Hiro Murai insists he’s just “gotten really lucky” to be where he is today as an executive producer and Emmy winner on “The Bear,” a director on “Barry,” a longtime exec producer and go-to director on “Atlanta” and now an exec producer and director on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” A dozen years ago, he had just gotten hired to direct a music video for Donald Glover and his Childish Gambino alter ego when the relationship with Glover led to his career shifting into overdrive. “Donald was doing a rollout for an album and I just happened to meet him and his manager,” Murai explains. “I thought it was going to be a very temporary relationship. because music video directing tends to be that way – but we just immediately clicked.” Then when Glover was developing ‘Atlanta’ a few years later, he insisted to FX that Murai be the director. “I thought that wasn’t going to go well, because it was like, ‘Hey, my buddy’s going to direct my pilot.’ But they trusted our process and our chemistry and our voice together. And we’ve just been working on and off together for the past decade.”
Murai spoke to Gold Derby as part of our “Meet the Emmy Nominees” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Indeed, Murai would go on to direct 26 episodes of “Atlanta.” And when Glover was putting together “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” for Amazon Prime, he approached Murai to be part of the production team and direct the first two episodes as well. It made plenty of sense, not only because Glover and Murai had such a great working relationship but because Murai’s television career had further blossomed in associations with “The Bear” and “Barry” not to mention the miniseries “Station Eleven.” As for his humble claim of merely getting lucky, Murai insists, “I just happened to be around people who were like-minded and wanted to play with the TV medium. There was something especially exciting a couple of years ago where people were really playing with the half-hour format, turning shows into dramas. I just happened to be around a bunch of people who felt the same way and was just lucky to be invited.”
He calls his time on “Atlanta,” his first foray into long-form narrative, “a learning experience. We were aiming for something really specific tonally that we were developing on the short-form side. I knew enough to trust the chemistry that me and Donald had, and this surrealist, mundane sort of tone that we were both attracted to was really important for the show. That was the north star, and everything else I just learned on the job, fortunately.”
In terms of the first-year spy thriller “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” on which Glover is at once co-creator (with Francesca Sloane), co-producer, co-writer and star with Maya Erskine, Murai notes that a lot of the crew carried over from “Atlanta” and that it all felt weirdly familiar. “Too familiar,” Murai offers. “We kept calling Donald by his ‘Atlanta’ character name the first couple of weeks. We kept reminding ourself that he wasn’t ‘Earn,’ he was ‘John’.” Once everyone got that straight, it was a labor of love for Murai working on the series. “I especially loved working with Maya,” he says. “I knew she was a terrific actress from her work in ‘PEN15,’ but I was really blown away just from day one. She just clicked in immediately. It was just such a pleasure, honestly.”
Working on the pilot episode of the show, for which Murai received his Emmy directing nomination, was somewhat more of a challenge. “It’s more complicated in the beginning because you’re really mind of finding your sea legs, but also, there’s a lot of joy in the exploration and the finding, especially for a show like ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith.’ It could have been so many different things tonally, especially given that it came from the idea of a movie initially. Every day, we were kind of chipping away at the tone. And I was lucky enough to be around a bunch of people I’d worked with before, so that was enough of a shorthand that I felt comfortable.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” received 16 Emmy nominations in all for its first season. It streams over Amazon Prime Video.
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