn't hurt a beetle. But you're so buff and so strong.

17:30I'm nervous for it's gone.

17:35Donald Glover:My fingertips and my lips, they burn from the cigarette. That's got to have been your biggest audience up to that point, right? I mean, music videos get seen a lot, but I mean, to have the Grammys audiences, and at least certainly among the artistic community, that and that directly you did you feel coming out of that there was more outreach from people that wanted to work with you who maybe weren't as familiar before that yeah i mean it was a really

18:05Hiro Murai:gradual thing and also you know like music videos are a funny thing because like people who pay attention pay attention but people don't yeah don't know they exist you know what i mean and so like in my mind there was like a very big thriving community of like artists making really cool stuff i think at the time but you know like my parents were like what are where are these music videos playing like wait you know what i mean like the internet yeah between the odd feature things i i think i think the artists started reaching out to me you know and then a lot of

18:34Donald Glover:collaborations kind of came out of it obviously you're you're very closely associated with uh donald glover who performs as childish gambino i don't did that was he was already performing as childish gambino before you guys started working together or he that was a persona that existed

18:52Hiro Murai:it already yeah i think he put he put out like one or two albums by that before i met him yeah

18:57Donald Glover:yeah yeah so grammy's thing with frank ocean things excuse me the production i don't know what to call it either no no that was early 2013 by august 2013 the world uh who's paying attention gets to see this 25 minute i guess you would say short film that you and donald did clapping for the wrong reasons and then even still in that same year december is 3005 which was i think your first music video together where it's up in the the ferris wheel the whole time and very cool

19:59Donald Glover:I guess I just wonder though, So obviously I don't believe you'd interacted or met Donald before the Grammy. So what happened in that year that all of this sort of just tug off?

20:11Hiro Murai:You know, I think him and his manager, Pham, reached out to me. And, you know, this happens a lot. You get, you know, people reach out to you and then you meet them and then you basically never hear from them again, you know. And, you know, I was a fan of him as an actor and I liked his music. and I don't know, it's just, I like this sensibility and his approach and we just kind of had like a nice chat and I kind of figured I would never hear from him again, you know, and then like three months later, he just emailed me cold and was just like, hey, here's a paragraph treatment of a short film I want to do, do you want to do it?

20:50Hiro Murai:And what's great about Donald is like, there's just no formality to anything. He's just like, hey, is this cool? Do you want to do it? And, yeah, ever since then, like, you know, that was like almost 15 years ago. That's been our relationship. Like every once in a while he'll just hit me up out of the blue and be like, hey, I have this thing that might be cool. Do you want to do it? And, yeah, so for the first couple of years before we started working on narrative, it's just every like four months he would just call me and be like, hey, I have a new song. What do you think about this? And then we just throw the idea back and forth.

21:23Hiro Murai:That's amazing.

21:23Donald Glover:Well, so clapping for the wrong reasons, just so people keep, anyone who's keeping track, this was to promote essentially the, his second album, right? Yes. Which was because the internet. Then 3005, which really, I think, again, maybe brought in a whole audience of people that, again, obviously within the music video community, you're certainly well, already well known and respected, but maybe just a different segment of people. But one thing it definitely did was, I guess, not that long after he comes to you about, do you want to work in, do you want to collaborate on a TV show? And I wonder if you can just recount how you first, like, heard about the idea of even that there would be something that would become Atlanta.

22:12Donald Glover:And also, were you yourself already thinking about transitioning from music videos, not transitioning necessarily dumping one for the other, but like trying to move into television yourself? I didn't have any sort of ambition to move into television, you know, especially at the time, you know, TV was, it was less kind of a, it was a more rigid format in 2015 or something, you know.

22:37Hiro Murai:and to backtrack a little bit you know we we'd been working on a few music videos at that point and you know we really felt like we were developing like a language that we really liked you know it kind of something a little slippery and surreal and you know it was kind of about foregrounding like emotional logic then practical logic and it was really fun you know and and and out of the blue, you know, Donald's a guy who's always working on something. And out of the blue, he was just like, hey, I'm going to do this pilot for effects. You know, do you want to do it? And I said, yeah, I want to do it, but I don't think people are going to let me do that.

23:17Hiro Murai:You know, you can't go up to effects and be like, I'm going to let my buddy direct my pilot. You know what I mean?

