Top 45 Hiro Murai Quotes

I’ve loved music all my life.

I got into film school thinking I was going to make features, like every other film geek.

Once you go outside of Atlanta, there are still a lot of Klan rallies and whatnot. There are a lot of conflicting elements that are trying to solve itself in that city.

I used to be terrified of heights as a kid.

‘Twin Peaks’ was my gateway for David Lynch.

When we were making ‘Teddy Perkins,’ we were playing with a lot of horror tropes and things you might’ve seen in movies before, but we get the ability to subvert expectations or get a comedic element out of a horror moment.

It’s very easy to fall into a rut where you’re just making things that you don’t believe in for other people.

I’m one of those people who keep a dream journal.

I thought there was a way of marrying what I wanted to do with filmmaking with pop videos, which I found out through a couple projects just wasn’t possible. That’s not saying anything about the artist. If you’re making an Usher video, you’re making an Usher video, not a film with an Usher song in it.

I’m an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

I think to truly not know what to expect out of the story – to create a world where nothing is guaranteed – is sort of the backbone of ‘Atlanta.’

A TV show has to be a certain length and, you know, you have expectations from the viewers. You know, you want to see the characters again, or you want to see certain dynamics between the characters or certain kinds of storylines. And you kind of figure out how to best fit what you want to say into that format.

Directing action scenes is really just pure visual storytelling that just makes sense to me pretty intuitively.

In a lot of comedy shows, there’s a safety net where you don’t assume anything of real consequence will happen.

It’s something that I’ve always been attracted to, that idea of letting everything happen in a single frame.

I don’t like fast cuts. I’d rather shoot something that dances to the music.

We always talk about how, obviously, there is still very in-your-face aggressive racism. But there’s a lot of passive racism that, in the moment, you don’t even realize is racist. You chalk it up as a strange interaction you had, and then you look at the context of it later on and realize the root of it was racism.

Even if an episode is self-contained, the preceding episodes always affect how the audience takes it in.

Part of the fun is finding out how elastic that box is and, you know, test the limits of what TV shows can do or what a music video can do.

Whenever you’re making something, you’re hoping that it connects with somebody in some big way, but I’d have to be crazy to expect that.

I just want to do things on my own terms as much as possible.

I never thought of myself as a TV director.

I don’t know why, but even my nighttime dreams are very, very rooted in reality. They just start to become surreal, little by little. That exact moment when you’re about to realize that this might be a dream is my favorite thing.

I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was ‘outsider art.’

TV is generally an unfriendly environment for directors because you’re expected to come in and tell a story in the voice of the show that already exists and just fill in the blanks and then submit it back.

I did a short film with Donald Glover for one of his Childish Gambino projects, and Flying Lotus was an actor in it.

I’ll listen to a song so much that ideas start to form out of daydreaming. It’s as if I’m reverse-scoring the track and building visuals around a specific beat or riff that’s grabbed me.

In Japan, animation is a big part of your media diet. I moved out to Los Angeles at 9, and when I got homesick, I would watch anime.

I just got a Filmstruck account so I can watch all of those Criterion movies streaming. I’ve been nerding out about that.

Music videos were an outlet. They were the jobs most easily available to me, but creatively, they’re also so free form; there are no rules whatsoever.

I’ve never been robbed in person, but I’ve gotten my car broken into a couple of times.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that once we make a thing and release it, my turn to talk is done. Ideally, you’re saying everything you want to say in the product you’re making, and you don’t have to add commentary to it afterwards.

‘Guava Island’ is the end result of four incredible weeks spent in Cuba with some of the most inspiring creative talents I’ve ever met.

I like stories where it feels like you’re only seeing a small window of a bigger world.

Most of the time, I can’t listen to the song after the video’s done. Sometimes I’ll hear a song that I’ve worked on at a restaurant or on the radio, and I’ll have this visceral physical reaction.

Whether it’s a TV show or a music video, the seed of the idea is what’s driving my decisions, not the format or the outcome.

I like absurdist aesthetics. There’s something about dream logic that’s really fascinating, how it interweaves with narrative.

If I were FX, I wouldn’t have hired me.

It might sound naive, but for me, you know, for me, the important part is kind of making process. So I’m not super result oriented, and I just, like, kind of getting lost in the process of making something.

I’m a first-generation Japanese immigrant.

Pilots are tricky because there are so many things you have to accomplish.

Two things – one is obvious: always keep making. The second thing, with regard to music videos specifically – the music video industry can be a place that takes advantage of young freelancers and filmmakers. Make sure you’re making stuff that you’re proud of and you can get behind.

In the case of, like, Childish Gambino, he is someone who is a writer by trade, so he is very meticulous about how he writes his ideas. I don’t do this with a lot of artist, but he would give me a treatment that he wants to do, and I’ll go off that; then I’ll give him feedback and pitch him my ideas.

Regularly in music videos, I’ll write the pitch and convince the artists that this is a good idea, and then I’m having to make concessions to meet in the middle.

‘Atlanta’ is Wild West-y – every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There’s no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down, it could engulf you.