The Extraordinary Vision of Hiro Murai

From Atlanta to "This Is America," it's been a breakout year for Donald Glover's chief collaborator. And the most thrilling part of all? Hiro Murai is just getting started.
Hiro Murai sits on a stool.
Shirt, $596, pants, $475, and bow tie, $195, by Giorgio Armani / Suspenders, $88, by Trafalgar at Barneys New York / Watch, $17,800, by Rolex

When Donald Glover set out to make "This Is America," he knew it would be easy to fail. "There was a lot of room for it to be bad," Glover told me when I got him on the phone recently. "Like: really, really bad. Like preachy bad. Over-reaching bad. Pretentious, racist-in-a-different-way bad."

When the four-minute music video/mini-polemic that featured his alter ego, Childish Gambino, hit the Internet back in May, it wasn't any of those things. Instead, its allusions to the Charleston church massacre, to Jim Crow–era minstrel shows, and to police brutality seemed a perfect crystallization of our national mood—a grim snapshot of where we are now. But Glover still believes his performance, which has been viewed 435 million times on YouTube, would have fallen short if not for the person I'd called to ask him about: his longtime collaborator, the Tokyo-born, Los Angeles–raised director Hiro Murai.

"You fall into a bad place when you try to preach and be a translator to people," Glover said, explaining that Murai—whom he calls a master of restraint—evokes instead of explicates. "I don't think Hiro believes in translating. He believes the audience has integrity at the end of the day. He believes in a world where we're supposed to make something brand new. And that's where the magic lays."

Magic comes up a lot when people talk about Murai. Partly that's because his body of work—mostly music videos and TV episodes, and maybe someday soon a feature film—is often defiantly surreal. Murai, who is 35, has helmed the most talked-about episodes of Glover's television series Atlanta, whose depiction of the struggling rapper Paper Boi, his cousin-manager Earn, and their friend Darius, has changed the definition of what a half-hour comedy series can be. The show is unpredictable, less tethered to plot than to what it feels like to be young and striving in a city like Atlanta. Its characters live on the outskirts, symbolically if not literally, and Murai's sensibility meshes well with the sense of happenstance and powerlessness that dominates their lives.

The show unfolds according to its own set of rules. Remember the episode in which a celebrity sped by in an invisible car? Or the one that featured a black Justin Bieber? Or the one in which Earn's Uncle Willy keeps an enormous alligator in his house as a pet? Remember how these things were presented without explanation—as unsurprising, even mundane? Murai directed all those episodes, and also the one called "Teddy Perkins," which got him nominated for an Emmy this year.

Bill Hader, who sought out Murai last year to direct a couple episodes of his dark HBO comedy, Barry, told me he especially loved the "Teddy Perkins" episode, in which Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) picks up a piano at the mansion of an aging, reclusive celebrity (Teddy, played by Glover in whiteface). There are echoes of the late Michael Jackson in Glover's unctuous, menacing portrayal, which was achieved with the help of prosthetics and a bob-cut wig. The episode's dimly lit, claustrophobic visuals have foreboding to spare.

"I watched it before we started our first day of shooting on Barry, just to be inspired," said Hader, who wanted his show—about a midwestern hitman who yearns to make it as a Hollywood actor—to have its own edginess. "Teddy Perkins" struck him then, as it does now, as a masterpiece. "It was like the band was playing 'Sergeant Pepper' or something," Hader said. "It was one of the best things I'd ever seen in my life. It was just like, 'Let's aspire to this.'" So awestruck was Hader, he admitted, that it became difficult at times not to be self-conscious around Murai. "What do you say to your friend after that?" he asked. "It's like Hiro just flew. Like: 'Yeah, so you can fly now, huh? You're like a different species of creature.'"


Watch Now:
Hiro Murai Breaks Down His Most Iconic Music Videos

Good directors are deciders. They can't hesitate. They must evaluate options and choose among them with speed. Given those prerequisites, it should come as no surprise that many people who succeed at directing are also arrogant, bossy, even domineering. To spend five minutes with Hiro Murai is to see that he is none of those things. Hader is right: He is a different species of creature.

We met for the first time about 30 hours before the Emmys, and Murai—whose black Levi's, striped pullover, and worn white Nikes signaled more art-history grad student than Hollywood A-lister—told me all the pomp surrounding the awards show and his nomination was "very, very strange." What quickly became clear, though, is that to him, "strange" isn't a bad word. When he was 9, his parents moved from Japan to Los Angeles. The result, he said, is that he has always felt like an outsider—a stranger. "Most of the time," he told me, "I'm a little bewildered or sort of feel out of place. Just, even, today."

As a child, wandering around his adopted city with an electronic Japanese-to-English dictionary, Murai didn't know how to process the cultural products he was seeing for the first time. He learned English by watching The Simpsons and Looney Tunes, which he loved because "cartoons felt reality-adjacent." Bingeing on them, he said, "was like an easier way to learn about the culture than just being dropped into it." He was brand-new to schlock. It was the early '90s, and Hulk Hogan posters were seemingly everywhere, but he had no context for them. "I didn't understand what wrestling was, culturally, and why this middle-aged guy with a headband was a movie star," he said. "You know, when you're that age, you kind of roll with it. You're like, 'Yeah, this is America.' It took me so long to realize that L.A. was a very specific place and that I was seeing just a weird corner of popular culture."

