No./15 How to build a criminal underworld
The creator of TOKYO VICE on crafting a deadly metropolis
FEW SHOWRUNNERS CAN say that their series began with a threat from the yakuza. At first, Tokyo Vice creator J.T. Rogers wrote off the elusive text messages as a case of mistaken identity, until childhood friend Jake Adelstein, a journalist working in Japan, gave him a call. “He sombrely asked, ‘Have you been getting these threats in Japanese? Because I found out a secret about one of the worst gangsters in Tokyo and now he’s threatening the people I care about.’” Rogers first asked if his friend was okay, and then told him to start from the beginning. Speaking with Empire, he breaks down how he turned that conversation into a ten-part series, with an opening episode helmed by Michael Mann.
SHOW THE REAL JAPAN
Adelstein gave Rogers permission to tell his story on one condition: that he did it authentically. With that in mind, the showrunner set out to make a Japanese show, as opposed to a show set in Japan through the eyes of an American. “Myself and a few actors and producers were gaijin [foreigners in Japan], but everybody else was Japanese,” he says. Through his native team, Rogers vetted every detail of the ’90s-set story, from the local nightlife to the specific order of information in a detective’s bulletin announcement. “You want that one person in Okinawa to go, ‘That detective is a badass, they got that right,’” he says.
BRING IN A MASTER
Rogers is the first to admit that he’s not a genre writer, so instead laid out the tropes of crime noir — the cops, the hostesses, the yakuza — and left the rest to his directors, including Mann. “He’s got such a great eye that aligns with his noir sensibility,” says Rogers of the filmmaker, who previously brought us vice in Miami. This came in especially handy when filming the show’s nocturnal scenes. “Tokyo at night is a doubly extraordinary city,” he says. “We were looking at all these old yakuza and Japanese cop films to help draw on the locations, colours and textures that we wanted to show.”
PUT YOUR ACTORS THROUGH THE MILL
The show co-stars Ken Watanabe and Ansel Elgort; the latter had to learn fluent Japanese in order to play Adelstein. “Ansel got so good off the back of studying for seven months during lockdown that he asked if he could switch from speaking English to Japanese in some scenes,” Rogers recalls. Mann also mined his media contacts in America and put Elgort through “journalism bootcamp”. Additionally, former yakuza members came on set to train certain Japanese actors, while former hostesses would teach their etiquette to the female cast over dinner at Rogers’ place. “Some of it ended up on the periphery. But it also gives your actors the courage and the spontaneity to do stuff you wouldn’t expect, and that’s always thrilling.”
TOKYO VICE IS ON STARZPLAY FROM 15 MAY