ALAN POUL - Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Producer/Director - Tokyo Vice - Six Feet Under - Tales of the City - My So-Called Life

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Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.

"My most formative TV experience having been Six Feet Under, I tend to want to take a rather conservative approach to score, in that if a scene works brilliantly without music, why do you need music? And that score, especially, is usually there to provide an element that you're not getting fully from the dry–when there's no score, we call it dry. So with the dry footage, that was always our philosophy on Six Feet Under: if the scene works just as well without music, we don't need music. And that just runs a little counter to what was, and kind of still is, the prevailing philosophy on television, which is that everything needs music. Like, people won't know what to feel if you don't score it, which I think is a really very insulting underestimation of the intelligence of the audience.

And so there's always pressure to put more music in, and our feeling is, no, if we don't need it, we don't need it. Now, that changes, like when we get to Tokyo Vice because of the genre elements of the show. You know, if you have an action sequence, you need music. If you have a really tense, suspenseful moment, it probably needs music.”

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/

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