Quotes from Hiro Murai

It's very easy to fall into a rut where you're just making things that you don't believe in for other people.

I really enjoy blocking and staging. I think most of visual storytelling is camera placement and how to stage action around the camera.

Directing action scenes is really just pure visual storytelling that just makes sense to me pretty intuitively.

I'll listen to a song so much that ideas start to form out of daydreaming. It's as if I'm reverse-scoring the track and building visuals around a specific beat or riff that's grabbed me.

A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they've seen before.

Even if an episode is self-contained, the preceding episodes always affect how the audience takes it in.

I like shooting locations just because too much control on the stage can be a bad thing.

We always talk about how, obviously, there is still very in-your-face aggressive racism. But there's a lot of passive racism that, in the moment, you don't even realize is racist. You chalk it up as a strange interaction you had, and then you look at the context of it later on and realize the root of it was racism.

'Atlanta' changes genres a lot per episode.

That feeling of wavering between reality and supernatural has always been really interesting to me.

I don't know why, but even my nighttime dreams are very, very rooted in reality. They just start to become surreal, little by little. That exact moment when you're about to realize that this might be a dream is my favorite thing.

The way I look at stories is often from far outside, like a god's point of view, and also very, very subjective.

For me, I don't have a grand vision planned or an end goal. I'm just exploring what's given to me at any given moment.

'Guava Island' is the end result of four incredible weeks spent in Cuba with some of the most inspiring creative talents I've ever met.

The weird thing about having an alligator on set is that you can't be in the direct line of sight, or they might start charging at you.

A lot of weird things happen in life that are not always pertaining to your main objective.

I've always preferred being behind the camera.

I don't like fast cuts. I'd rather shoot something that dances to the music.

I love David Lynch movies, and I like Haruki Murakami books.

Once you go outside of Atlanta, there are still a lot of Klan rallies and whatnot. There are a lot of conflicting elements that are trying to solve itself in that city.

Music videos were an outlet. They were the jobs most easily available to me, but creatively, they're also so free form; there are no rules whatsoever.

I was fortunate to work on a few episodes of 'Barry' right before we shot 'Atlanta.' That was where I got my training wheels for action coverage.

When we were making 'Teddy Perkins,' we were playing with a lot of horror tropes and things you might've seen in movies before, but we get the ability to subvert expectations or get a comedic element out of a horror moment.

I just want to do things on my own terms as much as possible.