When the Emmy nominations were announced in July, FX’s historical drama Shogun took the lead with a whopping 25 noms, including one for best drama series. For co-creators — and husband-and-wife team — Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, the recognition for the series, based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell, sums up six years of collaboration with an international crew that led to critical acclaim and praise for its authenticity. Here, Marks and Kondo discuss the challenges and joys of making FX’s most expensive scripted series.
Congratulations on your nominations. What does this recognition from the TV Academy mean for you and the show?
RACHEL KONDO This is my first job in the industry!
JUSTIN MARKS You’re talking to a guy whose first job was a video game/martial arts adaptation [Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li]. It’s completely surreal to imagine that this show, after the past five, six years, is a show that so many people got recognized for, because we were just trying to survive it, all of us together, and trying to figure out how to make it — there wasn’t really a mold for this. And so this crew, who in the mud and the snow and the rain, really gave a great sacrifice, made this show a reality. The cast had nothing to imitate. They just had to know how to perform this 1600 version of Japanese in the modern day and make it human.
KONDO I think the reason things clicked and worked was because we didn’t have a template. It may feel or look intentional now, but it was pretty chaotic. … It was chaos for a long time. Let’s just be real.
Rachel, I know you are of Japanese descent and the show is largely in Japanese, but it is an American production. What were the challenges you faced with that?
KONDO In this context, it doesn’t mean much simply because I am Japanese American. I was Hawaii-born and raised but many generations removed, and not to mention, there’s 400 years between then and now. It was new to all of us, and it was foreign to everyone involved, even someone like Hiroyuki Sanada, who is the most seasoned of all seasoned gentlemen. And he had to adopt the specific language of that era and help his counterparts figure out how to speak something they wouldn’t really even understand on their own.
MARKS Nothing came simply with this show. When it comes to what characters say, that’s usually the hardest thing, just writing, and in this case, it was how they say it and what dialect it works in, that old Japanese and the modern Japanese, a mix. … It took a lot of care, scrutiny, research and a lot of questioning and asking our advisers … not saying, “Tell us what we got right,” but, “Tell us what we got wrong so we can fix it.”
Even Japanese historians laud the show for its authenticity.
MARKS I always like to say, for us, when we’re doing this show, we’re not doing period, we’re almost doing science fiction, because we have to build this world down to the smallest detail so that you believe the humanity that sits inside of it and you can forget about all that world-building and just watch the characters and the landscapes that are their faces. And in order to do that, I think you have to get to great specificity. You’re just going for cinematic reality. And in that sense, we really lean on our Japanese partners on this show, who have done so many Japanese shows and movies and can say, “This is the thing that we always deal with in our shows that’s not quite historically accurate, but we have to find a way to be able to get enough people out on set that we can actually shoot the scene. And so here’s some of the cheats that we use.” Accuracy was never the thing we were after. We were always looking for authenticity, or a measure of it. … We can never deny we are not Japanese [nationals], but we can try to tell this international story in a way that also maybe gets out of our own way a little bit. And that’s what the crew who’s now being recognized across both continents really did so beautifully.
KONDO At some point, we understood that you set out to make a Japanese show, then you feel the weight of your Americanness or your Canadianness … so many of us came in together and then had to realize, “No, we have to actually make something completely new that isn’t a Japanese production because they’re good, they can make their own stories.” It’s also not fully a Western production, because it’s bringing in so many perspectives and voices. So what can we make is a blending of both.
Was there a scene that was particularly difficult to nail?
MARKS Production, every day, is another “what’s not going to work today” when it comes to weather and who got tested [for COVID]. But, more than anything, it was the duration for everyone. That was really the hardest with all the COVID shutdowns that we had to go through. The best one, which is so perfectly emblematic of everything, was, we’re getting wrapped out down to the end, and I don’t think anyone who could get COVID hadn’t gotten COVID by now. So it’s like, “We can’t test out anymore, right, just finish this up, and we’re going to shoot some stuff with Toranaga [Sanada] and Tetsuko, his falcon.” And then there was an avian flu that came out, and we couldn’t shoot the birds outside anymore. So it was like, “Even the bird is testing out now!” This was, for some reason, one of those shows where anything that could happen did, and I think we were all stronger as a partnership for it, which is what makes it so gratifying to see it in the end.
KONDO The bird survived, she’s fine!
MARKS That was the journey of Shogun, always trying to pivot to the unexpected and then really lean into it.
The majority of your cast was drawn from the Japanese film industry.
MARKS That is one of the greatest joys of my career. These are actors who we all love so much in their own language and in their work. And part of what was such a big motivator to do this show in Japanese was to get to work with all these actors who would not be able to work on a show like this if they had to perform in English because they don’t speak it. So to be able to see Emmy nominee Tadanobu Asano performing and improvising in his own language and kind of creating this version of Yabushige that is reflective of the persona that he has in Japanese, but is not reflective of, at all, the persona that he has when he performs in American films, because he’s performing in a different language, doing it in Japanese, and acting from his heart, was the reason we do it. To see these faces who are unfamiliar to American audiences now be household faces is the reason we did it. Whether they’re nominated or not, we’re so proud of that.
This show has been compared to Game of Thrones. What’s your response to that?
MARKS It’s not really germane to the story that we were trying to tell. We always joke that we were watching much more Succession at that time than we were anything else as a [writers] room. And what that speaks to is, to us, that this is a very tragic comedy about human nature in a certain way. We really tried to find the humor that James Clavell also found in this show and to bring it out in a very, albeit cynical, way.
Given what happens in the season finale, did you always anticipate another season?
MARKS I think it was fan fiction in the writers room, and then actual fiction on set, because we started to say, “What if we carried this on?” We started to have conversations with Michaela Clavell, James Clavell’s daughter, as well as with Gina [Balian, FX Entertainment co-president] when she came to visit. “We have this idea, what do you think?”
I think it’s like all television. You want to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, right? And if it doesn’t work, well, we built a complete story, and I hope enough people liked it to feel as if it was worthwhile. If it does work, we can say we’ve got a little more we’d like to get off our chest. That’s where we are now as a writers room. We definitely have a lot to get off our chest. It’s been going really nicely so far.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
