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Tokyo Vice producer Alex Boden talked about next steps for inbound production in Japan, including the need to expand the crew base, during his MPA/DHU/TIFFCOM masterclass at Tokyo International Film Festival.
And the need for more crew couldn’t be more urgent as Japan’s Visual Industry Promotion Organization (VIPO) revealed that ten projects have already been approved for the country’s new 50% location incentive.
Max/Wowow’s Tokyo Vice, which filmed two seasons in Japan from 2020-2021 and 2022-2023, served as a test case for the incentive, which was officially launched in late 2023. During his masterclass, Boden outlined some of the challenges the production faced when it first came to Tokyo, including securing notoriously difficult locations such as Akasaka, and finding enough experienced bilingual crew.
“But I would say that it’s so important that we’ve established this precedent,” said Boden, whose producing credits also include the Wachowskis’ Sense8 and Cloud Atlas. “We’ve shown that it can be done and hopefully everyone on all sides has seen that it isn’t such a big upheaval after all. Precedents really count – if you can show you’ve done something before, then others can come and follow you.”
Boden also said when Tokyo Vice returned to shoot a second season, there was already another international production filming in Tokyo – sci-fi black comedy Sunny, starring Rashida Jones and produced by Apple TV+.
“Tokyo is not used to having productions of this scale running concurrently, but hopefully that will start to change,” he continued. “We brought a lot of people into our crew who hadn’t really worked on international production. They’ve had the longest possible training experience, and will hopefully stay in the business. I’ve seen some of them here this week and they’re busy working on other productions.”
In addition to multiple locations, Tokyo Vice also filmed on sound stages at Toho Studios and other facilities and used an LED volume wall for some scenes. “It is useful to have a stage in Tokyo, especially if the weather’s inclement and you’re here for months – you need a place to hide,” Boden advised.
He explained that the virtual production wall was used for driving scenes in Season 2 when some of the characters take a trip outside Tokyo into the snowy mountains of Nagano: “It’s hard to film driving scenes, especially in snow, so its better to shoot those scenes in a more controlled environment.”
But he also said the growing use of virtual production technology will not replace the need for physical locations. Using the example of a Sao Paulo carnival scene in Sense8, he added: “We had our cast on a real float driving through two million people. Some scenes are challenging to create, but I’m not sure a digital stage could achieve the same intensity.”
He continued: “So you take decisions on what needs to be virtual, and that will happen more and more as stages become available, because they’re still not available in every city. But just being able to have that choice is the best thing.”
Japan has several LED walls and is slowly building up a crew base for physical shooting, but with several new projects awarded the location incentive, has no time to waste in upskilling local talent.
“There’s already a flow of productions coming to Japan, that’s fantastic progress, but now we need to make sure they can find the crews they need on the ground, rather than having to bring people with them from the US or UK,” Boden said.
“The crew base is already there – they’re working on Japanese films and TV, so they just need to acquire the knowledge they need to understand international production. It’s more complicated to work on a foreign production so it does need some support to help crew who want to get involved in this international evolution.”
Japan’s new incentive, funded by the Ministry for Economy Tourism and Industry (METI), offers a cash rebate of 50% to qualifying productions that spend above a specified amount in Japan. The incentive is selective, not automatic, and has a cap of $6.6BN (JPY1BN).
Among the most recent projects to be approved are the second season of Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters, which is shooting in Australia but will spend several days in Japan; Neuromancer, a series based on William Gibson’s novel produced by Skydance, Anonymous Content and Wowow; and Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty, directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, who was one of the directors on Tokyo Vice.
Boden’s masterclass was held as part of the MPA/DHU/TIFFCOM Pitching Contest in which five up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers and two Korean filmmakers pitched their projects in front of a jury.
Shion Koreeda’s AI Within won the MPA Grand Prize, including a trip to Los Angeles for the Global Film & Television Immersion Program in November. The Special Recognition Prize, which includes a trip to the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Australia, went to Kazuya Maruyama’s The Right Place; while the Judges’ Special Award went to 2 Years And 2 Months by Shun Tsujii.
