Ansel Elgort on Michael Mann and “Tokyo Vice”: “Spielberg warned me that he was going to make me work very hard”

The actor who comes from starring in Steven Spielberg's Love Without Barriers went from practicing two hours of dancing a day to four hours of Japanese lessons for his character in Tokyo Vice, a six-episode series that premiered HBO Max this Thursday, April 7. The series is produced by Michael Mann (Fire Against Fire, Collateral) who also directs the first episode. From street dancing to an American journalist based in Japan under the orders of one of Hollywood's most acclaimed directors, Ansel told Infobae about his experience.

“I didn't have in mind that Michael Mann and Steven Spielberg had produced Mann's film with Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise [Collateral]. I started asking and Spielberg told me that he was going to make me work very hard, but that he believed that as long as he was willing to do it as hard as ever, we would get along very well,” Elgort said about moving from one project to another and having the chance to discuss it directly with Spielberg. But he sought a second opinion and wrote to Jamie Foxx. He replied: “He can't take stupid things. Michael Mann is a great director to work with.”

Ansel Elgort, without making those enormous transformations to which actors like Jared Leto or Christian Bale undergo, composed characters as different as they were remembered. He was the designated host of a band of thieves in Baby Driver, then the dancer and gang member of Amor without Barriers, and participated in the Divergent saga as the questioned Caleb. For Tokyo Vice, change and challenge also required a lot of training, both martial and linguistic: “Michael [Mann] initially wanted I will take Japanese lessons 9 hours every day. 'That's how it works', he told me. But then Alan Poul [executive producer of the series], fortunately to my rescue, said that maybe 4 hours a day was enough because he also had other things to do, such as aikido and everything related to journalism, among other things. And Michael Mann agreed.”

The challenge, in addition to submitting to the hard work proposed by the director of Miami Vice, was to get involved in a reality-based project. Tokyo Vice is the adaptation of a book written by Jake Adelstein, a journalist who told in the first person his closeness to the yakuza, the Japanese mafia that in the 90s was as powerful as it was unattainable. To get a better interpretation of Adelstein, Elgort had to know him and adopt some of his main characteristics: “I showed up at his house and the first thing he said to me was: 'Today I am going to investigate this story. We're going to go to the courtroom, we're going to wait outside, because we don't have a way in, and we're going to listen to everyone who will come out of there and talk about what just happened in the courtroom. '” The actor acknowledged that in one day he learned a few keys about “how to practice journalism”.

That was Ansel Elgort's little approach to journalism. A very short one trying to capture the essence of Jake Adelstein more, but during the filming and the story, he still had things to say about the profession, specifically about the police branch: “What I learned about the role of the police journalist is that they work with the police. However, they also work to make the police honest because they must take a police report, then double-check its authenticity and try to get the word of everyone who might have been involved. They have to paint the whole picture. And in a way he is a public servant because he does make sure that justice is done when sometimes it is not done.”

Tokyo Vice is not only a series about the Japanese mafia in the 90s and its implications for politics and even society, it also immerses itself in the depths of Japanese culture, its nicest parts, its wisdom, but also its darker side: the position of women, the place that a foreigner occupies in sectors strictly occupied by premises such as the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. All this encompasses the fiction of six episodes with an excellent first chapter and a fairly well-achieved development with a concrete record of that time and the research. About the experience, the actor was blunt: “I worked very hard, trying to immerse myself and get the skill set that this character needed and take his challenges. But in conclusion, it was wonderful. Being in Tokyo was a lot of fun.”

Tokyo Vice premieres this Thursday, April 7 on HBO Max and every Thursday will present two new premiere episodes.

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