Death Stranding<\/em> anime series<\/a>, took the time out of his busy schedule to tweet effusively about Netflix\u2019s new period drama.<\/p>\nAhead of Last Samurai Standing<\/em>\u2018s launch on Netflix, THR<\/em> spoke to Okada about the making of the series, juggling his roles as lead actor, producer and fight choreographer, his hopes for a second season and how they might incorporate more superhuman elements that were found in Imamura\u2019s source material.<\/p>\nFirstly, congratulations on the show! Let\u2019s start with how you got involved with the project.jidaigeki<\/em> [samurai period dramas], and I had the fortune of being able to work on these, epic projects here in Japan. Netflix approached me about Last Sumurai Standing<\/em>. When I got the offer, they talked about me being the lead character and they also talked about me being the action choreographer. So, if I were to work on all these elements, I thought that I would love to also be a producer on this project.<\/p>\nSpeaking about these three distinct roles you carried out on Last Samurai Standing<\/em>, what was the challenge of doing all three? And did each job impact the other and in what way? <\/strong><\/p>\nHaving these three roles, [it\u2019s like] having to use three different brains, so it was very difficult in that sense. As a producer, of course, you have to think about the money or the financial aspects, but a producer is someone who usually asks people to do something, and you\u2019re also in a position to stop a certain things. An action choreographer, you can propose or suggest things that you would like to do or you would like to pull off. And as an actor you\u2019re in this position where you try to become this character, [you try to] believe you are that person\u2026 you usually don\u2019t have to mind about what\u2019s going on in your surroundings. But having these three tasks, I knew too much about the surroundings, so as an actor it was definitely a difficult situation.<\/p>\n\nRegarding your work as an action choreographer, watching the show, there seems to be lots of different fight styles on screen. How many different fight styles are there? And was it difficult to choreograph so many, even within particular fight scenes that shift from martial arts, to swordplay to straight up brawling? \nBut, was there a particular number of fight styles in the series? <\/strong><\/p>\nWell, we have a huge number. The reason why we have a huge number of these different styles for fighting is because we have the styles per character, and then we have different concepts and ideas and we even have styles per fights and then per sequence too. [That\u2019s] an immense number of these styles, if we were to accumulate all of that. There are instances where in one fight, you have like three to four concepts and then, maybe, in a certain shot there\u2019s more things happening. So in that sense we have a very large number of fighting styles. In one episode, I came up with about 100 [concepts], but most of them are not actually adopted.<\/p>\n
Speaking directly about two particular fight scenes. In the second episode, \u201cAwakening,\u201d where your character takes on the black uniformed officers and goes \u201cbeast mode,\u201d it\u2019s quite incredible. Could you talk about how you shot that? There\u2019s also the one-shot scene in the seafood restaurant in episode four, \u201cThe Mastermind,\u201d could you talk about that too? <\/strong><\/p>\nAbout these one shot [fight scenes], when we are working on these period drama pieces, we always try to respect the genre, and our intent and our mission was to update the period drama. As we see in [Akira Kurosawa]\u2019s works there are these long shots, and in his frame the location is also fighting in these battle sequences. We also wanted to do that, and we wanted to connect to that. Personally, myself, I have been training in martial arts and other forms, so I am able to pull this [fight choreography] off on my own, I don\u2019t need a stunt double. I don\u2019t need people to hide my face and pretend that it\u2019s me. I am able to be part of that location in that sequence, and as you mentioned, becoming like a \u201cbeast,\u201d we call that an \u201cawakening.\u201d In that one shot [see clip above] we wanted to convey the reality of fighting against people with firearms \u2014 you cannot have that much distance, so you have to be much closer. And then I\u2019m also trying to convey the tactics of fighting in that scene as well, [showing that] I\u2019m surrounded by a lot of people. In that one shot, you are able to see a lot of those elements that I\u2019ve been describing so far.<\/p>\n
