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Tiffany Hanssen: Welcome back to All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Alison Stewart today. Now, we are going to preview a new historical drama coming to FX and Hulu tomorrow. It's called Shogun, based on the 1975 novel by the same name by James Clavell. The story follows a shipwrecked British sailor named John Blackthorne who washes up on the shores of 17th-century Japan at a moment of intense fighting among five ruling regents as they jockey for power.

One of them, the cunning, stern Lord Toranaga takes Blackthorne, who by the way, curses like a British sailor under his wing. Blackthorne is a devout Protestant Christian who sailed the dangerous voyage around the world and opened up trade relations between Japan and England, breaking up a monopoly held by Catholic missionaries trading on behalf of Portugal and Spain. Lots and lots and lots of history here, folks. Those Portuguese missionaries helped Mariko, a noblewoman, loyal to Toranaga find her faith as a Catholic.

We're going to just dive into all of that in order to-- We'll just get right into it. Joining us to talk about the series are the creators, writer, and executive producer, Justin Marks. Hi, Justin.

Justin Marks: Hi.

Tiffany Hanssen: Supervising producer, Rachel Kondo. Hi.

Rachel Kondo: Hi.

Tiffany Hanssen: Thank you both for--

Justin Marks: Executive Producer.

Tiffany Hanssen: Sorry. Got it. Noting.

Justin Marks: So many words in front of producers on television.

Tiffany Hanssen: So many words. Thank you so much for being here. I just want to start with the book because I was a kid back in the day, and I remember my mother reading that book. It's a tome. It's over a thousand pages. Of course, as a kid I was like, I don't know how anybody can read, first of all, 1000 pages of anything. All that to say, that's a really expansive work to try to distill down to a series. Talk to us about your process. I'll start with you, Justin.

Justin Marks: I think it was probably-- the biggest challenge was really looking at the cultural legacy and thinking of-- Rachel and I are of a generation that we did not read the book in its time or experienced the miniseries that came out.

Tiffany Hanssen: 1980.

Justin Marks: We really grew up with it as it was the book that was on our parents' nightstands. That book had a silhouette, one that we recognized from the culture. It was a silhouette that I think we were having a hard time figuring out, is there a story that we can tell today that feels contemporary, that feels-- So much of what Shogun has spearheaded in the culture is this narrative framing of a stranger in a strange land. Even hearing that description is strangely not how once we read the book and really dove in, how we saw the story. It is very much Toranaga's story in those [crosstalk].

Tiffany Hanssen: It's a strange land for who, not for him.

Justin Marks: As Rachel puts it, a narrative braid with Blackthorne and with Mariko. We found it to be an amazingly dispersed point of view, and I think that's what gave us our way in at that early level. We talk about-- someone said in architecture, "There's no grand-scale buildings or small-scale buildings. There's only human-scale." We really think the same with story. It's just the human scale of the story is what led us through it.

Tiffany Hanssen: You didn't find that at all daunting?

Rachel Kondo: I think the daunting part was just understanding the impact that it had had, and that we all lived--

Tiffany Hanssen: The story itself?

Rachel Kondo: Yes, the story itself, and that we all live in the after-effects of that impact. Do we have anything new to say? Do we have anything new to add? That was the most daunting part. I think the characters or the read itself was so propulsive and so engaging that these were characters we knew we wanted to spend a lot of time with, and we did. Five years for us. However, just making sure that we had something that we could add to the story.

Tiffany Hanssen: For folks who may know the story, may know the miniseries, this is have you, and I'm questioning. I don't know what your view is on this. Have you just reframed it? Is someone could someone be very simplistic and say, "It's a reframing of the story"?

Justin Marks: I would say we went back to the text because I think the way James Clavell framed the story was in this dispersed way. We really looked at it from the place of, "Well, we have a standard today where audiences will accept things like subtitles, and so we can really give voice to this Japanese cast in the same way that Clavell does on the page in a novel." We're we're able to bring it closer to that.

I think that over the course of the production what we were looking to do, we kept saying is, "I don't think we could ever properly as Western filmmakers invert the gaze of this novel set in Japan. We're from Hollywood. We can't possibly fully embrace a point of view that doesn't belong to our culture." What we can do and what we tried to do constantly through this show was to subvert the gaze, and to play with expectations when it came to what story you think this is. Then what story it actually turns out to be. Which is exactly what the novel does too. In that sense, I still consider it today a little ahead of its time.