In high school, Murai became obsessed with movies. The Japanese director Takeshi Kitano—he made "very stoic, dry, deadpan sort of existential comedies; at least I think they were comedies"—became a touchstone. As fellow film-nerd friends embraced filmmakers like Akiro Kurosawa, the country he'd left behind began to figure more prominently in his thinking. "It felt like something I could sort of claim, identity-wise. A lot of my personality and my affinity for certain pieces of pop culture and art all stem from a sort of Japanese aesthetic and way of thinking," he said. "More so that I thought."

Murai went to U.S.C. film school and was working on music videos for big-name bands even before he graduated in 2006. It wasn't as hard as you might think to land these gigs. The minimal budgets that music videos commanded made it necessary to tap students or recent graduates to get them done, and friends recruited him to help. Later, to pay the bills, he was a storyboard artist and sketched concept art for an ABC reality show called Wipeout, which involved contestants running through obstacle courses, doing face-plants, and being whacked by big red balls. "Drawing a guy falling into a pile of mud is probably not filmmaking," he admitted, but a guy needs to eat. Meanwhile, his work with musicians was getting noticed. Often, he aimed the camera at objects or animals, not at the artists themselves. That frog in Earl Sweatshirt's 2013 "Chum" video, for example, was Murai's idea.

"There was something about the way Earl rapped, especially back then, the felt kind of dazed and detached, with a mumbly, drawn-out cadence that felt sort of non-human," Murai explained. "The frog sort of personified that for me." (Murai still has the frog, which he kept as a pet; he named it FDR, for Frog Delano Roosevelt.)

In 2013, Murai created a video that played during the Grammys behind Frank Ocean's performance of his song "Forrest Gump." Glover saw it—it featured Ocean running down the center of a two-lane highway—and sought out Murai. They met up at the Soho House in L.A., which still makes Murai laugh because it is so unlike either of them to hang out at a members-only club. Shortly thereafter, Glover e-mailed Murai an idea for a short film. It would be filmed at the house of NBA power forward Chris Bosh, where Glover was staying while recording an album, and it would try to depict the listlessness of holing up in a mansion with your buddies to make beats.

When Glover invited Murai to Bosh's place to look around, the actor-writer-rapper-stand-up-comedian half expected the director to balk. "We weren't living in the house right," Glover said. "Like, people were sleeping on the pool table. It was like a vagabond circus—a very weird space, kind of like Lost Boys. And Hiro came in and it didn't feel like he batted as much as an eyelash."

Murai remembers feeling immediately in sync with Glover. "It just felt like we were aiming at the same thing," he said. "Donald was sort of intentionally doing things the wrong way, in a different way, and trying to make stuff that was the opposite of what people were expecting of him." Murai describes himself as a contrarian: If he ever made a film musical, for example, "it would probably be a kind of curmudgeonly musical," he said. So Glover's approach to his art—"there's something sort of punk rock and fun about it," Murai said—was intriguing.

The result of this first collaboration was a 24-minute film called Clapping for the Wrong Reasons. Almost completely plot-free, the film—which follows Glover as he wanders aimlessly from room to room—is an extended meditation on alienation. (People still argue about the meaning of a scene in which Glover pulls on a string he finds in one nostril, only to discover a gold tooth tied to the other end. It was Murai's idea.) Glover released Clapping on YouTube in August 2013, as a prelude to his second studio album, Because the Internet. But Murai has said that the film also contains the DNA that soon would find triumphant expression on Atlanta, which Glover set up at FX not long afterward. Glover insisted on hiring a young, all-black writing staff and the untested Murai to direct most of the episodes.


Murai is fascinated by the workings of the subconscious—for years he hosted "doodle parties," which involved lots of wine, big sheets of paper, and Magic Markers that he urged friends to wield however they saw fit. He loved seeing what was revealed, he told me, when there was "no intent, no promise for what it needs to be." Sometimes, the result was "really weird, dark shit"—and, he admitted, a lot of scribbled portraits of male anatomy. Looking at doodles, he said, felt like peering into someone's diary.

Murai told me those doodle parties are something of a metaphor for what Atlanta seeks to achieve. The show unspools slowly, focusing on little moments. Its tone mimics the absurd, random feeling of dreaming. Similarly, Murai said, a doodle "just is an amorphous thing that sort of naturally happens. And that's the stuff we're always looking for in the show and in everything we make: putting ourselves in a situation where we can thoughtlessly doodle and then make something that feels honest to that moment."

Read More
These Are the Hollywood Breakouts of 2018

Claire Foy, Winston Duke, the cast of Succession, and more made GQ's annual roster of talent on the come-up.

