Hiro Murai (‘Atlanta’ director): The surreal comedy series ‘was an experimentation every step of the way’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“The first narrative anything I ever directed was the pilot for ‘Atlanta.’ And so the whole cast and crew that came together for it, a lot of us, it was our first TV experience,” remembers “Atlanta” director and producer Hiro Murai. “Finishing the show this season really felt like the senior year of high school where we just kind of watched each other grow up and we’re kind of putting a bow on this four-season experience that we got to go through together.” We talked with Murai as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above. Click the CC button on the video for closed captioning subtitles.
“Atlanta” ostensibly told the story of music manager Earn (Donald Glover), his girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz), his client Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and their friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) as they navigate the ups and downs of life in the title city. But the series was known for its trippy, surrealistic tangents. “We’ve experimented with so many different things and different genres,” Murai explains, “so I wasn’t really sure what the best way to park the entire series was.”
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The show ended up concluding with an episode that, appropriately enough, played with our perceptions of reality. In “It Was All a Dream,” Darius struggles to discern what’s real and what’s not as he floats in a sensory deprivation tank. “It’s kinda like any other episode of ‘Atlanta’ in a very ephemeral way,” Murai tells us. “And there’s something very purely us about that script that felt right. We weren’t trying to end on a big emotional climax or give a big buttoned-up closure for all the characters … In the finale, we just kind of contextualize the entire tone and spirit of the show as Darius’s perspective.”
In the end, Murai feels like “the most beautiful thing” about the show was how the creative team were learning how to make a TV show as it went along. “It really was an experimentation every step of the way” with “an incredible group of talent.” Ultimately, “Atlanta” was “a beautiful sandbox that we built that we could just do anything with.”
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