23:22Donald Glover:Just because there had been, literally, you'd had zero. Had zero narrative experience and in fact other than donald who'd been in the he'd been in the writer's room and acted on 30 rock right and he'd been in and he'd acted on uh community and girls and like but like he'd never had so much anywhere near that level of responsibility exactly or anybody else on the

23:43Hiro Murai:exactly central creative team exactly exactly but it was very donald right it was just like it was like it was it wasn't even like a no formality whatsoever he's like text to me like hey, I want to do this TV show. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. And when I read it, I was like, oh, I get why I could do this. You know, like, it was kind of a language that we developed together. It was kind of a point of view that we developed together. You know, the short Collabbing for the Wrong Reasons is like a very weird, obtuse, 25-minute short we made. And a lot of people hated it. It was just like, it was like, what is this?

24:17Hiro Murai:But, you know, it kind of had this kind of laconic existential you know kind of floaty tone that i think is sort of even you know i think it's it's in the lana you know i think it's sort of a the prototype in a weird way and so yeah i was just like i'll go along for the ride if you know if uh if um we can convince the

24:38Donald Glover:powers that be basically and it sounds like from things you've all said that or you and donald have said like there was sort of no real expectation that the show was going to go beyond i mean it was a it gets ordered to series right and then but you guys weren't banking on four seasons over i mean it ended up being four seasons spanning 2016 to 2022 your ep and do direct 26 episodes but you guys kind of were not sure it was going to go at all really right well i don't think at

25:12Hiro Murai:At least for me, I didn't even understand what it meant to have an ongoing show. You know what I mean? Like, I couldn't even think that far ahead. And when we were shooting the first season, Donald just kept saying, like, I don't care if—this is very Donald, too— he's like, I don't care if it gets canceled or no one watches it. I just want to make sure we do the thing that only we can do and, like, we have a good time and feel like we really did something, you know? yeah it was like and then the way fx works too like once they greenlit the show they kind of just let you make the thing the way you want to make it you know there is oversight but but they're very like artist forward especially back then the way they build their shows so we like we're building this show in a vacuum and nobody knew how to make television you know and like practically speaking like you know now in 2026 i know that you're you know when you build a show you should be building returning sets and you know there's like practical things that you should know to make production easier at the time i didn't know any of that stuff so i was just like you know our ambition was like every episode is its own short film and we use all locations and non-actors and you know try to kind of push the boundaries this way and that you know after we shoot every season like me and the crew would be just completely dead thinking that that's how you're supposed to make TV, you know?

26:34Well, what is it, do you have a theory why quite a few people who,

26:40Donald Glover:you know, who had come out of music videos, Spike Jonze, Michelle Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, right? Other, we can keep going, have gone on to be really successful in if they, when they make that jump to kind of narrative series or film in the way that you also have been. Like, is there something that it preps you for coming out of that way of working? And then on the other hand, are there things that maybe it particularly doesn't prep you for that you have to learn?

27:11Hiro Murai:I think music videos, for me at least, music videos was a training ground for tone creation. I think there's something about creating visuals for an existing piece of music. And if the existing piece of music is good that really lets you understand all the nuances of tone, you know, because a great song isn't just like a happy song or a sad song. It's like, oh, it's happy, but there's like kind of this, you know, like a, you know, like put upon kind of heaviness on top of it, or like this is a sad song, but it has this uptempo kind of drive going through it.

27:51Donald Glover:And just to quickly interject, I mean, for anyone that wants to be thinking about something while you're saying this i mean kind of this is america is like the ultimate example yeah

28:00Hiro Murai:exactly and it's like it's a it's contrast right um and so i i think i came away from music videos being like oh the things i'm really interested in are things that don't sort of define themselves super clearly up front but it kind of sneaks up on you and so for me even in working in narrative all the things i sort of gravitated towards in music videos i'm still chasing now on the other hand first season of Atlanta I couldn't tell you how much I was just faking it to make it you know like I I never shot narrative before so I didn't know how to work with actors properly thankfully I we just like managed to have one of the best casts we could have dreamed of but you know I learned everything on the job like I just remember Brian Tyree Henry at one point, like midway through the season, just looking at me like, you don't really say much.

28:55Hiro Murai:What's the, you know, you thought it was like a plate. Like I thought it was like my method of working. And I was like, no, I just didn't know how.

29:03Donald Glover:Well, but I think you must be being a little bit to some degree overly humble because for that first season, which obviously was very well received, I know that Donald ends up for that season winning a directing Emmy. And he said this when he accepted, quote, this really belongs to Harold Murray. He taught me everything about directing. He had the eye for this first when we sat down and he's just amazing. I really want to give this to Harold and just say, I love you and thank you for being my best friend and making this with me, close quote. So he's learning from you and you're saying you didn't know anything, but I mean, it worked.

29:44Donald Glover:So How do you explain what did really work? Was it the idea maybe not to – I don't want to lead you. You give your own take. But it seems like the thing that you were referring to a few times earlier about we're not going to be as focused on plot. We're going to use what I think you refer to as dream logic, like more a feeling than a plot point. Is that what it was? Do you think that people responded to?

