The Watch - Behind the Scenes of 'Tokyo Vice' With Director Michael Mann

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

This week, Chris is joined by The Ringer’s Juliet Litman to assemble their dream prime-time TV lineups (0:00). Then, Chris speaks with director Michael Mann about his work on the pilot episode for the HBO Max series ‘Tokyo Vice’ (34:37). Mann breaks down shooting on location in Japan, Japanese film, and more (46:00). Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Juliet Litman, Michael Mann Producer: Devon Renaldo  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Tap this ad to learn more about Trimfaya, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interest that inspires a run crew, the support that gets you over the finish line.

Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going. Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan.

I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line my one true office roommate. It's Juliet Lippman. Hi, Chris. I'm so happy to be here. This is so exciting for me because I have my favorite co-worker with me.

You're my hair, co-worker too. And my favorite filmmaker, Michael Mann, is on the watch today. Oh, my God. It's a pot of faves. I mean, did you always think that you and you're a great Chicago in in some ways? Sure. Yeah. But you spend some time, like, you're sharing a podcast with the greatest Chicago filmmaker ever.

You know, it's funny that he is the greatest Chicago filmmaker. I don't, is he associated with Chicago like that? Like, is that like a Chris Ryan deep cut? Or is everyone like, yeah, Michael Mann, the great Chicago hope? I think early on with like, thief he was associated with it, but I would say that I still find his, I still hear the Chicago in his accent. Interesting.

He has that big, burly, industrial kind of like vibe to him. I'm like a little embarrassed to say this because I don't know what the right answer is, but like I just think of him as the director of collateral, which is a wonderful film. You shouldn't feel embarrassed at all. And so that's like the, that's like the most LA movie to me. I saw it before I'd ever been to California. I like, it tricked me into thinking there was like some kind of. truly functional public transportation system.

Yes. That you can get from the airport to downtown in 20 minutes. Yeah. And also like, I'm a major Jamie Fox fan. And like definitely began my reevaluation of Jamie Fox. And so I just think of him as like a great Los Angeles bard. But you're telling me he's a, he's a man of the Midwest. Well, he's an international man.

I will say that. So I would, it's interesting you brought up collateral. He brought up the insider a bunch on our, in our interview as people will hear. He directed the first episode of Tokyo Vice, which the first three episodes are up now on HBO Max. People can check them out. It stars Ansel Elgort as a journalist immersing himself into the Tokyo criminal underworld. And man's first episode that he directs, it kind of is like to Tokyo what collateral is to L.A. Like when you're watching it, you honestly feel like you are in like a small Yachtori, you know, Tokyo restaurant or something.

And like you feel like you were on this bus. you feel like you were walking down this street. It's so sensory. It's like so sensual, really. Like it's really amazing. But I'll talk a little bit more about Tokyo Vice later today. What we're doing today, Juliet, is something we haven't done it a while on the pod, which is we were making our own primetime grids.

This is a little way for us to run through a bunch of shows that we're enjoying right now. And essentially, it's a throwback to the pre-streaming on-demand days where you kind of had to kind of make sure that you were home at a certain time. And, you know, like when I was growing up and you were growing up, we would kind of sit down at eight and start watching TV until we went to bed. And that was like our night. And so even though people can watch whatever they want, whatever time they want, we thought we would make a little prime time grid.

So basically we were playing from the time of 8 p.m. to loosely when you go to bed. Anything is on the table from narrative shows to reality shows to stuff you watch on YouTube, to stuff you watch on your phone. It doesn't matter. It's just you got to fill up that eight to, 12-ish block. Right, right, right.

Go ahead. You told me reality was allowed, and I appreciate that. I think you're trying to account for the fact that due to my role here at the Ringer, I watch a lot of reality television. That said, that's not part of my ideal primetime night. I think reality has reached a different place where the best reality shows are happening on Netflix. I recommend the ultimatum, just dropped.

Oh, yeah. Takes a minute to get into it, but then it really takes off. And it is wacky. I think people are going to like it. Nick and Vanessa Jam, right? So they're Nick and Vanessa Jam. It's by the same EP as Love is Blind and Married First Site. His name is Chris Coellen.

His company is named kinetic content. But those, I'm not a binger. I don't like to binge TV. I was going to ask you that. I was wondering whether you rock, you just go full on 1.2, 1.5 speed and burn through it or what? I had a question for you about that. I, with this kind of show, I just like just tear through it because like I'm not usually so focused on outcomes as both a TV viewer and a reader.

But what these kinds of reality shows, I'm so, so focused on like, how does, like, how does it all end that I tend to binge it? So I think that it's like a Netflix reality show is best safe for a rainy Saturday or a rainy Sunday or a sunny day when you just don't want to leave the house and you've got five hours to kill. It's good stuff. Yeah. Exactly.

So that's not, but that's not my prime time experience that I'm desiring, which side note, and this is a service question to everyone. Can you do 1.5 speed on Netflix on a TV or only? on a like an iPad or computer because I can I don't get that option on my TV I only get it on my iPad do you watch it on your TV do you have like an Apple TV box now I'm a Roku loyalist I don't know I don't know what the Roku guys are doing I'm not sure I don't know what the Roku Netflix app looks like I'm sure somebody will will tell us but yeah like I have I was I'm pretty against that I don't listen to podcasts on sped up I don't watch TV sped up but my wife

Phoebe, who you obviously know, she has recently got really into these Netflix reality shows and watches them sped up. She says that they're too stupid to watch in real time. Yeah, there's definitely truth to that. I mean, I, a lot of the time with reality shows have to end up, like, watching them like one and a half

times or two times because I'm usually covering them for the pod and, like, I need to get every detail, but I also can't pay attention to these shows for that long. So it results in, like, more time rather than less more concentrated at time. But anyway, I just want to say, I definitely recommend Ultimatum. I definitely recommend Love is Blind. There's a lot. I personally need to catch up on Top Chef soon. I'm behind. Yeah. A little Dexailing Yacht another classic. But that I just don't think fits the exercise for me.