For the [seafood restaurant scene], there is a difference [as there were more people] and skills [on show]. We had to keep in mind how many people we introduced. We considered that scene like a [superhero] type of scene, a moment where just like in the Avengers<\/em> you\u2019re able to introduce everyone one by one.<\/p>\n\nIt\u2019s a fantastic scene! Regarding the production overall, it seems enormous, by that I mean, the number of sets, the many different costumes, the number of extras. How many people were actually involved in this project? Also in terms of historical accuracy, were you slavishly trying to be as accurate as possible or were trying to just get the spirit of the era right?<\/strong><\/p>\nOn the size and scale of the production, if you were to include actors and all extras, we have this incredible amount of people being a part of this. And because we didn\u2019t have enough time, we had two units. We had unit A and unit B, so it was two times the conventional size, so about 2000 to 3000 people. Talking about the costumes. What happened was that we contacted all the seamstresses in Japan and we had all those houses working for our show. We were working at this incredible scale.<\/p>\n
[On the authenticity], we wanted to celebrate Japanese culture, we wanted to elevate the culture to entertainment, but its fiction. [However], we wanted to avoid portraying it as fantasy. The violence was our way of showing how dreadful and scary that era was, but also trying not to make it a fantasy with finishing moves or killer moves for the characters, which were in the original source material. We did not incorporate that, we wanted to keep it more real, having this reality based in historical facts, that\u2019s the care we had in the production. On the other hand, we trying to make more modern, the vocabulary, or the nuances are sometimes updated, and not exactly true to that time. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s a neat segue to the manga, actually. Were there major changes from the manga? You just mentioned the violence aspect, but were there other key changes? <\/strong><\/p>\nThe actual source material is the novel, and then there also is a manga, but, in the original, the characters have special powers. For our show, for the first season, we don\u2019t have superpowers [for the characters], But, if Last Samurai Standing<\/em> is very popular and well received, and if we were to continue on to the second season, there may be a possibility that we might be introducing some of those aspects. But, for the first season, we gave a lot of care and focus into erasing the elements that could be considered fantasy, we concentrated on making it feel more real.<\/p>\nWe would have to see how this will go, [but at the moment] I\u2019m more focused on the survival game element. Ikusagami<\/em>, which is the Japanese original title for Last Samurai Standing<\/em> novel, has this connection with God. In the first season, we introduced the kagura<\/em> dance, which is like a spiritual ritual so there is this element of the superhuman power, so we may be able to introduce this divine power.<\/p>\n Last Samurai Standing<\/em> is unique, but it also has these elements of very popular Japanese films and TV shows, like Battle Royale<\/em>, Sh\u014dgun<\/em><\/em><\/em> and Alice in Borderland<\/em>, were you inspired by these other projects? <\/strong><\/p>\nThe easiest way to describe Last Samurai Standing<\/em> to the global audience, and for them to have a better understanding of our show, is that it is kind of like a mixture of Squid Games<\/em> and Sh\u014dgun<\/em><\/em><\/em>. But we\u2019re actually adding more historical elements, and also because it\u2019s a period drama, we\u2019re going to be portraying and focusing on the livelihoods of these characters, their lives or situations, incorporating elements like fireworks, the artist Hokusai, the kagura dance, elements of faith too. Those are the ideas that we are incorporating in our imagery and we really wanted to give more to the storytelling element. We wanted to show more of the characters and we wanted to emphasize the culture of Japan, too. And because this is a Japanese period piece, we wanted to update that genre to introduce it globally.<\/p>\n\nBest of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\nSign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cSh\u014dgun meets Squid Games.\u201d That\u2019s how Japanese actor, producer and action choreographer Junichi Okada describes his new Netflix show Last Samurai Standing, that has already become the talk of social media for its ingenius premise, stunning costumes and production design and intense fight scenes. Critics, too, have been won over by the live-action adaptation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2161382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[414430,365702,23191,380910],"class_list":["post-2161381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-action-choreographer","tag-junichi-okada","tag-netflix","tag-standing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\u2018Last-Samurai-Standing-Star-Junichi-Okada-On-Making-of-Netflix.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2161381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2161383,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161381\/revisions\/2161383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2161382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2161381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2161381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2161381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}