30:11Hiro Murai:I think so. And, you know, it's hard to kind of contextualize it now, but I think at the time people our age were feeling that kind of like sense of aimlessness and lostness, you know? Yeah. And it's, you know, it's something that we all kind of individually felt as creators, like Donald, me, the, you know, the entire writer's room, you know? And it's a very interesting collection of people because we're all, I don't know, we're very different, you know? like half the you know it's an all-black writers room uh like half the room came you know our our nigerian immigrant family you know family members and donald you know and his brother came from atlanta and you know from japan but we all kind of had this like we were all kind of like contrarians with a chip on our shoulders but also kind of always felt like a little bit displaced wherever we were and so the show kind of you know it's about a lot of things but it the the spine of it, I think, became a way to kind of express that feeling more than anything.

31:14Hiro Murai:And I think a feeling is universal, you know, like it's not, it's not, you know, you don't have to be a rapper in Atlanta to fully engage with it.

31:22Donald Glover:Well, that might, that might also address the next thing I was going to bring up, which is many of the projects Donald's chosen to do, whether music related or, you know, music, short film, video, whatever, or even Atlanta. I mean, these are in large part about the black experience in America. As you state, you're not black for anyone listening. Do you think could any talented, like yourself, very talented, but non-black person have made these projects with Donald? Or are there specifically aspects of your experience as an Asian immigrant that enable you to connect with Donald in these projects in ways that maybe other non-black artists wouldn't?

32:10Hiro Murai:That's a good question. I don't know. I guess all I really know about Donald and I's collaboration is that I click with Donald, and I click with Donald's point of view about the world. And yes, he's a black man in America, but he's also a very specific, in particular, black guy in America. You know what I mean? Like he's a theater kid. He's like, you know, he's a nerd. But growing up in like a very not nerd friendly environment, I think he he had this like outsider gaze no matter where he went. And I think that I immediately just kind of click with him on that. You know, it's obviously the context is totally different.

32:52Hiro Murai:But I'm looking at America from the outside in also, you know. and so yeah like spiritually I don't think I could have made any any tv show about the black experience but this one I was like oh I know how to depict this you know well and also I think

33:09Donald Glover:you've said that in the occasional instances when maybe there might be something that's that's not familiar to you about the black experience sometimes he's actually embraced that different interpretation like you'll yeah is that fair to say yeah yeah it's funny there's a lot of like

33:29Hiro Murai:regional Atlanta things in that show that are like it might as well been in like a space language you know what I mean and I sort of treat just chose to treat it that way because I think earn the Donald's character in the show is sort of experiencing around him that way anyway you know and so yeah I think I ended up making some choices that that he wouldn't have being from Atlanta Well, worked out well.

33:57Donald Glover:I just wonder, as we move along chronologically, just the first two seasons, well, you shoot season one, so well received. You come back for season two, airs in 2018, and then there's four years when the show is off the air and then comes back with three and four, which you guys shot simultaneously in Europe, right? But a lot had happened in those four years in the real world. Just to remind people, we'd had a global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the kind of taking off of the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump on January 6th. We could go on. So I wonder, did those things change you guys and your approach to the show?

34:45Donald Glover:It does – feels to me that the things that maybe you had avoided earlier on, like the way you've talked about it, I think even like the early things were very – maybe you were kind of dodging sincerity or dodging the way – that things that happened as you got towards the end of the show would not have been there in the first two seasons.

35:08Hiro Murai:Yeah, I think that's really fair. I think that's really fair. It was a strange time because we shot both of those seasons in 2022. And to your point, like a lot happened in the world in that period. And also we were kind of digesting it live too. The strange thing about season three is that I think they started writing it in 2019. Okay. And so a lot of the, you know, George Floyd and BLM and all the things that happened in 2020 kind of came after they started writing it. And it was this strange thing where like a lot of the things that the writer's room was working through, the world kind of caught up to for better and worse.

35:52Hiro Murai:Like it's in a weird way, it made the conversation extra jagged, you know, like it felt like we were touching a live wire in a way that we don't usually do, you know. and I think you know through the pandemic I think a lot of people went through this where people started kind of questioning their own sort of life and values and you know their relationship to work and their family and all these things and I think that was happening to us and in our own messed up way too you know well you guys were all also we should know blowing up I mean uh in the

36:23Donald Glover:course of the show, you were beginning to become very in demand for other narrative projects, right? There were these episodes of, just to mention a few, you directed an episode of Legion in 2017, an episode of Snowfall in 2017, four episodes, very memorable episodes of Barry in 2018 into 2019. I want to make sure I'm not leaving anything out. I mean, Station 11, in 2021 to 2020. So you, and these other guys, not that they were not known before, but they were much more known through this show. So that's got to change people too.

