‘One Piece’ Producers On Winning Over Manga Fans, Finding Luffy & Six-Year Plan For Hit Netflix Series
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One Piece, the live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s best-selling manga, just wrapped its second week at No. 1 in Netflix’s Top 10 with another dominating performance internationally. And, in what is becoming a right of passage for every series that hits it big with young adults these days (like Netflix’s Wednesday), One Piece sparked a TikTok craze with tributes to its demented villain Buggy.
In an interview with Deadline, One Piece executive producers, Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements, spoke about how the tide turned on TikTok, with skeptical fans of the manga and anime series embracing the live-action adaptation of the story about a young man and his pirate crew’s search for the fabled “One Piece” treasure.
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“Both Becky and I have been involved in a lot of successful shows. But in your career, you dream about one like this,” said Adelstein whose long list of series credits include Last Man Standing, Prison Break and Teen Wolf. “And if you’re lucky you get one like this that resonates so large, and there’s such awareness of and people have a love of the source material.”
For Tomorrow Studios, One Piece was a followup to another live-action Netflix series based on a beloved anime, Cowboy Bebop, which didn’t go beyond one season. Adelstein and Clements shared lessons they learned on that show that they applied to One Piece, spoke about assembling the young cast and particularly the expensive talent search for the lead role of Luffy, which went to Mexican actor Iñaki Godoy (Who Killed Sara?), and revealed how Adelstein’s involvement in Prison Break helped him land the rights to Once Piece.
The two veteran TV producers also discussed making use of pirate ships originally built for Starz’s Black Sails in South Africa, shared their favorite moments from Season 1 and how that finale credits scene sets up a potential second season.
Adelstein and Clements declined to address the status of Season 2 but One Piece is believed to have written material, a creative outline for where the story could go, in anticipation of a likely renewal. UPDATE 9/14: One Piece has been renewed for Season 2. They also spoke of their long-term plans for the show and how many seasons they think that it could go on for.
Additionally, the producers also discussed adapting other mangas for television, revealed two high-profile series in the works, one based on the book “Bad City”, about the USC ex-medical dean scandal, and an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel “The Janson Directive”. They also gave a status update on two Tomorrow Studios series that have been looking for new homes following content write-offs at their networks, Snowpiercer, which has a finished Season 4, and vampire drama Let the Right One In.
DEADLINE: One can never really predict the success of a series these days, but is this close to what you were hoping for in terms of the reaction to One Piece and its viewership numbers?
ADELSTEIN: It was not totally unexpected, because we really loved the series. We were a bit cautious, having gone through our last anime adaption, but we felt really good coming into it. The really nice thing is we were facing some headwinds from the fans who weren’t necessarily expecting something as good as they got.
DEADLINE: What is the best validation you have seen from fans?
ADELSTEIN: The people in the office have shown us a lot of TikTok videos of people saying ‘this is going to be awful, this is going to be terrible’. And then they brought in TikTok videos of the same people going, ‘I was so wrong, this is so good’. So real skeptics have turned around and really have praised the show and have been very happy with it and very surprised at how good it was.
DEADLINE: Marty, you have longtime ties to Japan, you have been traveling there regularly for years. Talk about your history with the anime genre and how it led to One Piece?
ADELSTEIN: Nic Louie, who was my assistant at the time, and I got very excited about the possibility because we had seen a lot of these animes take 10-15 years to get made as movies and our take was, we could get them done much quicker as television shows and more people would see them than movies. We hired two people in Japan who worked for us and facilitated the relationships and we would go three or four times a year and meet with them. And finally we broke through.
It was very funny, Oda was not initially going to do it but when he heard I was involved in Prison Break, he got very excited about it, let us have the rights. Especially with Asia and Japan, you can’t do anything on the phone. You have to show up in person face to face. It’s very important to that culture.
DEADLINE: Cowboy Bebop was the live-action anime adaptation that you referenced earlier. Obviously Netflix had faith in you, trusting you with another anime-based series. What are some of the lessons you learned from that experience that you applied to One Piece?
ADELSTEIN: Well, Bebop‘s interesting because I still love the show, and I think [EP] André Nemec and the Midnight Radio guys did a really good job in trying situations. [Star John Cho tore his achilles on set and the series had to shut down production for a year.] Here’s what we learned. You have to have a buy-in from the creator. The creator of Cowboy Bebop did not want anything to do with it. Not that he was disagreeable about it; he just didn’t want to be involved, it’s not what he wanted to do.
So having the buy-in of the creator, having Oda buy into this and bless it, made a big difference. But I think the main lesson was Cowboy Bebop was an adaptation. With One Piece, we learned that you have to stay very close to the characters that the creator created, that people wanted to see Luffy as Luffy and embody all the characteristics that he had. So we stayed much, much closer, in fact, as close as we could to the original to get the fans buy in, and that seemed to be the thing that made the difference.
