What does learning another language and living in another culture do for your humanity and creative process?

Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor played by Ken Watanabe, Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.
He has directed multiple episodes of HBO’s Rome and Big Love, Showtime’s The Big C, Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and the pilots for TNT’s Perception and ABC’s GCB. He currently serves an an Envoy for the U.S. Department of State’s American Film Showcase program, and as a Tourism Ambassador for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. He is a member of the board of directors of Film Independent and Playwrights Horizons, and of the Directors Guild of America's LGBTQ+ Representative Committee.

ALAN POUL

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from.

I was fortunate to be able to be out in Hollywood in the 90s and to be able to work early on seminal LGBT-presenting shows like Tales of the City series, and Six Feet Under with Alan Ball. When it comes to Tokyo Vice, I did push hard for there to be a queer storyline because in the late 90s, in Japan, there was a huge thriving gay subculture. But it wasn't on the table to come out because your sexual orientation was considered irrelevant to your obligations to society.

Career in Theater, Film & Television

I was always a film and theater kid. I just was completely starstruck and only wanted to have some kind of contact with showbiz. I didn't really understand in what creative shape that would take. It was when I was trying to work in theater. Stephen Sondheim was a close friend and advisor for the period. I was trying to work in theater, and he really changed how I think about art. And then before I went to do Mishima, I spent 3 years working with Robert Wilson, the great international stage director. Bob is a complete genius, and I adore him. Just being an apprentice to him and being one of his many producers working on his big international projects was a hugely formative and nurturing experience. And then finally Schrader [was an important mentor] because Schrader just sort of said, "Here, you're going to work in movies. Come with me."

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

For those who haven’t seen Tokyo Vice, lay the groundwork for us as to what was established in season one and how that leads into season two.

POUL

Season one of Tokyo Vice is based on a memoir by Jake Adelstein, who is obviously a real person who still lives in Tokyo and who went to Japan in the 90s and actually graduated from a Japanese university, became fluent and very eloquent in not just spoken, but also written Japanese, and was the first non-Japanese person ever to pass the highly competitive entrance exam for the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is the biggest of the big daily newspapers in Japan. So he did something truly unprecedented, and he was put on the crime beat and worked as a crime reporter for this newspaper. He was chasing stories and publishing stories in Japanese, but obviously, in order to do that, Jake had to have a certain intrepid nature. He also kind of relished the bull in the china shop aspect of his job, and I think we showed this pretty well in the show, the kind of weird intersected relationships between journalism and the police and the world of organized crime, the Yakuza. It meant that for many Japanese journalists, their hands were often tied. There were many reasons why they couldn't break stories about the Yakuza that might put the newspaper, themselves, their families, their other relationships, or sources in danger. And Jake, not being beholden to Japanese society as a whole, was able to break some of those strictures.

I think that from [creator, writer, showrunner] J. T. Rogers's point of view, he loves all of these characters. Even our biggest villain—I would say is the person Tozawa—who we love to hate, but even a character like Ishida, who is the head of a crime family and who has been responsible for untold deaths of people, we always want to get them and see what worries them, what concerns them and see to what extent we can generate empathy on the part of the viewer.

And I think that for J.T. and for us as filmmakers, it's always about putting the character in the context of what they're up against. This is the way season one was structured, but even more so in season two. We're putting each of our main characters in a situation in which they face both an existential crisis, meaning I could get killed for this. Or, on a lesser level, I could get fired for this, and then also create a moral crisis where—especially in season two—every one of our lead characters has to make a questionable moral choice, has to do something that they themselves know is wrong, but in the service of accomplishing a goal that they hope has a larger purpose to it. And so they all, everybody goes a little bit to the dark side. Everybody, even Katagiri, Ken Watanabe's character, our most morally upstanding character in season one is put into a situation in which later in the season, he has to make some morally questionable choices.

Scoring Music for Television

My most formative TV experience having been Six Feet Under, I tend to want to take a rather conservative approach to score, in that if a scene works brilliantly without music, why do you need music? And that score, especially, is usually there to provide an element that you're not getting fully from the dry–when there's no score, we call it dry. So with the dry footage, that was always our philosophy on Six Feet Under: if the scene works just as well without music, we don't need music. And that just runs a little counter to what was, and kind of still is, the prevailing philosophy on television, which is that everything needs music. Like, people won't know what to feel if you don't score it, which I think is a really very insulting underestimation of the intelligence of the audience.

And so there's always pressure to put more music in, and our feeling is, no, if we don't need it, we don't need it. Now, that changes, like when we get to Tokyo Vice because of the genre elements of the show. You know, if you have an action sequence, you need music. If you have a really tense, suspenseful moment, it probably needs music.

So we have brilliant composers, Danny Bensie and Sondra Uriens who are really there to help, sculpt and shape the drama. But the same way, even though I think Tokyo Vice has more minutes of score per episode than anything I've ever worked on when we get to the final mix. The real final trial for every episode of television is when you do the playback of the sound mix because the picture has already been locked before. You've done all of the rerecording of dialogue. You've done all the color correction. You've put in the VFX, and then you sit there on a soundstage, and you watch it played back. And that's when, for the first time, you know what you have. It's an episode of television. And with myself and JT, one of the things that we do in playback that is most important to the show is we take music out. Because when you're watching individually, you'll say, this scene needs music, this scene needs music. And when you're watching it, if you suddenly feel that you're just being bombarded by music all the time, it takes you away from your intimacy with the characters. And so, every time we'll watch a play, we'll go through, and we'll say–Okay, this scene, it works better without the music. This scene works better. It's like the music gilding the lily. So we go through, and we take cues out. And I think that always makes the episodes stronger.

The Impact of AI on the Creative Process

There will come a time when AI will have consumed and devoured all the works of all the great filmmakers. And you'll be able to say, I want you to cut this scene as if it was in an Antonioni film. Or I want you to cut this scene as if it was in a Sam Peckinpah film. And it will do the work of the edit. So the finishing touches will probably always be human, but the amount of creative work that's going to be able to be offloaded to AI is something that we don't fully comprehend yet.

The Importance of Mentorship and Personal Aesthetic

I feel like I'm always telling young people, I know you want to make your own films, and I know you think you know everything. And that's one way to do it is to take an iPhone and just make a terrible first feature and then learn as you go. But I'm such a believer in mentorship. And when you have the time when you're young, find people that you admire and put yourselves in their orbit and just absorb and it will serve you so well later in life.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Nadia Lam. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).