37:00Hiro Murai:Yeah, absolutely. And weirdly, Atlanta became strangely a show about a guy who's negotiating his identity with success. Right. You know, and so it was really reflexive. Like season two was, you know, an exact interpretation of how we felt after season one took off, you know, for a show that we didn't think anybody would watch, you know? And then having people have, like, expectations of you beyond who you are as a person was, like, a very strange experience, you know? And so a lot of, you know, Paperboy is all of us. Yeah, yeah.

37:40Donald Glover:Well, another thing, though, that happened after season two, and as you note, like, the chronology, you guys were kind of ahead of the game in a lot of ways. I mean, in America, obviously, there's always been racism. There's always been bigotry. But This Is America, your music video with Donald came out in 2018. This is before a lot of the worst recent stuff happened. I don't want to rank it, but it was not good. This is your four-minute thing that really had everybody talking, music video that had everybody talking. This is shortly after the second season of Atlanta finished. comes out tons and tons of views online to the extent that this propels that track to become Donald's first and I think still sole number one hit on the billboard out 100 it's a big deal for two weeks there provoked a ton of discussion but I do wonder since it was not in response directly to let's say the kinds of things that were sadly on the horizon like a George Floyd or whatever do Do you know what in that moment sparked the desire to do that project?

38:51You know, I think, I say this as an Asian guy too.

38:58Hiro Murai:I've always felt that Donald and his brother and those guys were, you know, they're experiencing a different reality and timeline than I am, you know what I mean? And so, yes, I think BLM and George Floyd and all those things really bubbled up to the surface. And I think we're all kind of collectively dealing with it now. But, you know, that's not new. You know what I mean? This is a thing that's been accumulating for hundreds of years, you know. And I think for This Is America, what felt really sort of pertinent and kind of resonant to me was that I think what Don was really scratching at was kind of the dysmorphia of being on the internet and seeing how race and violence and all that stuff gets mixed up with like dance trends and like banal entertainment and kind of the whiplash feeling of being alive you know there's just the sheer chaos of it and that i'd understood you know and and you know the when he told me the idea for the video it was like it wasn't the you know people think it was like a manifesto it was just like he told me two things it was like okay it starts in this really kind of like upbeat african song and then uh i'm dancing and then when it turns into the chorus this trap beat comes in I shoot him.

40:22Hiro Murai:That was it.

40:49and i go okay

40:52Hiro Murai:I know exactly what you're scratching at. You know what I mean? You're looking at contrast. You're looking at, you're just trying to like knock people off their feet. You know what I mean? You're trying to surprise people and kind of make incongruous things work inside of this music video. And so every decision we made after that was to kind of just to... The contrast. Yeah, lean into the contrast, you know?

41:14Donald Glover:Well, it's interesting also that stylistically, this is not in any way the only example of this, but it's probably the most famous example. It seems like you do really like to work in deep focus. Like, you know, I guess what we should explain to people where things are happening in the foreground and other things are happening in the background and people can kind of choose what they're looking at or notice both and see how they're playing against each other. And obviously in this case, and most famous example, I guess is Citizen Kane where that's happening all over the place. But I mean, it's forever since then.

41:49Donald Glover:But in this case, as you say, he's kind of moving and joyously, manically while all this crazy shit is happening behind him and around him. So I guess I just wonder, how did that become a style of working, deep focus or working with depth of field that you return to?

42:11Hiro Murai:you know i don't know where it came from but i i think i was always drawn to filmmaking that didn't call attention to itself too much like i i like a visual language that doesn't tell you what to think or feel or focus on and especially with a thing like this is america what we're showing is so provocative and extreme that it felt wrong to sort of rub people's face in it and and it's kind of about you know attention also like like what do you pay attention to and so it felt right that we were kind of presenting everything the banal and the kind of extreme stuff on the same you know same pedestal and be like you you pick you pick what you look at you know totally well and just to remind folks and note that you are in his collaboration on that music video ends up

43:02Donald Glover:being recognized with a grammy which was pretty got to be kind of cool uh yeah it's crazy i'd

43:07Hiro Murai:I never thought I'd have a Grammy.

43:09Donald Glover:And by the way, TV Academy, I'm going to say this if Hero won't. How does he have a Grammy before he has an Emmy? Let's get together. Get it together, folks. But anyway, you come back from that. You have the final seasons of Atlanta while you're doing these other things that I mentioned. I just have to briefly stop on Barry for a second because this is another one of the great comedy series of our era now. And it seems like, is it a coincidence that what you were kind of, what those episodes, the four episodes that you came in and directed there, how does somebody lure you at a time when you're coming up with your own shows and focus on those to come in and direct for them?