Like that's not part of my ideal night of programming in the traditional sense. Well, the other thing is that those shows already have in the network and cable reality shows already have like their event appointment viewing built into them. Like you want to be up on Top Chef, you watch it. You want to be up on Survivor. You watch it on Wednesday nights. Like, you want to keep up on these shows. Bachelor, obviously, then you watch them when they come on. But for this, it's like we're trying to assemble essentially if you have a bunch of different streaming services like Hulu or Netflix or Apple TV or HBO Max or whatever, your DVRing stuff, we want you to be able to assemble what would be like a really fun two, three, four hours

on the couch or in bed or whatever you watch your TV. So any other like general, conceptual philosophical ideas you brought into your planning before we get into the shows themselves. You know, this is unintentional, but my entire lineup is of from creators whose show either does not take place in America or they themselves are not American. Interesting. Are you feeling, do you have a little cabin fever? I just, I guess a little bit. I think also as well as you'll get from my list, I think I kind of oscillate between wanting something, something wholly original and exciting and something really reliable and familiar. And I'm not really interested. I was talking to a friend about this. I'm not really that into like the scam content craze right now. Right. And so I've been looking

elsewhere. I also find myself very interested in thrillers and the best thrillers are all British. So got to go across the time. Do you think that that's because you generally speaking know what happened to WeWork or know what happened to Theranos. But if you're watching pieces of her or like some British thriller, you're like, oh, I'm excited to see where this is going. Like I'm engaged in a part of my brain that I want to be using. I think it's because I generally know what happened. But moreover, there's like a lot of injustice baked into those stories that I don't find

particularly fun. Like the fact that Adam Newman is ridiculously wealthy billionaire is like not really an exciting outcome for this show to be working out to. And the fact that Elizabeth Holmes was acquitted of all of the charges related to patient and individual care, but convicted of charges related to the financial problem or financial losses of her board and investors is also like pretty depressing. Yeah. And Uber is a really complicated company. So like it's just not, it's just not that fun. And there's a type of moralizing that happens in thrillers that's like honestly easier to completely write off or to get behind.

Sure. So the pursuit of like writing a wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's sort of like thrillers are about serving justice and like these scam shows are just sort of like highlighting injustice that are happening here at home. So like who needs it?

Right. But also kind of mildly celebrating the outrageous wealth that these people have by taking you into it. I love Ann Hathaway and I think she's amazing and we crashed. So like I want to, you know, acknowledge that. And I'm a long time Amanda Safe Reed fan because I loved big love, which is incredibly underrated and the prestige TV can. But like, I don't know.

This I just, they're movie actresses. Do I need 10 hours in a row, Van Hathaway? Do I need 10 hours in a row of Mesafe? I like that you're kind of like, it's like they're not on Pompeo's level, you know? They can't hang with them for 20 hours. Well, that's because they're doing something so different. Like when you watch a, when you watch a soap or really like any kind of like frothy television show, people come into it like, I think hoping, especially with newer stars when

the Ellen Pompeo started and like the cast of Bridgeton, they're like so happy to here. Like, this is huge. Like, this is great for me. And it's like, they have fun with it. And then they, like, post behind the scenes pictures on Instagram and it's like really fun. And they're not like going for it. Like Anne Hathaway is amazing. But she also is like, I'm like, like, you can clearly tell. She's like, how will I win the Emmy for this show? Right. And same with Amanda, say, free. The voice work is like both impressive and laughable. I don't know. I just, I don't find this. I don't find this sort of like B level fake prestige TV. That fun. Well, let's talk about TV that you do find fun or or stimulating or interesting. Why don't we go through? We'll do them separately. So it's 8 o'clock. I'm fired it up. You're finished dinner. You're sitting down for three episodes in a row of Starstruck. Okay. So I don't like- We haven't talked about this show on this pod yet. Oh my God, ever? No, I don't think so. Oh my God. I think the watch audience would really like Starstruck. Do you tell us why? Starstruck is a rom-com TV show. Each episode is about 25 minutes. It is created and starring Rose Matafeo, who is a young comedian from New Zealand.

The show is set in London, where in the pilot episode, she hooks up on New Year's Eve with a man who turns out to be like the same level of fame as Vince in the season one of Entourage. And she's like, oh, shit, I just made out with a, or slept with a celebrity. And in her phone, she just saves his name as Tom Famous. He is played by Nikesh Patel, who if you're deep in the British TV salt mines like I am, you know him from the disastrous but lovable four weddings and a funeral on Hulu. It was not disastrous for me. I loved it. Really enjoyable show. If I can love it.

He was in Indian Summer, which was like a masterpiece show that's like pretty weird to watch because it's like celebrating colonialism. So it's like pretty weird, but also kind of interesting. He's just like all over British TV. And he's like really charming. And this show is so goddamn charming, Chris. It's like I would watch the show every day if I could. My only complaint, the episodes are short. And there's two seasons.

They have six episodes each. So there's a total of 12 and each one's 25. I wish there was more. Like I really like the sex size of college girls that those episodes are a little bit longer, which I enjoyed. And it's about this young woman who's kind of like a girl's type character. Like I had a horvath, but funnier navigating this relationship with this guy who is really famous while she's struggling to keep a job and survive in London. And it's just like incredibly

charming. I don't, I don't know what else to tell you. So are those around like 22 minute episodes? How long are they? So you can get three in in an hour about. Yeah, basically. Okay. For my eight o'clock block, I'm going to go to sitcoms, both of which one, geez, not sitcoms, two 30 minute shows, both of which we've talked about fairly extensively on the pod before, so I won't get too far into them. but Abbott Elementary continues to be delightful. I find it's easier to let a bunch of Abbott Elementary's accumulate because network TV still is like, this show airs one Wednesday and then six weeks later

