Tokyo Vice season 2 is fast approaching its finale which will air on Thursday, April 4. While fans are enjoying the HBO Max show’s fresh new episodes, its makers have shared the challenges they encountered while filming the series’ second installment.
The show’s producer Alan Poul recently opened up about the difficulty they faced in securing a filming permit for multiple locations in Japan. The filmmaker also worked on the set of Ridley Scott’s 1989 yakuza thriller Black Rain which was famously kicked out of Japan before the filming was complete.
Ridley Scott’s 1989 yakuza film became a cautionary tale in Hollywood
1989’s Black Rain starred big names like Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, and more. The film chronicled the story of two New York City policemen scrabbling about Japan’s underworld looking for a yakuza fugitive who had escaped from custody.
Tokyo Vice season 2 producer Alan Poul also served as an associate producer on Ridley Scott’s 1989 production. Despite Black Rain‘s commercial success, the film went on to become a cautionary tale among Hollywood filmmakers. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the filming crew faced a plethora of difficulties and local blowback. It was finally kicked out of Japan before the filming was complete. Black Rain‘s filming challenges in Japan were talked about for decades. It often discouraged studios from considering filming in the country.
In a 1989 interview with the New York Times, Poul recounted the difficulties of filming in Japan. He shared the impossible struggle of wooing Japanese shop owners to let them showcase their stores in the film. The business owners “thought that having their store or their house used as a place frequented by yakuza would reflect badly on them,” Poul notes. He also recalled how the Japanese police, at the time, were oblivious to the notion of crowd control while filming.
Tokyo Vice writer was “naive” about the filming difficulties that lay ahead
In many ways, Tokyo Vice may have done Hollywood a huge favor by encouraging more productions to film in real locations. Nonetheless, the show creator J.T. Rogers, was oblivious to the filming difficulties the crew was about to encounter in Japan.
Deeming himself “usefully naive” about the whole situation the American playwright said,
“I wrote the whole show without realizing how difficult any of this would be to shoot in Tokyo. And this being Japan and such a polite society, when I got here, nobody came up to me from the position of, ‘Are you f***ing crazy? How do you think you can make this here?”
He soon realized it was going to be “unbelievably difficult.” However, the filmmaker who also wrote 2021’s Oslo is happy he didn’t try to cut corners during the writing process. Thus, lending the show its authentic feel.
Tokyo Vice season 2 is available to stream on Max and Prime Video.