43:52Donald Glover:I wonder how that happens, if it's going to continue to happen, like how that works. But in this case, the ones that you directed, it seems like were some of the most action-heavy, you know, the Bolivian raid of the guys. I rewatched it this morning just to be fresh, and it's like so off the wall. And again, depth of field and all kinds of stuff, but interesting. But, like, what lured you to join a show that was now somebody else's baby? And was it just a coincidence that it was for the action stuff?

44:27Hiro Murai:You know, I don't—I guess I don't really, to a fault, think about, like, whether something is worth doing or not worth doing. You know what I mean? It's all—it's very kind of organic for me. And on that show, what I immediately clicked into is I saw, you know, I think I met Bill, Bill Hader, and then he, you know, I watched a pilot and I was like, oh, this pilot's really good. And also he's doing something really unique and interesting. And I've never seen hard comedy land inside this like kind of existential kind of realist world before. And he, you know, he was leaning into it even harder than we were on Atlanta.

45:08Hiro Murai:Like the jokes were like jokes, you know. and then once I started talking to Bill I didn't know this at the time but Bill is like the biggest cinephile like he is a complete movie nerd and so we just spent like an hour just talking about our favorite movies and I left that meeting going like oh that'd be really fun to do something with him you know it was as simple as that during that gap between

45:30Donald Glover:Atlanta season of Atlanta yeah

45:32Hiro Murai:and you know and I think initially he gave me those action heavy episodes in season And one, it's funny in retrospect, because his directing is so good and he directs action so well. But at the time, he was just like, I don't really know how to do this stuff, so you do it.

45:51Donald Glover:He assumed that because of music videos or whatever, you knew how to do.

45:54Hiro Murai:Yeah, which is a really funny thing to assume, because that's not a one-to-one comp at all.

46:01Donald Glover:Well, you figured it out. Yeah, yeah. The other thing that somehow happened during the year span, if not the actual shooting of Atlanta, was another kind of – I guess we would call it a – I don't know what we would classify Guava Island as. But that's in 2019. Premiers at Coachella. One person wrote, not quite a musical and not quite a visual album, but I guess somewhere. How do you describe it?

46:35Hiro Murai:You know, I guess we were reaching for something like, it's not quite, you know, Moonwalker or Purple Rain or something, but Donald and I both grew up watching those movies as kids and, like, being kind of confounded by them, just being kind of confused, like, oh, this is a musical artist that exists in our world, but this is also a fictional character in this movie, but also the music is part of the movie. and it kind of like those music films always occupied this like really strange place in pop culture I think and so I don't know that was like kind of our sort of attempt to be like how do you kind of reach for that thing that you find at a video store and be like what is this you know what I mean succeeded I made that in the most complimentary

47:23Donald Glover:way okay so we've talked about examples where you are the director and the EP where you're a director but not the EP. And then there's an example where you're an EP but not the director. I think the furliest one would be The Bear, which you've been in from day one, right? So how did that come about?

47:44Hiro Murai:That was a pilot that Chris Storr had written and we were helping him put it together and we had a deal at FX and we were working with him already. So we were kind of like the kind of connecting the dots a little bit. And I think Chris was, you know, Chris had seen what we had done with the half hour format and how much kind of like flexibility there were there was and kind of the limitless potential of that format. And I could see from the beginning that Chris was like, really, he had something like he had a point of view. He had a world and he could really kind of like play with it. and so you know i think i just kind of saw my job as like oh i i this is the format that i've been playing in and this is the partner effects that we've been playing with and i think i you would fit in you know i think your your vision could fit in here you know i i kind of did the legwork to kind of put the two together but once the show was going like that's chris's world you know he like kind of sailed you know he took the ship and sailed the world with it so well i guess the other

48:51Donald Glover:the thing that makes it consistent with a lot of your other work, including Widow's Bay, which we're about to come to, is you can't really, I mean, famously, this has happened a lot with the bear where it gets entered every year at the Emmys as a comedy and people say, no, it's a drama. I mean, it's very hard to label Atlanta as one or the other. Widow's Bay, I mean, it's not often that you have comedy and horror blended in the way that where it's not a spoof or whatever. And again, yeah, this is the case with the bear. Is that it can't be a coincidence that this keeps happening with projects you're involved with.

