Shogun’s Showrunner Justin Marks Opens Up About Maintaining Authenticity To Japanese Culture While Crafting The Intense Show

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00:00 everything was so well done. And I just want to know what was like your process as showrunner

00:04 trying to keep everything in order to make sure it was as accurate as it could be?

00:07 I think I'll key onto the word, you know, accurate, because it's an interesting one

00:14 to talk about in the context of the show. And it's one that with our department heads,

00:19 we talked about a lot. What does it mean to be accurate about a period in 1600 that you know,

00:24 there's still to this day, a lot of debate about within Japan, within the community of Japanese

00:30 historians, and many of whom worked on our show, to help advise us, you know, what are we in search

00:37 of and also in the interest of rendering something that's makeable on screen and, you know, that we

00:43 can execute at the number that we have. And so what the word that we ended up really chasing

00:50 more than anything was this idea of authentic. What is it to do something that is authentic to

00:55 work with your Japanese producers, your Japanese advisors and collaborators to create a version of

01:04 Japan in 1600 that hopefully, will feel true to Japanese audiences. And to do that, I think you

01:12 have to really rely on those voices in your process. Our Helen Jarvis, our production designer,

01:19 you know, worked very hard through historical detail, to kind of, you know, get it right,

01:26 so to speak. And then you're adding layers that, you know, are also expedient for production

01:33 purposes. And so when we did that, we would very often rely on the same kind of tricks and shortcuts

01:38 that were done within the vernacular of Japanese cinema, in order to do it so that we were careful

01:44 to, you know, be sure that we're being as respectful as humanly possible.

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