Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/1360/

The Red Baron

I think we ended up calling it The Red Baron.  Or something like that.  It was all to do with the Von Richtho... the Brown was this Canadian guy who claimed to have shot down Von Richthofen, you know.  It was based on that story.  And I was the aerial director and, uh, art director.  And uh associate producer really. So basically I went there before Roger to set the whole scene up and designed all the mission huts and got the crew together and all that.  And started to storyboard the film.  'Cause you have to storyboard 'cause if you don't it's all based on miniatures and you know, and camera... you know look down camera eye directions to things you're working on this thing called a gimble.  You know, which is these models where you put these actors in, you know.  And they'd be looking down like this and they're actually in this little gimble with the fan, which is making it look like the wind is blowing.  But it's that, it's that, all that kind of stuff I knew from just doing commercial work and doing, you know, just my own way of working. I just had uh you know all these camera directions and everything working.  And when you storyboard the whole film then you have it all, sort of like, the film basically made, you know.  The director just follows it.  And the actors and all that.  

So I did a second unit team.  And I went on a helicopter.  And, but before I went in the helicopter.. there were sixteen, fifteen planes in the air. Biplanes.  And they had to all be properly signaled of...'cause it's dangerous, you know, they'e all flying very tight, you know.  And from doing flips and everything smoke was coming out.  And uh the camera's got to follow them down.  It's all orche-orchestrated .... It's, um it's choreographed in the air.  And you talk to your pilots before that.  With models on, on sticks, you know.  A major communication.  So I'm doing that radio communication and directing in the helicopter and that is a very important role.  Now don't tell me how I did it. I just did it.  It was instinct.  Instinctively I did it and there was no accidents or nothing.


Date: June 29, 2012

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Chris Komai, John Esaki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Jimmy Murakami (1933 – 2014) was inspired as a child to become a film animator by watching the Disney cartoons that were shown to Japanese Americans confined at the Tule Lake concentration camp during WWII. After attending Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, he worked as an animator for UPA. He later founded Murakami Wolf—a company that produced many well-known commercials in the 1960s and 70s—and became a feature film director of When the Wind Blows and The Snowman. After establishing residence in Ireland in recent years, he passed away in February of 2014 at age 80.  (June 2014)