49:29Hiro Murai:Yeah. I mean, it's not consciously something I look for, but I, you know, this sounds almost stupidly simple, but I just want to be surprised, you know. And so when I read something, I think I want my expectations to be subverted. And I think for me, the thing that we kept saying a lot on Atlanta was I wanted to feel like we're getting away with something. Like they let us do this. And part of that, I think, is genre subversion and then kind of taking the structure of a half-hour show or an hour show and then just trying to make it do something that you haven't maybe seen before. you know and so that that's always because otherwise you know you're just kind of making the same thing again so that that was always like that's a thing that i always look for but it's you know i'm never sort of i'm not looking at it like what's a comedy that isn't a comedy you know well

50:26Donald Glover:so there you you and donald reunited for mr and mrs smith a couple episodes directing of that and then i think probably already by that point maybe you were already beginning to think about Widow's Bay. How did this great show come about? I understand that the creator, Katie Diffold, had been thinking about this just to give people a context of how long. Apparently, it was her submission to get hired for Parks and Rec. So this is not new, and yet it's obviously been expanded and tinkered with and all that. But I mean, And when along the line did she, I imagine, reach out to you? And what was the kind of framing of that outreach?

51:13Hiro Murai:She reached out to me, God, it was just like two years ago, two and a half years ago. It was fairly recent. And, yes, to your point, it's something that she's been working on on and off for like 15 years or something. She kind of describes it as her novel. Like she's just like, you know, whenever she wasn't working, she would just go off and work on this pilot. And, you know, when she sent me the script, my immediate reaction was like, wow, this is like a really dense world. Like it didn't feel like, you know, a lot of times you read a pilot and you go, okay, someone just wrote this and then they're going to figure it out once someone greenlights a series.

51:53Hiro Murai:This felt like a world that she had been like literally living in for a decade. honestly like that's kind of the whole game for tv right it's like it's it's it's not about the plot of the pilots about like how dense and and breathable is that world that you're building and so it just felt special to me from the start and it was also doing something that i thought was really refreshing it was like it wasn't shy about being a comedy and it wasn't shy about the format of television and it's funny me saying this because i you know for you know in atlanta and for forever we were we kept saying like oh it feels too tv let's let's subvert it or change it i've kind of come full circle the other way now where i'm just like tv format works for a reason and there's joy in television there's joy in that that kind of familiarity and i there's a this was a show that felt like it was really embracing the the kind of familiarity of like old era television you know like the monster of the week and yes even just just just the premise of you know making a show about a mayor of a small island like it just that that feels so like antiquated now right and so you know i i met with her and i was like this is really cool and really exciting but are you sure you want me to do it you know and to do it meant she was asking you to come in

53:15Donald Glover:and be a fellow executive producer and direct a bunch of it?

53:21Hiro Murai:Yes.

53:21Donald Glover:And in the end, just so people know, you directed the first three and the last two of the 10 that make up season one. Was that an immediate yes or what was your response when she's?

53:33Hiro Murai:I think my initial reaction was like, are you sure you, like what kind of funny do you need this to be? You know what I mean? Because I think there's a part of my brain that's a producer and like this is exciting, I want to help you make it. there's a part of my brain that's a director and it's like I know what I'm good at I know what I'm not good at I know I do a very specific thing and it's not right for every project and because the the script was so just funny like consistently funny I told her like if you want like a comedy guy if you want like a guy who can tag jokes and kind of like riff on the plate in the in in the moment and come come up with a better punchline i can't do that i'm not that guy and she was like no i i can do that i'm i'm funny you know what i mean uh and what she wanted was to kind of treat it as this very real lived in place you know and she kept saying like i there was a point where this show wanted to be something a lot like lighter or more comedic or like more networky but then in the last couple years like i watched atlanta and i was like oh like that's the format that i wanted to be i wanted to feel sort of real and heightened at the same time and i wanted to the the the format of each episode to kind of shift and and i was like okay i can do that yeah we went into it the coolest thing about that project is like on the page i think it could have been like 15 different shows there's just so many different versions of it it all would have worked But from the start, Katie had a really clear vision for how I wanted to feel and kind of the very precarious balancing act that the show wanted to hold.

55:20Donald Glover:So I know and everyone knows who's seen Atlanta that with something like maybe one of the most famous episodes of the whole series, Teddy Perkins, right? That was very horror infused. We know that you can handle that side of things well too. But when you guys go in to pitch this, first of all, did you pitch it to anyone other than Apple? And also how did you pitch this? Like I can't imagine how you succinctly enable somebody to imagine what this – like it's not really like anything else that's been around for a long time.