Tiffany Hanssen: I mentioned this is 17th century. Rachel, just for folks who might not even know what we're talking about with the book, describe for us this time period in Japan. What is it like? I will say hearing the creaking of the ship in the first episode, I immediately was like, "[unintelligible 00:06:17] I'm right there with you."

Rachel Kondo: Welcome to 1600.

Tiffany Hanssen: Exactly. It just took that creek of the listing ship. Anyway. Congrats on that.

Rachel Kondo: Oh, great. Thank you. We are entering the world of medieval Japan. This is the end of nearly a century of warring states. The reigning power has died, and he's left a young heir in his place. Too young to rule. We have the five most powerful Bushos who have been brought together as a--

Tiffany Hanssen: These are the regents that I mentioned, right?

Rachel Kondo: Absolutely. This is the Council of Regents. Together, they're meant to rule until the heir comes of age. However, they are individuals with thoughts and ideas and ambitions. It's a game. Who among them will come out ahead? As we enter our story, it's--

Tiffany Hanssen: Succession circa 1600.

Rachel Kondo: Thank you.

Justin Marks: So glad you mentioned Succession. That was really in the writer's room on this show. Every television show has that one show that everyone's watching over the weekend and comes in on Monday to talk about. For us, it was Succession all the time when we were doing this. I feel like it's interesting how certain shows just find their way into unlikely places like feudal Japan.

Tiffany Hanssen: Justin, you mentioned subtitles, translation is a, I think, a theme here. Talk to us a little bit about how important translation was not only in the book to the work that you have done, and also specifically to the politics and the diplomacy that's going on in the arena that's being showcased here.

Justin Marks: So much of this show had to do with translation, cultural translation, literal language translation. We gave a lot of thought to what it is to do to be in a multilingual world. One of the things that was really interesting was we knew, because Blackthorne speaks Portuguese which is filtered as English in our show, and the rest of the characters speak Japanese, that there was going to be a lot of translation.

I think what we found is that all of us, anyone who's ever been on a Zoom in two languages or anything else, you spend a lot of time speaking, and then staring at your hands and listening while that's translated, and then they stare at their hands while it's translated back, and it doesn't make for the most cinematic dialogue possible. We were really intent on trying to find cinematic dialogue out of it. When you look at the construction of Blackthorne and Toranaga, and then Mariko as their translator in the book and in our show, she has an agenda that is separate from Toranaga's agenda, that is separate from Blackthorne's agenda.

Tiffany Hanssen: For people who don't know, Mariko is the translator.

Justin Marks: That's right. She is a woman of the Samurai class, because of her Catholic faith, also speaks the language that Blackthorne is able to speak. She can be that bilingual character in the show, and played wonderfully by Anna Sawai. Those scenes where she's translating for them, we wanted to cut them like action scenes because they feel just as dramatic for her as these revelations are shaking the foundations of the Catholic church that she's so loyal to. Just as exciting for her as they are for Blackthorne and Toranaga himself. Finding that three-legged stool in those scenes was crucial to the mechanics of how we tell this show, which is a bilingual show.

Tiffany Hanssen: Rachel, viewing language as an opportunity as opposed to something that needed to be worked around or a challenge.

Rachel Kondo: I love that. This show, we didn't know it going into it, what it would require when it came to-- you write the scripts in English. Five years later, it's gone through twists and turns, and a team of translators, a Japanese playwright, our Japanese producers, the performers. Then it's translated back. What's spoken was translated back to us in English so that we could try to marry the experience of watching the performance and what you're reading, that we could get it as close as possible. I didn't even know any of this could happen. We had the time, thankfully, to do it.

This show from the very beginning started with a book. It starts with words. Our process ended with the words as well, and punctuation. We had to negotiate punctuation.

Justin Marks: When you have two married writers, there's going to be a lot of punctuation fights.

Tiffany Hanssen: I love that. I'm thinking about-- It gained popular conversation around language and translation with the series Narcos, because I think the greater world woke up and said, "Hey, people are going to watch stuff that they don't necessarily understand." I think what that has opened up is pretty fantastic in terms of what we're able to do on screen. I'm curious how you view it as an art form in and of itself. We were talking earlier in the show about translation. I'm sorry to belabor this translation, [crosstalk] but I think it's pretty important to the series because it's such an art form as it relates to books, for example. We were talking earlier in the show about book translations. Truly, it can make or break something.

Justin Marks: Absolutely.

