From Music Videos to ‘Widow’s Bay’: How Hiro Murai Became TV’s Most In-Demand Director
“Widow’s Bay” creator Katie Dippold did not write any of the show’s characters with actors in mind. But she knew she wanted Hiro Murai to direct it.
“He was my dream director. I was watching ‘Atlanta’ while I was rewriting the show,” Dippold told TheWrap, citing the Emmy-winning FX comedy that Murai directed nearly 30 episodes of as a major influence on her new Apple TV horror comedy. “I think Hiro is so brilliant at executing a very grounded world where you buy everything that’s happening, but then can really surprise you with something completely absurd. I just knew he would be perfect for our show.”
Her high regard for Murai’s work is a reflection of the position he now occupies, particularly in the serialized television space. Having directed seminal, defining episodes of not just “Atlanta,” but other acclaimed, genre-bending series over the years, like “Station Eleven,” “Barry,” “Mrs. & Mrs. Smith” and “Legion,” Murai has become, perhaps, television’s most esteemed and in-demand director.
How did that happen? Especially for a filmmaker who, when asked about the arc of his career, told TheWrap he never really had any kind of “master plan.”
Murai, the son of Japanese composer Kunihiko Murai, was born in Tokyo. He moved to Los Angeles when he was nine years old (“Where the movie business is just around,” he noted) and graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It was in high school, while going to movies with his friends at Los Angeles’ Westwood Village Theatre, that he said he fell in love with filmmaking.
“I’m sure this is true for a lot of kids in the ’90s, but every weekend, no matter what, we would just go see a movie,” Murai explained. “Some of them were really terrible, but it was like an appointment on Fridays. Just show up and stand in line. I think the communal aspect of that really stuck with me.”
After he graduated, Murai got jobs working on music videos, first as a cinematographer and storyboard artist and later as a director. It was a move, Murai said, partly inspired by his father’s work as a composer. “Music was always around. But I never had any real talent for it,” he reflected, noting that 10 years’ worth of piano lessons just “never stuck.” That did not lessen his love for the art form or his respect for the artists who create within it.
“I like the way they work. Many of my musician friends have this very organic, laid back approach to making things,” Murai said. “They just get together and pass the thing around. See if something comes. And I think I thought at the time, ‘I want to get close to that in some way.'”
Murai began to accrue his own directorial credits making music videos around the start of the 2010s. Reflecting on what he learned from those experiences, Murai told TheWrap, “I do think music videos, specifically, tell you how to build a story in an abstract way. A music video is an escalation of emotion and tension and release, and I think that translates surprisingly well to narrative storytelling.”
By the time Murai collaborated for the first time with “Atlanta” creator and star Donald Glover, who goes on stage by Childish Gambino, in 2013, he had already developed strong creative partnerships with artists like Earl Sweatshirt. But it was his early collaborations with Glover that changed the trajectory of his career, resulting in him directing the pilot and multiple episodes of “Atlanta,” as well as the incisive video for Glover’s scathing 2018 political anthem “This Is America.” (Murai won a Grammy for his work directing the latter.)
“I certainly wouldn’t be doing most of what I’m doing right now without Donald, just from a career perspective,” Murai admitted. “We’re very different people. He’s a performer, and I’m camera shy [laughs]. I don’t think you would group us together, but there’s something special about spending so much time with someone who has similar taste, the same creative ambitions and yet is capable of doing things that you can’t. You end up learning a lot about yourself as an artist.”
Murai followed up his early work on “Atlanta” with episodes of “Barry,” “Station Eleven,” “Legion,” “Snowfall” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” The same things that appealed to him about those shows drew him to “Widow’s Bay.” When I ask him what else he looks for in the pitches he receives, the filmmaker is quick to highlight bold ideas.
“I want to see something I haven’t seen before,” he said. “I like the feeling of starting something and going, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work. I don’t know if this is actually a good idea.’ Every good artistic experience I’ve had has started there, with that feeling of, ‘Is this going to work? Can we get away with this?'”
He felt that when he read Dippold’s script for the first episode of “Widow’s Bay.” An ambitious, genre-bending horror comedy series, the Apple TV original follows Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), the mayor of a lonely island town located off the coast of New England who longs to turn it into the next Martha’s Vineyard. His attempts to do so are thwarted by the superstitions of local residents and by the ghostly specters that suggest the island may, in fact, be haunted.
Murai found himself charmed by the show’s ties to an older kind of workplace comedy (“You just don’t see TV shows about a mayor anymore.”), as well as the parts of it that felt modern and sharp and “jagged,” even on paper.
“It has this weird combination of cozy and unsettled,” Murai observed. “There’s something about those two things that felt really unique and strangely compatible, and when I talked to Katie, she explained the show as a place that she always dreamt about. It’s tied to her childhood experience of watching these horror movies and going to these haunted houses in New Jersey in the 1980s. It was tied to a lot of nostalgia, but it was also about her own anxieties.”
“When we talked, I just thought, ‘Oh, there’s a lot here. I don’t know what the show is going to be, but it feels like there’s a lot of material and things to excavate,'” he explained.
