Director Frederick E.O. Toye has been nominated once before for an Emmy as a producer on HBO’s “Westworld.” This year, he earned his first directing nomination for his work on FX’s “Shōgun.” Toye tells Gold Derby that this nomination feels “a hundred percent different” from his first. “Honestly, the excitement level that I have about [this nomination] is far greater than I thought it would be,” he says. “The best part of all has been that all of these wonderful friends and associates and comrades over the years who I’ve worked with reached out to me. So it felt like a big birthday party when the announcement came.” Watch more of our exclusive chat with Toye above.
Toye directed four episodes of “Shōgun,” and says that he relished the opportunity to tackle a project of such massive scope. “To take whatever part of me that has a David Lean in it or Akira Kurosawa and bring it forward, that was a really exciting challenge for me,” he explains, pointing to the intimate and complex story created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo. “In the wonderful scripts that Justin and Rachel and the team put together, embedded within it was a massive story that I could use my skill set to be able to put onto a big palette.”
When Toye first read the script of his nominated episode, “Crimson Sky,” he knew that he had to keep the journey of Mariko (Emmy nominee Anna Sawai) front and center. “The intimacy of Mariko’s journey needed to be the guiding point of the story,” he argues. “As you watch it play out in this story, you realize that it’s all about this character and this journey. She had to play something incredible nuanced and complex, which is this plan that really is wholly inside her head and her head alone. And yet she can’t emote it.”
In working with Sawai, Toye says that he felt his job was to provide a foundation for her character’s arc. “I think that my job as a director is to provide the tools by which an actor can do their best work,” he says. “With someone who’s that prepared, who understood completely, on a fundamental level, what the directive was in the scene, it was my job to provide her the groundwork in order for her to develop the scene.”
Even with his background in editing and his long directing history, Toye repeatedly gives credit to his actors for making the episodes work. “It’s all rooted in the performance, not the filmmaking,” he argues. “I mean, we made it look as good as we can, but it was the performance.”
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