Tiffany Hanssen: If your book is written in Japanese and someone translates it with not knowing what they're doing or whatever, the whole thing falls apart. Again, I just feel like you had to have had-- it sounds like from the process, that was something that was really top of mind for you.

Justin Marks: I think there's a feeling sometimes as writers that you want the words to be the ultimate authority. We felt as the process gets handed off in this baton pass to our Japanese producers who have to conform this not just from English to Japanese, but to period of Japanese, did I get the Japanese, which is performed in a certain way. Then filtered through the actors who would sometimes improvise. Then coming back, we would find very often looking at the words from the script and then the final words that get retranslated back, very often it was quite the same, and that's great.

Then there were just a couple of moments of magic where the dialogue was better than we could have ever imagined because just some nuance that comes out in the Japanese that really was-- You realize what's really authoring this is not writers sitting there, although it is, because we are all as a writer's room coming up with the characters, and the themes, and the structure of the story, but these little moments are also the processes authoring it, the magic of the collaboration between our Japanese producers, our American and Canadian team to put this together. It was a very special thing.

The other thing that you talk about this translation and subtitles and that we're more willing to embrace it now with Narcos and other shows as well. Squid Game is a great example. I really think that one of the things that we look past too many times is the interface of the words on screen. We think of them as an afterthought. We wish they would just go away so we could just telepathically understand what these characters are saying in a different language, but that's not a fact of the experience. The discursive space of what you see on screen is in fact going to be words.

As much effort as our wonderful costume designer puts into these costumes, and our wonderful production designer puts into these sets, and our actors, the words that come up on screen are just as important in every way. We had to think of ways to say, "Because it's important to our promise, to our audience on this show, that if you're going to invest your time with us and watch this show, these subtitles, we're trying to do them in a way that no one's done before." We bring them higher up in the frame so that we-

Tiffany Hanssen: I understand.

Justin Marks: -marry it closer to the actor's eyes. We fight the color on every single letter so that you're not doing the white words on white background. "What's really going on? " Anyone who's ever watched a subtitled film in black and white knows what I'm talking about. Then as Rachel's describing, we married it to the performance. When, "Oh, it looks like she's reacting to that idea in this half of the sentence in there." We've rewrote the sentence so that the Japanese inversion would line up closely with the actual performance so that you feel what they're feeling when it's happening. Which too often we do subtitles with a third party in this business, and they're not actually the filmmakers doing it directly.

Tiffany Hanssen: Justin mentioned his hope for the project. What is your hope for the project?

Rachel Kondo: Oh, man. It has evolved over time. Initially, I just hoped to do well by it. Then I hope to survive the production process. [laughter] These days, it's so exciting. It's surreal to be sharing it with people. The hope for me, I can say is I hope viewers will sense the care that was put into it and how everything was considered and negotiated. It was this collaboration with an army of Japanese experts, historians, advisors, movement instructors. It was an army of people who came together, poured themselves into this. Every component of it has been carefully considered.

Tiffany Hanssen: We talk about collaboration just in there. We're thinking of Blackthorne, Mariko, and Toranaga as the three. Describe the collaboration between those actors on set and what that was like?

Justin Marks: I think everyone came from a very different style in some way, because you have the great Hiroyuki Sonada playing Toranaga who is classically trained Shakespearean actor. Spent most of his life working in Japan, and then came over to the Hollywood system over 20 years ago. You have in Anna Sawai, a more naturalistic and human and interior actress who brings what I would call a modernity to the role.

Then in Cosmos Jarvis, who plays John Blackthorne, you really have that great method madness, and energy, and ferocity that we really felt would bring a great contrast to the world he's being sent to. So much. We wouldn't have to do the work and the writing to define how Blackthorne appears different from this world. Cosmos just brings this kind of animal force into his environment that by its introduction, feels alien.

Tiffany Hanssen: We've got about 30 seconds left. Tell us it streams, tell us when, where, how we can watch it.

Rachel Kondo: Midnight.

Tiffany Hanssen: [laughter]

Rachel Kondo: In a few hours.

Tiffany Hanssen: Everyone, stay awake.

Justin Marks: It comes on FX and Hulu. Tomorrow on the 27th. We're excited for you to share it.

Tiffany Hanssen: Sounds great. Been talking with the co-creators of the new FX series Shōgun based on the James Clavell book by the same name. The first two episodes drop. Hulu, Disney+, FX. Justin Marks, Rachel Kondo. Thank you so much for being with us today. We appreciate it.

Rachel Kondo: Thank you.

Justin Marks: Thank you.

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