after like whatever American Idol or something that they've got to broadcast on Wednesdays is over, they bring it back. So even though I think Abbott's only broadcast like 11 episodes, it feels like it's been on for like six months, I find it still like utterly charming. And I am pairing it with, with Atlanta at 830 just because there's an amazing interview with Donald Glover today in

interview magazine where he interviews himself, which I highly recommend people check out and talks a lot about how he feels about current TV. He talks about Euphoria and Dave and a couple of other things. And a lot of it about taste and criticism. But when he asks himself to name his two favorite things on TV right now, it's Abbott Elementary and How To with John Wilson. So if you're watching Atlanta, I think Abbott Elementary is like, it's fun to watch something. that the maker of Atlanta, one of the creator of Atlanta also thinks is cool. So, yeah, Abbott Elementary and the Atlanta from my 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock block. Interesting. Okay. Does he, is he Donald Glover as both interviewer and interviewee or is he like, Charles Gambino as one of that. No, he's,

he's Donald Glover as both. And it's like, the whole thing is like, I don't really like being asked questions because people ask me the same questions over and over again, although I will mention, I do feel like some of the questions he asks himself are pretty well trod ground. But that's aside from the point besides the point. All right, it's nine o'clock, Julia. What are we doing now? Nine o'clock. I am turning away from HBO Max going to Apple TV Plus, firing up Pachinko, currently my favorite show that I am engrossed in. It is so beautiful. I recently read the book. I knew the show was coming and I wanted to read the book beforehand. I loved it. I can't recommend it enough. It is such a incredible heartbreaking page Turner epic. It's like everything a novel

should be in a really beautiful sense. And one thing that's really, special about the show is I feel like it completely honors the book while also being like wholly original in its own merits. It's a remarkable work of adaptation. It's a, it's the only way to put it. It's remarkable. I so love the way that it is invested in language in a way that really honors the book, but the book couldn't necessarily do because it's just written in English, at least it was for me. But it's primarily in Japanese and Korean. And so for someone like me, the Korean subtitle, are in yellow and the Japanese subtitles are in blue. There's occasionally English.

And it's such a beautiful, beautiful show about family and heritage and discrimination and language and home. And I just like, I cannot recommend it enough. I absolutely love it. It's pretty rare that you see generational life dramatized so well, like where you have this older version of a character and the younger version of that character. and they're kind of in these dueling or parallel narratives living their lives. And you actually, like, you actually believe that this is the same person.

You know what I mean? You get so swept up and lost, I think partially because of how maybe how romantic the filmmaking is and how obviously loving it is. The music is very beautiful. The cinematography is so human. But yeah, it's like, it's just, and I hope people, like, I think I saw some stuff when it first came out where, you know, people were like, it's not. not a show that like you should feel like you have to watch like it's not like the ken burns

documentary where you're like well i got to knock this out i feel like it's it's i should do this it's it's it's really really like gripping and entertaining yeah it's really immersive it also like this is kind of a weird thing to say but i think this is another one of my problems with the multitude of scam content shows it treats the viewer with a lot of respect like it kind of like asks a lot of you as a viewer in a way like to kind of goes between different languages and it cuts in between storylines quite, quite frequently without that many title cards. But instead of like, you know, doing some of the kind of straightforward tricks of television these days, it just like assumes you'll be able to follow if you want to. And I think that's kind of like a respectful

leveling up of television. And I don't know. I love it. It is like a, it is so unique and such a delight to watch. I really recommend it. So for my nine o'clock show, I'm going to go with Tokyo Vice as, as I alluded to. I think that it's 9 o'clock's a good time to watch something challenging. Like, my only idea was always like 8 to 9 is like fun. 9 to 10 and 10 to 11 are like the prestige more challenging shows. Like you have to give a little bit more attention to.

And then after that, turn on whatever like wallpaper you want to like kind of wind down for the rest of the evening. So Tokyo Vice, I mentioned that the first episode is directed by Michael Mann. it's based on this memoir by Jake Adelstein, call it of the same name. And it stars Ansel Elgort as this young kid from Missouri, who's been living in Tokyo for a couple of years, learned the language. Elgert, I have to say, does a very good job speaking Japanese throughout this show. Like, he literally is just like going for it. He learned Japanese for the show. It's a pretty impressive feat.

He is a fish out of water living in Japan. It's really interesting how man shoots him in the first episode because Elgort's, six foot four. So there are all these like crowd scenes and scenes where he's sitting in a newsroom with a bunch of other journalists and he's just like towering above in the frame. And it's like all this like kind of basically going towards this idea of dislocation and how it feels to be in another country and in another culture and kind of feeling like a stranger. And the first episode is largely about that. The first episode is mostly Michael Mann doing all this like intense close up handheld, typical Michael man, like, you can feel it in your bones while you're watching it.

And then towards the end, it starts to suggest what the story is going to be. And then the subsequent two episodes that they put up, which are directed by a really cool director named Joseph Lodico, who directed a pretty brutal but awesome movie called Catch the Fair one a couple years ago. It becomes a little bit more of a sprawling crime epic. And it's about the yakuza and like about the relationship between the police and the gangs in Tokyo and keeping the piece and all this stuff and it becomes a little bit more of a conspiracy thriller. And no less gripping, just a little bit different. It's interesting kind of like as more and more content gets made and more and more shows

get made to see whether or not any directors are ever going to be able to do more than a couple of episodes. That was a big thing like 10 years ago. Right. I'm Kuiangir directed all of True Detective and Steven Soderberg directed all of the Nick and we're going to get like these Oator shows. I feel like we're kind of slipping away from that a little bit. It's a real challenge scheduling-wise, obviously, but it's also like a huge undertaking to direct all these episodes.

But I highly recommend Tokyo Vice. It's definitely very dense and it might not be for everyone, but I think for the people it clicks with, they're going to be really, really into it. What network is it on? It's on the HBO Max network. Oh, wonderful. I'll check it out. Okay. So what's your 10 p.m.? All right. You know, we started out light for Starstruck. Pachinko isn't like a light show. And also, you know, you got to lock in so you don't miss anything.

