Maxance Vincent
While the anticipation for Shōgun was high, the incredible success it has received, not only critically and commercially but also with a historic 25 nominations at the Primetime and Creative Arts Emmys, felt completely unexpected. We previously spoke to Takehiro Hira, who discussed how he never expected the show to reach so many people and to be recognized at this scale by the Academy.
This is also the case with Emmy-nominated editors Maria Gonzales and Aika Miyake, whose work on the show’s finale, “A Dream of a Dream,” was nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing for a Drama Series.
Reflecting upon the show’s success, Miyake tells Awards Radar on Zoom that she thought the series was “such an amazing project from the beginning. Maybe some crew thought it wouldn’t be received well, but I loved it. I watched so much TV and knew from the beginning that we were offering something people had never seen before. That was very exciting for me. However, I didn’t know if the American audience would want to see it, so I’m happy that people received it well.”
On the other hand, Maria Gonzales remembers “the original series or at least the excitement around it. It was a big thing in my house, and the book was also big. It seemed like there was a fan base, but maybe generationally, it felt like that was from some time ago. I personally wasn’t sure how it was going to get received. The climate in the streaming world has changed regarding how open people are to subtitles. So I knew there was potential because so many other subtitled shows were so successful. But our show is a little dense with all the political intrigue, so I wasn’t sure. I loved working on the show, but you never know if it’s the right climate for something like this or how receptive audiences will be. You certainly hope people will tune in, but I think it exceeded our expectations.”
In our 30-minute-long conversation, we discussed some of the biggest challenges in editing the finale, the process of cutting the final exchange between Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), representing the emotional progression of a character through the edit and focusing on some of the more introspective sequences of the series.
You can check out my full interview with Maria and Aika below and stream all episodes of Shōgun on Disney+:
Comments
Loading…