John David Washington, Sarah Snook, and Hiro Murai

One of the reasons Murai wanted to move on from music videos, he said, is that generally their goal is to make the artist look as good as possible for three minutes straight. "I think that's a totally fine priority," he said, "but the thing that's interesting to me about filmmaking is all the other stuff—the pockets of ambiguity." Atlanta, he said, "is so much about outsiders who are thrown into these situations and confrontations that kind of leave a weird feeling in your chest. Especially the passive, latent racism which we deal with a lot."

How that all comes together on set is not always predictable and is rarely planned out in advance. To some extent, working on Atlanta—which has been renewed for a third season—is "a game of 'How Do We Paint Ourselves into a Corner?' And then: 'How Do We Get Out of It?'" Murai said. Collaborating with Glover, he continued, "I just sort of know that while we're lobbing it around, it will become something, which is not a relationship I have with a lot of people."

Glover feels the same. There are times when it feels like Murai, whom he calls "a very playful soul," is reading his mind. "I think we both have our own issues with being alone, or just feeling like an alien at some level," Glover said. Part of that is that they share visceral memories of the simultaneous wonder and terror of being a kid. "When I was a child," Glover continued, "you could tell me, 'On this day the sun rises twice,' and I'd believe you, because I've only been around six or seven years, and so anything is possible. That's a beautiful thing, and it can be magic, but it can also be really scary. And I think Hiro never really forgot that. He always seems vulnerable in that way, which is hard to find. A lot of people are trying to be too cool."


Murai has a metaphor he uses to describe what a director does. "It's like you're on a stepladder," he said, "with your head sticking up through a hole, looking into an attic. And you're seeing something that nobody else can see. And it's your job to tell the 80 people on the level below you how to re-create it." Murai said that attic view gives him a general vision for how he wants the cinematographer, the actors, and everyone else to use their talents to build something together. He can't do their jobs for them, he stresses—he doesn't know how. But he can push them forward.

Often, what Murai sees at the top of that ladder is a place, as he puts it, "where everything is so new that you don't know where the walls are." In this rule-less world, a man next to you on the bus is as likely to offer you a Nutella sandwich (as happened in the Atlanta pilot) as he is to disappear entirely. Ideally, viewers first experience this as a surprise and then, because real life can be undeniably odd, as something recognizable. "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," Murai told me. It was clear he is looking forward to working on the show again, whenever production of season three begins.

In the meantime, Murai has been busy. He's returned to Barry this fall, directing the first two episodes of the second season. (Hader told me the crew popped champagne corks when they heard he was coming back.) And last summer, a photo of Glover and Rihanna on Twitter prompted much Internet chatter about a mysterious project, reportedly directed by Murai and titled Guava Island, that was under way in Cuba. Both Murai and Glover declined to tell me if the production is a feature film, as is rumored. Regardless, Guava Island only amped up speculation about when Murai will make his big-screen debut.

He acknowledged to me that he is helping develop a sci-fi-thriller script called Man Alive, but he insisted, "I'm not in a rush with features. I just want to do things on my own terms as much as possible. So when people tell me, 'This is your opportunity to do this!' my impulse is to be like, 'Well, hold on, though.' Every time I've rushed into something, that's usually when I have regrets."

Which brings us to what happened on Emmy night, back in September: The statuette for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series went not to Murai but to Amy Sherman-Palladino, for the pilot of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Hader recalls that when Sherman-Palladino's name was read, he blurted out, "She just beat Hiro? Really? What the fuck?" At which point Alec Berg, the co-creator of Barry, elbowed him. "He was like, 'You're on camera, you fucking idiot.' And I was like, 'Oh God, did I just say that out loud?' He was like, 'Yes.' And I was like, 'I'm sorry,'" Hader said before adding this caveat: "I have not seen Mrs. Maisel, all right? I just want to make that abundantly clear. It could be a very, very, very well-directed show."

The next time I talked to Murai, a few weeks later, the Emmys didn't even come up. Awards are nice, to be sure, but his definition of success, he'd told me, is "having the freedom and resources to work and chase ideas with people I like. No assholes." Besides, the ceremony offered a chance for the kind of reality-bending that Atlanta fans love: Someone who looked just like "Teddy Perkins" was in the Emmys audience, seated down front. It was unclear whether it was Glover donning the plasticine cheekbones to reprise his role or someone else, but whoever it was, cameras captured the moment when Teddy rose and congratulated Hader for winning the Emmy for Lead Actor in a Comedy. (Hader beat out Glover, among others.)

Murai looked on, meanwhile, tricked out in a classic tuxedo. It was his second Emmy ceremony and, it's worth wagering, not his last. The day before, he'd told me, "Part of the fun of the process for me is that I don't want to do something I've done a million times, so I'm always looking for something new and interesting." Of course, that means constantly putting himself in unfamiliar situations that might make others cringe. But he's not only accustomed to that feeling; he welcomes it. "It's the whole fake-it-until-you-make-it thing," he said, smiling. "I just never feel like I'm qualified for the thing I'm working on, but I trust that I'll figure it out."