So I think she's got to like take an exhale after that a little bit. Just fire up an episode of Bridgeton. Go straight to season two. How is it? I much prefer to. Yes, there's much less sex. But the show, I think is much better. The characters are more nuanced.

Characters are more dynamic. Simone Ashley of Sex Education fame is the female lead. And she is like simply radiant. The male lead is Jonathan Bailey. He's fantastic. Like they're both, they have like amazing chemistry together. Clearly really liked each other. And it's just like a fun watch.

I found it a little hard to get into the first one. And the episodes are so long. Like, oh my God, they're so long. There's several or over an hour. But episode six of season two is like my favorite episode of television and recent memory. Like I just had such a fun time watching it. It's really well done. It reminds me the pacing and like the story arcs remind me of the best of Grey's Anatomy.

And you get to like learn a lot about the characters. And it's just sort of like a fun hang episode, which is really hard to do. a soap opera-ish show. And I think, you know, I will yell it every time given the opportunity, but like, Shonda Rhyme's enterprises just don't get enough credit for being like serious, seriously good television. Bridgetton season two really is. So I recommend it. Can I ask a very basic question? Sure. Do I have to have seen Bridgetton season one? I'm asking for a collective because I've seen Bridgeton season one. Or at least I do not. Yeah. Okay. It just starts out and you're like, okay, I'm getting reintroduced. I'm getting introduced to a whole new set of characters.

Well, one of the two main characters is not on it. So they basically had a right around that. And so as a result, you might have a couple questions about who's the older sister? Why is her husband never around? Like, what's her deal? But it's pretty relevant. So I think you can go straight to season two. And I really recommend it.

It's sort of like skipping season one of Grey's Anatomy and going straight to the good stuff in season two. Have you always been a TV completist? Or do you find that that is like actually overrated? Because I remember when you were when I was younger, like sometimes you just wouldn't be home for an episode of TV. and you'd miss that week's ER and the next week, you know, something very similar would happen. It wasn't as serialized. But do you find that you're like very like obsessive about like starting stuff,

finishing it, making sure you watch every episode when it comes to prestige stuff? Yes, for sure. I used to, well, it's easier now because seasons are shorter. But I used to be like, I don't, I used to say to people, I don't drop shows. Like when the OC got really bad,

I was like, well, I have to keep watching. I don't drop shows like as a matter of principle. So I kind of still like that. It's just, what's the worst show you ever? didn't drop. What's the worst show you just were like, I have to see this through? Well, I've watched all of Virgin River and Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. Those are those good answers. Those are really. I mean, Virgin River is one of the worst shows I ever watched. It's really bad, really, really bad. I think that's probably it.

I'm trying to think of anything else that could potentially qualify. Like, did everyone would get bad? Like, did you, did you ever watch like any like dramas from that era that you were just like, I'm on season five? One Tree Hill. One Tree Hill was never like that great to begin with. But it got so ridiculous and far patched by the end and I watched all of that. Okay, well done. Thanks. For my 10 p.m. I'm going to go with Severance. I know that folks want us to talk about Severance, but the Thursday episode of The Watch is actually strangely scheduled since Severance goes up later tonight. If you want to deep dive into the finale, I know that Mal and Joanna are doing one tomorrow for the finale episode, the season finale episode. So that Proceedgege TV podcast will be up tomorrow.

And Mal and Joe will do a great job of that. And then I'm going to try and hit it on Monday. I've, I've loved the season. I think that it had like a huge amount of like buzz and momentum when the first few episodes and the concept of the show was kind of getting revealed. And then that kind of leveled out partially because there's just so much frigging TV on right now that like people find other things to talk about. Severance makes me miss the television without pity era where I could. Oh, interesting. So where you could just read the recap. Yes. In my new detail. I do not want to watch this show, but I really want to know what happens. Do you not want to watch the show because of its tone or because of its subject matter? The pacing for me. It was two.

slow. Can you tell if I have attention problems these days? No, but like I think that the pacing of the show, especially in the beginning, is really interesting because it does so much atmospheric world building. And now I feel like the plot stuff is getting not condensed in any kind of rushed way, but there's a lot of story in the last couple of episodes. So I also kind of like take some umbrage at the idea of atmospheric world building. Like I actually was texting with Phoebe, your wife. And I was like, I just find a cinematography showy for really no. reason. Like, this is about severance.

Yeah. I was like, okay, cool. Like, this looks really nice, but like, what's the point? Like, what's it adding? And I understand it is like world building, but I found it so, um, conspicuous. And like I said, and just like showy, whereas like, Bridgerton does like something very similar with the world building and it's even more conspicuous. But I think it's like written off as like a kind of soap opera trope.

Yeah, it's disposable somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas it's like taken much more seriously because like there's some like misery foregrounded in it with severance. I just sort of didn't wasn't in the mood. The conversation that I'm kind of curious about having with about severance is really about like the degree to which. And I think that this happened a bit with loss, but the degree to which like are, are you more drawn to it metaphorically as a story about our relationship to labor and our relationship to the bifurcated self that happens in capitalism because you have to send. one version of yourself out into the world and then one version of yourself home.

And it kind of reminds me of the way like leftovers was, was processed where it's like, you know, it's this story, but the story is about grief and the story is about loss and the story is about getting over like your, your pain. And I think Severn's kind of drifted away from that metaphor or that the centrality of

that metaphor and is now very much almost a thriller, which I think I might prefer. I was going to say I would prefer that too. What you were just described, about the bifurcated self and grief and all that. That sounds like a great novel that I'd love to read, but I just don't know that I need it delivered to me in the severance television package.

But like that and that's why I want to read the recaps because I do find these ideas interesting. And I think if there was like a recap where I really trusted, I'd be interested in the prism through which they explained to me the show. Right. But like I'm not interested in experiencing this with Patricia Arquette and Adam Scott. Up Scott. Okay.