DEADLINE: The cast of the series, which come from different corners of the world — the US, UK, Australia, Mexico, Japan — are getting praise from fans. How you assembled the Straw Hat crew, and what was the hardest part to cast?
CLEMENTS: We knew that finding Luffy was the most critical part of probably the whole show, someone who, when they smile, it lights up the screen the way it does in the manga and the anime. That was probably the part that we were most concerned about because he is the cornerstone of the entire spirit of the show. And when we saw Iñaki, it was unanimous. He has, as a human, this great spirit, this enthusiasm the way he approached the role. Once we got Iñaki, we could breathe. And he pulled it off.
Obviously acting skill is important but [the lead cast] all embodied what we wanted to do with the live-action version of these characters. Mackenyu, who is just a giant talent and hugely famous in Japan; it’s a big role to take on the character of Zoro, and he has such a magnetic presence and is such a phenomenal martial artist and fighter.
Showrunner-creator Matt Owens has known Emily Rudd for years, and she’s a big anime fan. Emily was really our first person where he said, ‘I think Emily would be a great Nami’, and we said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ Each of these actors live their lives in a very direct, present, interesting way. And they are supremely close, they spend a lot of time together in South Africa and they travel around the world and so to us that was so validating.
DEADLINE: Did Iñaki audition, because he also had done a popular Netflix Mexican series, so he must have been on their radar? How did he get the role?
CLEMENTS: No, he auditioned for us, and I have to be honest, we weren’t even aware of the Netflix series when we thought he was the guy. And then, as we investigated, we thought oh, this is going to be complicated but they were very supportive of trying to figure it out between the two series if needed.
DEADLINE: How many young actors did you see for Luffy?
CLEMENTS: Definitely over 100, from all corners of the world. We really tried to stay true to the backstory. the origin of all the characters that Oda created; we were focused on supporting that.
DEADLINE: What was Iñaki’s reaction when you told him that he got the role?
CLEMENTS: I believe he screamed, he definitely laughed. He was on Zoom with us, he thanked everyone, he said he will give it his all. And then when we said, how is your family feeling about this and do your parents have any questions about production — because I think he was just 18, he was very young when he got the role — at that moment, he pulled his mother into the frame of the Zoom and said, ‘Well, my mom’s right here, she can ask questions’. And we just knew at that moment, what a great young man to have his parents sitting right next to him after he got the good news.
DEADLINE: A world-building show like One Piece is a major undertaking. What were the biggest production challenges in Season 1?
CLEMENTS: The challenges were obviously scope, how do we create a pirate world with characters, with special effects and also keep it grounded. We spent a lot of time with Marc Jobst, the director, with our production designer, our producer Chris Symes, really focusing on how do we make it feel real and grounded in the builds, the textures, the VFX, the costumes.
The crew in South Africa is incredible. We knew we were going to shoot there because Chris Symes, our executive producer, produced Black Sails, and he built many pirate ships for that series. There were a couple of them in place already that we knew we would have an advantage and be able to refurbish.
One of the challenges you have in South Africa is weather, you can shoot best at a certain time of year, so that always comes into play, and even the weather cooperated, which isn’t always the case. So we had many challenges, but we had the most professional and awe inspiring team there that just helped us pull it off.
DEADLINE: For both of you, what is your favorite scene from Season 1?
CLEMENTS: I felt that the cast did an amazing job with the vulnerable and quiet moments that really cemented your connection to them, which doesn’t always exist in the manga and the anime but the way they handled the emotional truth of their journey, I found to be so important for the live-action. So that would be when Luffy’s coming undone about Zero being injured or Nami being absolutely devastated after Arlong double crossed her and the goodbye of Sanji to Zeff as he departs with the Straw Hats; of the 50 times I saw that scene, I don’t think I ever watched it without a tear in my eye.
ADELSTEIN: I think mine is probably when Zoro makes the turn and says, ‘I will be loyal to you and part of your crew’ because he was a pirate hunter to begin with. The turn in his character at that moment really got to me.
DEADLINE: Netflix is known for meticulously analyzing viewership data and rarely gives out quick renewals but I assume you have hopes for a second season?
ADELSTEIN. We have hopes for 12 seasons, there’s so much material.
CLEMENTS: We’re over 1,080 chapters at this point in the manga.. We have plans with Matt Owens for how we would break multiple seasons, and I think even if we did six seasons, we would probably only use up half of the chapters of the manga. It really could go on and on and on.
DEADLINE: But do you have at least six seasons in you?
CLEMENTS: Oh yeah, easy. (laughs.)
DEADLINE: You mentioned plans you have with Matt Owens. What can you say about them and the path for the next few seasons?