Murai ultimately helmed five of the 10 episodes of “Widow’s Bay” Season 1, making it the season of TV he has had the most control over since “Atlanta” ended in 2022. When I pointed that out to him, he admitted with a laugh, “This is the most tired I’ve been since ‘Atlanta.’ So that makes sense.”
Fortunately, the effort was worth it.
The Apple TV series is a cinematic marvel, one that feels deliberately reminiscent of horror classics and yet visually, aesthetically singular. The series is, like the episodes of “Atlanta” and “Station Eleven” that Murai directed, an achievement in grounded emotional reality and heightened, surreal logic. Watching its first three episodes, all of which Murai directed, leaves little room for wondering why directors like Ti West (“Pearl”) and Andrew DeYoung (“Friendship”) seemed like logical choices to direct the season’s middle episodes.
“I’ve come to distinguish the difference between my directorial voice and what I think is helpful for a TV show,” Murai told TheWrap. “I’m going to tell a story the way I’m going to tell a story because it’s not a choice. But I’m also stocking the kitchen so future people can come in and make something cool, too. The pilot is rarely the best episode of a show. Making it is kind of a thankless job. But what you’re doing is looking for the potential of something, a certain actor, setting, dynamic, and going, ‘There’s something here that future directors can play with.'”
“I’m a director first, and I love crafting scenes and building an experience out of an episode,” he continued. “But those two things are not at odds with each other, and they feel more and more like two different muscles that I am constantly oscillating between when I’m doing something like this.”
Despite its obvious debt to films like “The Shining,” “Jaws” and “The Fog,” “Widow’s Bay” never feels purely like homage. It is its own thing, one where the horror and the comedy are treated with equal respect. For Dippold, she wanted Murai to direct the series, which she has been developing since 2008, because she knew he would understand that.
“It’s a real tonal, tight-rope walk, and working with him was really great, because I knew he would never make anything corny or campy,” the showrunner explained. “That’s just not his taste.” For Murai, he knew the key to making the series function was making its world and its characters’ lives feel as real as possible.
“When we started, we came at it thinking, ‘We have to make the comedy and the horror work. It can’t be camp. It can’t be a spoof, because we want the horror to be actually scary.’ The only way to really get to that is by treating the world of the show really seriously,” Murai told TheWrap. “We were always thinking, ‘How do we make this feel real? How do we straddle the line between it being this nostalgic vibe and something that also feels uncomfortably real?'”
“Katie and I were always talking about how we didn’t want this to be a send-up where we’re dutifully recreating certain shots from horror movies we love,” Murai said. “There needed to be a baseline cadence that feels consistent, and, hopefully, what that does is make certain things extra jarring. Because we might have one scene where it is just office banter and then another where there’s an evil hag chasing Tom down the street. But it’s still the same visual language.”
“It wasn’t a foolproof recipe,” he said. “Sometimes, it felt like we weren’t servicing the joy of the horror enough. But little by little, we nudged it to the right place.”
Murai directed the opening and closing chapters of “Widow’s Bay” Season 1. A lot changes in the show between those installments. There are unexpected detours into different genres and standalone stories, a trick that Dippold said she fell in love with in “Atlanta.” As she broke the first season down with her fellow writers, she felt herself taking bigger swings, partly because she wanted to keep giving Murai reasons to direct more.
“Honestly, I think the show got more ambitious in its scope throughout the season because I wanted Hiro to direct as much as possible,” Dippold confessed. “I feel like I purposefully made it more ambitious for him.”
It worked.
“What I was particularly excited about with the show is that it starts in one gear, and then it keeps escalating and morphing into this other thing,” Murai said. The show’s ambition meant he, as the director of the series’ opening chapters, had to build a sandbox big enough to fit it all.
“Whatever we made needed to house all of those gears. It needed to work as a slice-of-life comedy. It needed to work as a sitcom, but there are also episodes in the season that are kind of straightforward movies, whether it’s straight drama or straight horror,” Murai said. “We tried to build a language that could house all of those things.”
Now, as “Widow’s Bay” moves into the middle of its season on Apple TV, Murai says he is just enjoying being back in Los Angeles for a bit after having spent months in the New England area bringing ghosts, ghouls and sailors’ superstitions to life. He does not know what he will do next, cryptically teasing only that, “There are a few things in the oven.”
Regardless of where he directs his attention next, Murai has ended up in a rare place in Hollywood, one where showrunners like Dippold want to pitch their projects to him, rather than the other way around. That is not too bad for a filmmaker who left college with no master plan.
“Creatively, I feel like I’ve always been chasing the same, consistent thing, even if it’s hard to define, both in tone and point of view,” Murai reflected. “I didn’t really have TV ambitions before I started doing ‘Atlanta.’ But something I learned early on, especially in the music video world, is that part of the work is just being present with the thing in front of you, the collaboration in front of you.”
“I’ve tried to just get something out of the process and the person in front of me at each step along the way,” Murai said. “That usually nets an interesting outcome.”
New episodes of “Widow’s Bay” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
The post From Music Videos to ‘Widow’s Bay’: How Hiro Murai Became TV’s Most In-Demand Director appeared first on TheWrap.