So it's 11 o'clock. We're winding down. You know, you mentioned a. thriller. That's where I want to go. I want to just recommend, I know you're already here, but like everyone, join the Harlan Cobin on Netflix hive. It is such great, dopey, thriller fair. And I like to stay close the best. You know, when I was noting that all of these shows are from British people, stay close is based on Harlan Coben's novel, one of his novels. He's got many. He has a huge deal with Netflix. So there'll be more of us to come. He lives in New Jersey and all of his books are very

specifically set in New Jersey for Netflix they're transposed to the UK and they like it just becomes like generic central England or like it's not even like the Midlands or Birmingham like it's just like something pastoral in England and they keep all of the New Jersey names yeah but it's like Moors Town but it's in it's in England it's too and then like they have also like all these like Jewish names but like not a single like Jewish person on the show that they're like Goldberg he did that it's like very very weird So it's like totally otherworldly. It's neither American nor British.

It's like some kind of amalgam specifically for Netflix. And it's just kind of like fun. And when I was talking about moralizing, I do find these books to have very, very simple moral tenets that they pursue doggedly. And there's something like very easy about that. There was nothing easy about the stranger. Like stranger a lot. The stranger was bat shit. I couldn't get it.

So have you watched Stay Close? It's also batchet. That's the one with Cushumbo, right? No, I haven't seen Stay Close yet. My mom watches every available British thriller. So I know I have a lot ahead of me. It's a great genre. It's ultimately...

Is your mom watching slow horses? I don't know. She probably is. She wouldn't really enjoy it. I'll let her know. Okay. At 11 o'clock, I'm starting to chill out a little bit. So I'm going to watch a sitcom or a comedy,

and that comedy is going to be our flag means death, which we haven't really talked about on this. the show. It's from a guy named David Jenkins, but it's executive produced by Tycho Waititi. And it is a pirate comedy starring Reese Darby, who is in Flight of the Concords and the film version of what we do in the shadows and is a very, very funny guy. And it's basically like absolutely ridiculous. It's like it is what I just called it, a pirate comedy. And there's like a hundred jokes a second. Rory Keneer is in there playing a guy named Badminton. It's just really, like the game uh yes but like he's like a british naval officer it's just really funny but i find

their uh accents and the just overall kind of synthetic style that they have where it's just like obviously sets and everything to be very very calming and very very pleasant interesting okay cool that sounds great uh what do you have after after your harling cobin every night recently to fall asleep I put on what is the equivalent of a really warm blanket of a television show. That would be the longstanding case of the week, call the midwife. I'm worried just going to leave Netflix. It's too good to be true. How many seasons are we on here?

I'm currently in season nine, season 11 just aired in the UK and the U.S. So I've got a few more to go. This is just the most genuine sweetest show. If you're interested in like case of the week, but like don't want it to have any like too much blood or just don't want to be too gruesome and you always want to know it's going to end with like some happy music and and some a nice corner of Poplar and good old East London. This is a show for you. I like really love Call the Midwife. It's so good. Did you ever watch Granchester? Of course. I found that Granchester got too serious after a while. Not this show. Also Emerald Fennell. Excuse me. She was on this show and left to go make. her movie. Probably not called it. Yes. But she's like on it for several years.

It's just like it's one of those classes. Like, oh, I know that actor. I know that actor. What is actually the premise of Call the Midwife? Call the Midwife is about young nurses who are deployed to East London, the neighborhood called Poplar, where they live at Nanadas House, which is like they live with nuns and they share space. And so it's like three to four young women who are secular and are not nuns, but living

living with the sisters and together they do house calls, they work at the NHS and they provide healthcare services primarily for pregnant women, but really for everyone. And so it's really, it's basically a medical show. My number one falling asleep content right now is something I have no idea how I found this. I have no idea what my algorithm did to give it to me. I think it might be because I watch a lot of cooking videos on YouTube and there is some cooking in this, but it is a YouTube channel called Go 4x4 or Go 4x4. And it is essentially a series of like basically ASMR videos of a guy camping solo in Australia in the rain.

Wow. And so he drives a Jeep out into like a jungle or a forest or something. And his dog gets out of his Jeep and he sets up his solo tent. He's got like the dopest equipment. All of it has like these special bespoke like bags that he's got special compartments for in his Jeep. and he sets up like a huge tarp and then he sets up his tent and stuff and hangs out and it's like you can hear the forest or the jungle and then you hear like the rain coming down because he's often

in the rain and then he like usually cooks himself dinner and all of the sound is like really like ramped up so like you fall asleep to the sound of himself making like a chicken breast or something like that the one thing i will say is that it is so narcotic like it's so it makes you so sleepy that sounds awesome when he starts to like do his dishes or his dog knocks something off of like the table, it honestly wakes you up. Incredible. That sounds great. But it's really, really good. If you, if you ever just like having like total chill out, like this is basically like YouTube edibles for you. That sounds awesome. Can I throw in one bonus? Of course. I'm a bad sleeper. So I often wake up in the middle of the night and like I'll try to

fall back to sleep and then I'll put something on. So this is the 3 a.m. block. This is a 3 a.m. block. Nothing has been more enjoyable at 3 a.m. than the Secrets of the Whales on Disney Plus by James Cameron. I just like, it's not discussed enough. So Gordy Weaver narrates, George James Cameron appears at the end of every episode because as we all know, he loves the deep sea, that avatar lifestyle. Absolutely. Maybe the only person who lives the sea more than I do. Yeah, exactly. I like to look at the sea. He loves to be like down at the bottom of the sea. Yeah. Um, if you had your own submarine, I think you might enjoy that too. But It's like, for near mortals like us, it's a lot of logistics.

You set me up. I've asked Jacoby this on food news, and then I promise I'll stop talking so you get to Michael Mann. Would you rather go to outer space or go in a submarine? Outer space. All the men say outer space. And so many women pick the sea. I mean, I don't know.