CLEMENTS: Everything we do is in concert with Netflix, [manga publisher] Shueisha and Oda-san, they are a part of that conversation. We’ve definitely had more thorough conversations about what we would do with Season 2 should we have the opportunity, and then less extensive conversations about where we would go for season three to six. The one thing I would say, we’re all unified in the parts of the manga that you just absolutely cannot eliminate, and that’s our guiding principle, the stories that we know and the characters that we know are important to the fans. So that really is the start in breaking future seasons. It will require a lot of conversations, but we feel lucky to have the roadmap.
DEADLINE: What does revealing the shadowy figure teaser at the Season 2 finale, likely Marine Captain Smoker, mean for Season 2? What part of the manga might you be tackling next and what new villains can we expect? BTW, why doesn’t anybody die on the show? I feel so far there have no major deaths, villains just keep coming back.
CLEMENTS: I actually think we do have death but we just don’t linger on it. One of the parts of One Piece that is so original are the villains. it really is the area where, between the Gum Gum fruit and the villains, they are so much fun, we’d like them to come back when they can.
But the end of the season leads to the next natural chapter for the manga, that’s what that [credits scene] indicates. That was the idea, we wanted to give fans a little stepping stone, something they recognize that indicated where we might be heading. That was very intentional, and something that we added after filming because we wanted to indicate that we have a plan creatively, that we thought would please the fans.
DEADLINE So that final scene was something you filmed later?
CLEMENTS: Yeah, that was in our pickup in March.
DEADLINE. A One Piece season takes about 6-7 months of production and another 20-24 weeks of post-production. The strikes are still ongoing, you mentioned the weather in South Africa. What is the time window that you would need to fit into and start filming because if you miss it, you would have to wait another year?
CLEMENTS: I don’t know what Netflix is thinking. It would benefit us to move more quickly. Once you get into the summer months there it can get pretty windy and wet — our summer months, their winter months. It didn’t stop us last year, we did some reshooting and we shot later than we anticipated, and it worked out just fine. We try to find ways to minimize exteriors to create a safe environment for shooting and we do stuff inside when we need to.
DEADLINE: You spoke of staying very close to the original with the characters but you did update the show’s theme music from the anime.
CLEMENTS: Yes, we did. We brought our composers on really early, they did The Witcher for Netflix. We always talk about the show that there has to be one element — we call it a One Piece element — that is fully original, just like the manga and the anime where you just think, where’s that coming from. They were really terrific at finding musically the discordant moments or the whimsy.
DEADLINE: Was there that moment for each of you — maybe during production — when you felt that this would work, this may be a hit?
CLEMENTS: I think the first week of shooting, we had Iñaki Godoy on wires, flopping around across the deck of Alvida’s ship. When you have a crew of a 100 laughing and clapping., seasoned people who have seen just about everything, you know that you’re doing something unique. I think just feeling that energy from hundreds of people being on a pirate ship in the middle of Cape Town, South Africa felt special.
ADELSTEIN: For me, after all this time, I’m not a huge fan of watching 35 takes of the same scene over and over again. But when I saw that cast, when they came together, I watched every frame of every daily because they were just so bonded and so special together. Each one of them had their own qualities that they brought to the role, It was really just a joyful thing to watch.
DEADLINE: Of your other series, Physical is airing its third and final season on Apple TV+. Can you share any updates on new-home search for Snowpiercer and Let the Right One In and on Season 3 renewal for Ten Year Old Tom at Max?
ADELSTEIN: Ten Year Old Tom is doing really well this year, I think the numbers are up, what 10 or 20%. Physical has popped 20% and us doing really well on Apple. Snowpiercer we have Season 4 in the can, which hasn’t been seen yet. We’re talking to a number of buyers about buying the first three seasons and also Season 4 which is probably our best season; we’re in the middle of that. Let the Right One In got caught up in the whole turnover from Showtime; we’re trying to place it elsewhere.
CLEMENTS: We are very proud of that show.
ADELSTEIN: I love that show.
DEADLINE: Any other anime or manga properties you are looking to adapt for TV?
ADELSTEIN: Oh God, we’ve got a library full of manga that we bought in Japan. We have writers attached, who are not currently working because of the strike. We believe in as much as possible writing in the house and then going out at least half the season already written. We have a book that we’re getting a lot of attention on, called “Bad City”. The story of the USC scandal with the guy who led the medical school, Carmen Puliafito.
CLEMENTS: It’s a very compelling read.
ADELSTEIN: It’s very compelling, and we’re getting a lot of attention on that. The scripts are written by Ed Solomon, Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin.
We’ve been buying a lot of IP, that’s very important to us. We have a deal with Midnight Radio, the producing team of Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg. We’re very excited to be doing a Robert Ludlum adaptation, The Janson Directive. They’re going to be writing it after the strike. Craig Gillespie also has a deal and is doing something for us.
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