56:01Hiro Murai:Yeah, that was the hardest thing. And also it makes you doubt yourself. It's like there's no comp. Right. Is that because we shouldn't do it? You know, but yeah, you know, I think I part of the reason I wanted to do it is we dabble with this horror comedy thing on Atlanta and we really enjoyed it. You know what I mean? There's something about that tone that felt really fresh and it was leaning into this idea that, you know, you see it in features a lot now. But like the idea that comedy and horror work from the same sort of engines. Right. It's about tension and breaking tension.

56:38Donald Glover:And either you can tell if it's working.

56:40Hiro Murai:Yeah. People are either affected or not. Exactly. Exactly. And so I think we were excited about it internally. But as far as how to pitch it, Apple was the first one to kind of bite. And they were just on board, even though we kept saying, it's not like anything you know, which is not a thing you should say to Netflix. Why do you think they said yes? I think they were just excited that me and Katie were excited. You know, and I don't know, like everything else, we just sort of, we just kind of faked it till we knew exactly what it was, you know.

57:22Donald Glover:Once you guys were actually at work on this, and it was in, was it all in Massachusetts? Like some of it was shot in Massachusetts or what was it?

57:30Hiro Murai:It was 95 % Massachusetts, and then we shot a little bit in Maine.

57:35Donald Glover:So once you've been given the go-ahead, you're at work on this, you've got this great cast and crew around you. Crew includes a lot of people who you've worked with for a long time, right? What did you find to be the greatest challenge of actually bringing this to life? What proved to be the most challenging aspect?

57:55Hiro Murai:I think the tone balancing was so much more nuanced than I expected.

58:06Hiro Murai:Because production happens in iterative layers. You pick the sets and then what kind of tablecloth goes on it and what kind of lighting goes in there. And then what cast members do we put in there? What clothes do they wear? How do they speak? you know are they speaking in uh are they performing dramatically are they perform comedically are they performing uh realism you know and all these layers you just don't know how they all stick together until you see it on camera you know and so it's all kind of

58:38Donald Glover:hypothetical until you're rolling and how do you communicate that to your actors like is before you start shooting anything is there kind of a meeting where it's like here's how here's how we're going to approach this or do you just have to modulate as your shooting takes hey we're not going that we're not going that big or we're not going like how do you actually when it is such a specific tone get everyone on the same page i think you start with

59:05Hiro Murai:kind of big kind of conceptual ideas you know i think with the actors i mean first of all this is the craziest cast of incredible actors you know that i've ever worked with it's like you know they're all legends you know what i mean and and legends at doing this very specific kind of tonal balancing things you know people use the word like character actors a lot but like what that means to me is like are people who can deliver believable uh performances in like

59:36Donald Glover:extreme absurd scenarios that includes steven root who you'd had on barry right i imagine you probably are partly the reason he's also on this one if not entirely it's obviously matthew reese But then there's the person who you have said you think – and it's kind of proven to be correct I think in some ways the soul or heart of the show is the actress who plays Patricia. It's kind of broken out of this. Yeah, Cato Flynn. I mean – and we could go on and on. I mean Kay Callan. Dale Dickey. Dale Dickey. Jeff Hiller. It's really an amazing group, but not necessarily people that other people immediately put at the center of a show.

1:00:21Donald Glover:You, I guess, you know, was casting – it's always such an important thing. But with this one –

1:00:31Hiro Murai:It felt essential that people knew how to live in this tone. You know, like, you know, I'm like a big Coen Brothers fan and like, you know, that they're sort of like world building and kind of specificity in casting felt like it was really useful, you know, like a useful film reference for this.

1:00:51Donald Glover:In the beginning, when I talked to Matthew, at least, I think the big conceptual approach was like, don't play the jokes.

1:00:59Hiro Murai:Play, you know, play the drama, play the emotions, play the sort of immediate want. and the situations are what will make it funny. You know, like if you react earnestly to a sea hat crawling towards you, that'll be funny. You know what I mean? But it shows me scary because you were actually scared. We talked about it broadly, conceptually leading up to it, but it's funny like when you do the specific scenes and there are certain jokes that are like knowing jokes, right? How that lands always like was precarious. You know, so like sometimes Katie and I would watch a take and be like, that everything worked except for that one part why doesn't that work was it the phrasing was it a performance thing was it should we not reach for that joke right now uh and it was kind of a case by case and you know like with all shows we were just kind of figuring out what the show

1:01:50Donald Glover:needed as we were making it and there are some big swings there like i mean the um dale dickey at the board walking through the entire freaking family tree of whatever. I mean, it could easily have not played as well as it did. You know, like, that's just unreal. Yeah, 100%.

1:02:08Hiro Murai:I mean, I got to give Katie infinite credit on that scene specifically because I said that very beginning when she sent me the script and it ended on an eight-page monologue of Dale Dickey giving a genealogy presentation. I was like, this ending is really funny. It can't be eight pages. It's too long. You know, and then Katie kept going like, I don't, I think it could be really good. And then, you know, the cut to now, it's like, Cut to Emmy nomination, Dale Dickey.