It's just, I don't want to be too gendered about it. Do you think so? Yeah, I choose the sea. Is it? Don't you think that you would get, a more altering, like life-altering perspective on your own existence if you saw the planet from outer space than if you were underneath the water? I don't want to leave the earth.

Okay. I don't even like flying. I just, I have so many. I mean, I guess outer space also has a pretty bad track record in movies, but I just feel like submarines like are only ever depicted because something bad is going down. Did you watch Vigil? I bet to say Vigil actually confirmed this for me because I was like, oh, there's a whole orderly society down here.

And they brought the police down to investigate. There's not. There's like bags going to rise. Yeah, I understand. But there's like a sense of order. Space you're starting over. And you're just like anything, anything can go. I just, I have no interest.

So thank Chris. Thank you so much for having me. Julia, thank you for coming on. Thanks to Devin Bernalto for producing this episode to watch. And we're going to get into my interview, unbelievably, with Tokyo Vice Director, Michael Mann. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of? nowhere and realize you're missing something.

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to talk about Tokyo Vice. I guess we could start in the most general of places. And if you could tell me a little bit about how you got involved with this project and what really attracted you to it. John Lesher, who's executive producer and originated the project when he optioned Jake Edelstein's book, sent me to this script and asked me if I wanted to do it, but I read it and I thought the script is terrific,

like J.T. Rogers. And that kind of launched me into it. I was fascinated. John has great taste. He proved Birdman and Blackman. He's, he's, he's, uh, did have known for quite a while. And I've then fascinated with, with both the, the period of Japanese culture, and the chaos of the 90s. And Japan has always had a very special mistake for me. I love the world of it. And the extreme commitment and imperative inside this main character to make himself into who he wants himself to be, which is a, which is number one, a reporter. And that's the The first thing is his action is to be a reporter.

And then secondly, to be doing it in Japan, I lived for six years in London and in my 20s, my early 20s. So I know what that sense is of somebody in a different place. And, you know, you're not in Kansas anymore. And that's, so I get it. I get where this guy's coming from. To report is a critical thing. And that quest that he has to discover and to tell what really happened for the messy

cut a fabric of an event that's occurred, whether it's a stabbing or a killing or something mundane, until it really happened and dig and find that thing, the social engineering of it, the getting of it. And then maybe if you're really lucky, you make a small piece of history at some point in your career. I understand that. I know investigative reporters, obviously Lowell Bergman, the real Lowell Bergman is the subject of the insider, play by Al Pacino. And other investigative journalists. journalists, particularly British investigative journalists, like the late departed, Kevin McFadgin, who was with World in Action. Yeah.

So, anyway, that was the appeal of the material. Did you spend much time in Tokyo personally as a traveler, or was it someplace that you had always dreamed of shooting? I always dreamed of shooting there. I've probably been in Tokyo seven, eight, nine times, but always on a press chunker or something or on a vacation, staying in hotels. and it's entirely, obviously, entirely different experience when you're living there. And we had an apartment in a spectacular neighborhood called Daqanyama.

And we kept an apartment the whole year. And it's very different experience living and working there than just kind of moving through it. My wife was with me, and I think she walks seven, eight miles every day without having a destination. Yeah. And it's such a uniquely distinct culture. I mean, most places we go in the world, particularly to Europe, have been homogenized by 1960s, jet setting, and then by the internet in the 90s, and everything is pretty much like everything else, you know?

Yeah. It was kind of an unsettling shock way back in 64, 65, when I saw a Hertz, rental car, you know. And, and, but not Japan. Japan is completely isolated, you know, it's unique, it's isolated, and it's, everything is different. You know, Jake is a really interesting character for you to be working on because I, in some ways, I found him sort of atypical of your protagonists. I mean, a lot of the times you focus on characters who have already achieved a level of excellence in their given professional field or in their vocations. And Jake is somebody who is still sort of feeling around in the dark when we, when we meet him in the pilot.

He's still sort of trying to figure out. He's obviously got a lot of natural ability and he's got a lot of drive, but he makes mistakes. stakes. And I wondered if you kind of recognize that this would be a, maybe a different kind of character to focus on. I didn't really think of that. I mean, yeah, but kind of, because it, you know, he suddenly finds himself a bit of a stranger to a strange land. And the land, it's not just the landscape that's strange. Landscape isn't that strange. He's kind of a local in his neighborhood. And that's why I, that's why I chose that particular area of Akabani and his little tiny apartment over that

sake shop. But as much as he thinks he knows what reporting is, and as much as he has a background in it in a way, because he working with his father, who's a medical examiner doing autopsies, it was a fascinating, it's a fascinating job anyway. He's not, he's not,

he's a complete foreigner to corporate. culture and the corporate culture of that newspaper. And it's totally, it's perfectly antithetical to his mission of why he wants to be a reporter, which is, no, you don't get to tell what happens. You get to, what you want to tell is going to get censored and it's going to get modified and it's going to get blunted. And it's going to be what the corporate, what the corporate paradigm is about how we handle news, particularly as we're allowed to report things by the police. So it's totally antithetical to what he thought reporting would be. Yeah.

And what I always look for is where's the conflict? Because drama to me is conflict. So where's the conflict? So here's his character on a quest for something. And he runs right into these conflicts that he didn't expect. That was the dramatic hook that actually really got me about it. You shoot Ansel in such an interesting way, especially, you know, in these opening minutes. Because in a lot of ways, the first episode of this show feels like a series of initiations.

You know, like we were being initiated as viewers into the visual language of the show, but also the world that we're entering. But Jake is being initiated not only into Japanese society, but as a cub reporter into a newspaper, as a guy living and maybe in the mainstream who gets initiated into the underground. Why did you choose this sort of very close up handheld style? Why did you think that that was sort of the best way to shoot Jake in this opening episode? You're picking a great word of initiation. It truly is an initiation.

