American director and producer Alan Poul is best known to the industry for his work on prestige HBO series like Six Feet Under, The Newsroom and Big Love, but his career began, improbably, on a soundstage on the west side of Tokyo, Japan.
After graduating with a degree in Japanese language and literature from Yale University, Poul was working in New York as a Japanese cinema programmer in the mid-1980s when he was approached by maverick screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Light Sleeper) with an offer to serve as an associate producer on the movie project that would become Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) — Schrader’s now classic, semi-experimental biopic about the iconoclastic Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Poul accepted the job and decamped with Schrader to Japan, earning his entree into the film business at Tokyo’s Toho Studios,…