1:02:37Donald Glover:I mean, that's great. I believe it's 19 Emmy nominations. That's pretty incredible. You've been a part of a lot of successful things, but for a first season of an unconventional show, just how did you, does that mean something to you?

1:02:53Hiro Murai:Yeah. I mean, it's honestly shocking. You know, when you spend your whole career sort of like reaching for the weird thing, you never expect it to be sort of embraced so wholeheartedly by the public. And yeah, there's something about this show that I think, honestly, I think it is because Katie holds this place so dear to her heart. I think you can feel the love in it. and I think that's what's resonating or at least that's what I've deduced in the last couple months.

1:03:29Donald Glover:Well, and you've made an interesting point elsewhere about how there are certain shows, I mean, on the surface, you might not see a lot in common. People might not see a lot in common between Widows Bay and The Simpsons, but you brought up a really interesting point that is kind of interesting as you think about where the show goes from here. Can you share what that was all about?

1:03:53Hiro Murai:Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, Simpsons was very formative for me and also like a big part of me learning English, you know, and just learning about like archetypes of like American family, you know. And so that shows what has been really close to my heart, but also in hindsight, like it does what television does so well or good TV does so well where you just kind of want to be in that room with those characters. And the world is so fleshed out that you feel like you can kind of be kind of plucked in a dropped into any part of that town and that there will be an existing story there. You know, it's like the internal logic of that world just totally makes sense.

1:04:31Hiro Murai:and so when we were making this show I think because the show was kind of reaching for like an older era of TV in some way I just kept thinking about The Simpsons you know just even down to like on Atlanta we never shot establishing shots of locations like we never showed the outside of Paperboy's house before we cut inside Paperboy's house there's something about this show that just wanted establishing shots you know what I mean and I kept thinking about The Simpsons like seeing the elementary school or like the church or whatever.

1:05:02Donald Glover:That's so funny. Last question. You've given people a lot of different ways to get hooked on what you do. I mean, these are shows that appeal to very, you know, I imagine cover the whole spectrum between Atlanta and Widows Bay and music videos and all the things we've been talking about the bear. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who are curious, you know, about what's on your schedule and to-do list moving forward. I am curious, will you remain as involved with Widow's Bay moving forward? Are you guys already on to season two? What else do you have coming up? I'd heard about a limited series, The Marriage Plot, I believe.

1:05:38Donald Glover:And then I saw yesterday there was an announcement about a comedy series for Amazon. And so maybe just like, I know you've got a lot going on, but can you tease a little bit of that? And also might we at some point soon see a feature film from directed by you?

1:05:54Hiro Murai:Yeah, I hope so. Again, I'm very short-sighted in the way I operate. I just sort of gravitate towards the thing that's exciting to me in the moment. We are in the writer's room for season two of Widow's Bay, and I'm definitely involved as a producer right now and timing dependent. We'll see what happens in production. Marriage Plot is a show written by this incredible writer, Will Arbery, based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenesis that I'm really excited about. It's, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the book, but it's kind of, it's like a love triangle story set in the kind of East Coast academia in the 80s.

1:06:38Hiro Murai:Very different from anything we've done so far, but there's just something in it that feels like really refreshing and resonant to me. So again, just kind of, I don't know exactly what it is yet, but I think there's something there. Nice. And yeah, and then working on a few sort of feature things, I'm kind of like trying to figure out what I want to do in like a feature format. And, you know, I don't want to do it just to do it. I just want it to be something that feels sort of like natural and organic to me. One of the things we're working on right now is a samurai movie that we're doing with A24.

1:07:16Hiro Murai:Wow. which is logistically very complicated just because, you know, it's like an English script that needs to be translated into Japanese and period and all these things. And that's something you might direct? Yes. Oh, wow.

1:07:28Donald Glover:And that would probably be the first one out, you think, of the features you're developing? I think so.

1:07:34Hiro Murai:I mean, you know, these things are all kind of in the burner and we'll see what happens. But, yeah, we'll see what rises to the top, I guess. Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for doing this.

1:07:45Donald Glover:And for all the entertainment, I've enjoyed so many things you've done.

1:07:49Hiro Murai:I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I've been down a very road to walking now. It doesn't have to be so dark and non-sum.

1:08:03Donald Glover:It takes a while that we can figure this thing out. And turn it back around.

1:08:18Donald Glover:Thanks for listening to Awards Chatter. We really appreciate it and would really appreciate you taking just a minute more to subscribe to the podcast and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. And to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.