American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 78

unwilling, to accept each other's
their respective jobs.
language barrier and
all, it all came together to become a
great experience. I considered myself
very fortunate to be doing the work I
loved, and as an additional perk, I
was in Japan,
learning about that
part of the world, its culture and
people. Meeting and becoming
ways of doing
But in the end,

friends with James Clavell, whose
books I loved for years
met, was one

before

we

of the high points. I

couldn't believe my

good fortune
might have a
chance to film Shogun. Rereading the
book and reading the script for the
movie filled me with anticipation -
and a certain anxiety about how
filming some aspects of the story
would be accomplished.
One Friday night, our sched¬
ule called for the photography of one
of the most complicated scenes of

when I first heard I

the entire 12-hour miniseries. Those
of you

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ocurftesy

Phot s

who have seen the show
might recall the scene where
Toronaga and his entire entourage
are
trapped in Osaka Harbor.
Toronaga successfully barters for
some muskets from the captain of
the Black Ship, and, using Pilot
Major Blackthorne's (Richard
Chamberlain) expertise and leader¬
ship, has his samurai trained in the
use of those firearms, which they use
to break through the barricade of
fishing boats that cut off Toronaga's
escape to the sea. The scene was set
up something like this:
We are in Osaka Bay. Besides
Toronaga's seagoing galley, the scene
includes a big, old Spanish galleon
and a very large number of small
fishing boats linked together with an
immense bamboo rope, forming the
barricade. As Toronaga's galley
approaches this barricade, 30 or so of
his samurai, equipped with the
muskets, open up with a fusillade of
gunfire from the bow of the galley,
blasting an escape path through the
barricade of boats. At the crucial
moment,

the command to fire is

given by Blackthorne, who is stand¬
ing in the center of the group of
samurai. Chamberlain

"Fire, now!" on
tor.

was to shout,
from the direc¬

a cue

The dramatic effect of

not

seen

till this

moment

gunfire,
in the

show, is followed by the fishermen

(played by Japanese stuntmen)
falling, somersaulting and diving off
the fishing boats, which capsize and
are chopped to pieces
by the intense
and vicious gunfire. Having elimi¬
nated the obstacle of his escape, the
once-again-victorious Toronaga sails
out of the harbor, leaving chaos and
havoc behind, and is swallowed up

by the darkness of night. This is more
or less how the scene was scripted
and how it was supposed to play out.
But before I go into what actu¬
ally did happen, let me talk a bit
about what goes into the preparation
of such an exciting scene. The scene
read relatively simply in the script,
which gave a brief description of the
location, time of night, performers
and necessary elements such as the
ships, smaller boats and so on. We all
look forward to filming such a scene,
at times in anticipation of exciting
action, and at times with dread of
those factors that, for
have been known

to

us

filmmakers,

spell disaster.

of routine, after a
suitable location for the filming is
As

a

matter

found, the preparations start and a
date is scheduled for the actual

photography. Crew, cast, equipment,
and large props - in this case, a
16th-century Spanish galleon and a
full-scale, seagoing Japanese galley-
are
brought to the site. To illustrate
the enormity of such an undertak¬
ing, it took 70-plus days to sail our
"Spanish" ship, a replica of Sir
Francis Drake's ship The Golden
Hind, from San Francisco to the loca¬
tion in

Japan, and almost a year to
build the period Japanese vessel. The
logistics of this scene were immense,
but

as

it turned out, that was the easy

part.
All of the small

also had

to

fishing boats

be created;

some were

built from scratch, while many

exist¬
ing, similar boats were altered to
look the way the period required.
Once these boats were in place, they
had to be rigged with what we in the
film business call "bullet hits"

or

"squibs." Squibs are small, electri¬
cally fired explosive charges that
splinter the wood and form holes
where bullets have supposedly hit.
Actors who were also to be hit by
"gunfire" had to be similarly
prepared. In most cases, these "hits,"
when placed on stuntmen, also
contain bits of clothing and fake
blood. The advance preparation for
just this aspect of this scene - creat¬
ing the bullet hits on the boats and
the

actors

of

special-effects people and took

-

called for

a

small army

several weeks. Additional hours of

preparation were needed in the days
on the night of the shoot
to apply these effects.

Opposite:
Director of

photography
Andy Laszlo,
ASC outlines
the action for
actor Toshiro

Mifune

as a

crewmember

readies the set
of Shogun.
This page:
Pilot Major
Blackthorne

(Richard
Chamberlain)
assumes a

defensive
stance. It was
an

ill-timed

query

from

Chamberlain that

prematurely
launched

a

thousand bullets

during filming of
a complicated
night scene in
Osaka Bay.

before and

Now let

the difficulties,

me

mention

some

of

specific, others
general in nature. In the case of any
motion-picture project, the script is
scrutinized long before the actual
shoot by an army of experts whose
suggestions and observations bring
about changes affecting the scenes

-

some

and, in fact, the entire picture.
American

Cinematographer 65
American Cinematographer - September 2004

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