For cinematographer Christopher Ross and his longtime collaborator, director Jonathan van Tulleken, there was a fine line on which to balance in bringing the FX series “Shogun” to visual life.
“There are two sides to faithfulness. One is to stay as architecturally faithful and characteristically faithful to medieval Japan as closely as humanly possible,” Ross tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Cinematographers panel. “Then on the flip side, it’s sort of the idea of a Western that is fed into Akira Kurosawa, and ‘The Seven Samurai’ and then fed obviously from there in ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and even ‘Star Wars’ and the lightsaber battles. So the idea was that we were trying to approach the series from an utterly faithful place with Japan, but with a Western narrative cinematic gaze from the 21st century.”
No small task, but Ross and the entire “Shogun” team pulled it off. Based on the acclaimed novel by James Clavell and created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, the FX limited series has been one of the breakout hits of the entire year, winning critical praise and audience love for its knotted take on the classic story (one previously adapted to great acclaim for the award-winning 1980 miniseries).
“One of the interesting things from the script that Justin and Rachel put together was a retelling of the narrative of the novel from a multi-protagonist perspective,” Ross explains of the new take. “So therefore the visual philosophy came from a truthfulness to that… a much more visceral first-person storytelling approach where we were able to jump from protagonist to protagonist. So although Blackthorne [played by Cosmo Jarvis] in the novel is clearly the protagonist, what we set out to do was to allow an audience to take allegiance with the different characters. You want to fall in love with Mariko [played by Anna Sawai], you want to be able to see the rivalry between Yabushige [played by Tadanobu Asano] and Toranaga [played by Hiroyuki Sanada], and the only way to do that is to walk in their shoes. So it was about this first-person perspective of being able to move around and that’s a much more contemporary take.”
“Shogun” has been hailed for its performances, with Sawai, Sanada, Jarvis and Asano all expected to compete strongly for Emmys recognition. Ross says capturing the work of the ensemble was tricky because so much of the show’s drama is found in the communication of the characters and translation between Japanese and English.
“One camera is on the subtext in the scene, and the other camera is delivering a secondary subtext,” Ross explains. “I think it’s important. There are a lot of words in movies and shows, and they’re great. And they’re written by incredibly talented people. But oftentimes the emotion comes from an incredible performance of someone listening to somebody else. And so if you can do that in compositional choices, then that’s a lot of fun.”
“Shogun” episodes are streaming on Hulu.
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