And to me, the thrill is to be riding with Jake as if you're seeing through his eyes and walking in his shoes as he's experiencing this whole complex new world. And so then I'm always looking for how do I bring you as audience, it's the feeling what he's feeling, into getting into, you know, empathetically connecting you into his experience. And so it's not predictable exactly where the camera's going to go to do that.

I mean, I explore that in the insider quite a bit because I wanted to take that story and subjectify you because of the following. I know it's a lethal drama that was happening in insider. It's life and death, but there's no guns. It's all about destroying. you in ways that people really do get destroyed, like making it so you don't have the wherewithal to give your kid a college education or to afford your wife the best medical

or something tragic happens. That's real damage. Yeah. Yeah. But it's situational, it's psychological, it's dramatic. So how do I bring you inside? So it's the same kind of, how do I do this? And it's interesting. That's always different. There's one other thing, and that is that Ansel is so tall. Yeah. By camera operators, my height, right? We're normal. We're 5-8. Ansel 6-4. So it's going to be a little bit different.

No, because I feel like there's almost this tension between it's almost like the camera is trying to get a leg up on Ansel and Ansel keeps bursting out of the frame. And in some shots you can see when he's taking the entrance exam for the newspaper.

He's kind of above, I head above everybody. But even when he's at the nightclub, he's jumping, he's above everybody. But like I feel like the camera is always trying to get on top of him and kind of like keep his, almost his enthusiasm for where he is limited. Well, kidding aside about Ansel's Heights, the, you know, again, it's all about the same thing. It's a challenge for me. Can I bring audience into experiencing what he's thinking and feeling? Some of it's verbal. Some of it's not. Sometimes what's expressed verbally in the text

is actually counter to the subtext. He's saying one thing, but he's really feeling or thinking something else. Those dichotomies and playing those dichotomies are very important. The whole idea is together so that you're empathetically connected and you are him, in effect. I mean, that's what moves me when I'm watching something. Do you feel like there's something that you're drawn to about this era of journalism, specifically globally, I guess? Because, you know, we've talked about The Insider a couple of times here. And I do feel like this is right at this crucial moment where mobile technology is upon us, but is not dominant, and there's still an element to, if you want to go find something,

you have to go look for it rather than just look it up on the computer in your hand. But he's got a... Also journalism, also journalism had authority. Yeah. Such as things, objective reality, and you got that in the new, and you said, okay, if it's in the New York Times, you know, it's not partisan. It's more or less objective. And there was maybe one might also look for something in a Wall Street Journal.

And it's gotten so subjectified and politely. polarized and through social media, the public is so locked into this logarithm that's made it almost like a heroin-like connection between, I will feed to you what you want to be seeing. And that makes a connection. And down that connection, they could just move material. So as a consequence of that, it's almost as if we're all living in the Middle Ages in the town of 40,000 people and can all be inflamed by the same thing and decided, we're going to kill witches or something. So it's journalism has a completely different function.

I don't think that the effect that Lowell Bergman had in the insider because of reporting would make a difference today. You don't think so. You think it would just wash like up on the shore and be considered as partisan and it'd be dismissed by anybody who, you know, thought differently. I guess I hadn't really considered that. I mean, it does seem like there's basically a 48-hour life cycle to any story that comes out, but I would like to think that something like that would be the least shoot-on

for a little bit longer than that. You know, you'll see in subsequent episodes what Ansel does get involved in, and it had to do with the Yakuza becoming golden sacks with guns and making moves in the financial sector. You know, you mentioned the Yakuza. Like, I was curious if we could talk a little bit about the final scene in the episode, which is this initiation ritual that Sato attends. and it's a stunning piece of filmmaking. I was wondering if you could just sort of set the scene and tell me about how you achieved such an intimate and very real seeming moment there.

I wanted that ritual to be in the pilot. And so it is. There's a number of things going on. One of them is that Kume, who's played by Masa Hanita, is getting initiated in a brotherhood ceremony. But the real point about what's going on is that I wanted you to feel that Sato, is so proud to be included that he's, we thought maybe perhaps he's a low levels, you know,

he's got his own little street crew and everything. And now we see that he's not the leader of a small street crew. He's at the bottom of a hierarchy. And it's a very vast, complex hierarchy. We don't have to understand the hierarchy, understand the levels. We just have to know there are levels. And he's at the bottom level and is proud to be included. and kind of thrilled to it almost as if I'm identifying with this group,

as if it's my surrogate family, and he's proud to be there. And that's the real kind of, it could be a subtlety, but that's the real importance of that scene, as well as here's the breadth and scope of Vyakas, obviously it's highly ritualistic. Yeah. And so we contacted the ceremony leader

who really does lead those ceremonies amongst the occupancy. was a, we basically did the entire ceremony. And then we kind of compressed it a little bit because we don't have two and a half hours of screened out of the ceremony. That's where that's where it came from. And then we were, it's this particular temple out in the, you know, out of the suburbs of Tokyo, where we shot it. But it was the more authentic, the more detailed research is that we did, the more esoteric

it became, the more authentic you felt. was the impression. And that's the whole point. This is real. This is exactly the ceremony. The dried fish means something. Everything has a certain meaning. And you don't have to know what it means to understand that it's meaningful. That's the whole point. Yeah, I think I felt the same way when Jake is starting at the newspaper and, you know, even seeing basically the printouts of the stories writing and how they're getting kind of assembled and the various sub-editors and editors that he's working with. Did you talk with Japanese journalists? Or did you, how did you sort of construct this? I imagine a fictional newspaper based on what I would imagine is a real one in Tokyo, right? We turned various newspapers in Tokyo and looked at their offices and everything. And one thing was all the big spaces, they look like small object museums,

meaning if you put your cell phone down someplace and turn it around, you're dead, you've lost it because there's so many little things all stacked everywhere. You can't possibly find anything. And as opposed to the arrangement of objects that you normally, all material objects you see in Japan, it's elegant design everywhere. There's a sense of orderliness to it. And the newspaper offices are the exact opposite. They're chaos.

The chaos. And it looked like rat war in some of these workspaces, you know. And so I found that fascinating because everything else you see is very, you know, rectangular and ordered and very symmetrical. And it's layout from curbstones to the design of manhole, covers to, you know, restaurant interiors, to graphic design, clothing design. Everything's perfect, you know, except this chaotic mess of a newspaper office. Did you find that there was still a holdover of like the sort of technology? Like, was there still a lot of the stuff that they were using in that late 90s period still available to, to use in the depictions of the

newspaper? Yeah, we were able to find it, particularly those word processors, are absolutely period. And we had terrific prop department and an art department. and they were able to find those places. It was also finding what the interiors of the hostess bar should look like was a real journey. And that really is to the genius of web production designer Jeff Mann, who's no relation. And the name of the place was onyx.

And so he had this idea about an onyx-like shape. And then we had location scouted, and we had one place that had this fantastic green mirror, would seem to have these butterflies kind of on pins, you know. And so we took that component from there and everything else. But Jeff put this thing together, including the video waterfall and river. Yeah. It's one of the best sets I've ever had.

John Box built a great set for me on the keep. And this ranks right up there with it. Was it a pretty running gun shooting? Like, were you able to get into the nooks and crannies of the city because of the style with which you shot the episode? No, it wasn't one of that running gun. And it's very difficult to arrange location. and we persisted, and we persisted. And then we were, you know, getting a lot of maybes that then

converted into nose. And then we continued to persist. And then the governor of larger Tokyo was 35 million people. She made a couple of phone calls. We had a meeting with her, and she made a couple of phone calls to, in Shibuya, to the chief of police of Shibuya. And these neighborhoods are little fiefdoms. And they had opened some doors and we were able to shoot in places. But it's difficult to shoot. And part of it is very annoying if you're a filmmaker, it's very admirable if you're just looking at Champneys culture, because they really don't care about Hollywood. Yeah, they really don't care that you're making a motion picture. They really do care about a yacotori storefront or something that they have their customer who comes in at three o'clock and that

customer is not going to be disturbed because you need to shoot something. And they don't care how much money you're willing to pay them. They're not going to, you can't shoot there. That's it. You got this, which means piss off. So did you want him having to make like agreements with individual yocotatory stands? I mean, when you're shooting Ansel on a bus or a train and you're, you're up in his face, but that is, that feels like a real commuter train going, going to work. I mean, how are you, are you able to just kind of, do people just let you do that? Well, when we shot in the bus, it was our bus. And when you shoot on, so we owned it and we just, we just, just drove it around and shot whatever we want.

We've filled it up with people. That guy just, that's a little Hollywood magic then. That's too bad. I was curious whether or not, you know, you're doing this show now. You've done this episode. You've obviously worked with HBO in the past and you have this long storied history of working in television. Do you ever feel the ground changing beneath your feet or the sea changes of the television industry when you come back intermittently to work on it? Or is it kind of like you're working on the filmmaking side of it and you don't even

really engage with that part. I'm always just doing what I'm excited about doing, taking the narrative form into some, for me anyway, into some, into the next place I can advance it into. So for myself, personally, I'm on always, I try to be, not always successful, I try to be on some kind of a cutting edge for myself. And usually maybe that corresponds to, you know, something in the zeitgeist. But television right now, I mean, there's fantastic stuff at the top level of it. And I'm thinking particularly of Sam Levinson's Euphoria, which I think is extremely advanced,

narratively, writing, directing. I mean, it's really brilliant. So, too, was Anna McKay's show on The Lakers. Oh, yeah. We've been talking about that. Yeah. Love it, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's really, really adventurous visually, as is euphoria.

I didn't expect you to say that you were, was euphoria something you found on your own? Or was it something that like somebody recommended to you? I forgot why I started looking at it. And I've actually jumped in a season two first. And then that was it. You know, I was just kind of hawk for the whole season two. And now we're going back and starting to look at season one. So I'm kind of late to it.

But this is radical. This isn't just, oh, this is a good show or this show is shot really interestingly or any of those kind of pedestrian things. This is a radical advance of narrative form. you often, if you're shooting someplace like in Japan or if you're shooting on location, someplace that has a kind of visual identity, do you ever engage with the cinema of that location? Like, so were you watching Japanese New Wave before you shot this? Or is that a genre that specifically holds a lot of interest for you? Totally. And I've seen a lot of Japanese

film. But one thing, one area I did jump into is Japanese noir from the late 40s. And late 40s, early 50s, and I just got hung up with, I think it was Kurosawa's first or second film, Trunken Angel, maybe the title. Yeah. I was just knocked out by some of that. It was fascinating seeing Tokyo after the war compared to what it was now, but I usually do. But I'm always looking for that expression that's raw and innovative at that moment of time, not something that's derivative. But it's more like, it's not how it's shot that's fascinating to me. It's the world I'm looking through the cinematics into the actual world and the emotions and the, you know, the customs and the patterns and rhythms of everyday life. So kind of looking through it.

It comes along with more of a sociological study in a way that's a cinematic study. So if you're watching high and low, it's not necessarily the framing or anything. It's the personal drama, yeah. It's the personal drama, yeah. I had like a real run of where I was watching a bunch of of this stuff that was featured on the Criterion Channel, streaming service. and I came across a movie called Pale Flower. Have you ever seen that? Fantastic.

And it seems like a real Michael Mann movie. I love their film. Yeah. Particularly the opening, the opening five minutes of that film, The Train Station, is unbelievable. It's unreal. I hope anybody who hears this checks that movie out. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me today.

It's been great to catch up with you again. This show is extraordinary. So I hope people check it out. And the work you did on it is just magical. That's great, Chris. Thanks, it's a great interview. Thanks so much. Take care.

Mama, thanks for making all my favorite recipes. Hi, Ma. Thanks for your unfiltered advice. Hi, Mom. Thanks for always being by the phone. Hey, Mom. Happy Mother's Day. When you ship UPS Air at the UPS store,

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