‘Shogun’s’ VFX Pro Knows Exactly How a Cannonball Would Kill a Man

Shogun always meant a lot to Michael Cliett, who has fond memories of watching the 1980 miniseries with his dad as a kid in Japan. So the Emmy-nominated visual effects supervisor leapt at the opportunity to work on FX’s lavish adaptation of the James Clavell novel. Cliett speaks with host Rob Legato, the Oscar-winning VFX legend behind Titanic , about creating an authentic representation of Japan in the year 1600. “Everything had to be grounded in reality,” Cliett says, including the show’s brutal violence, from a chain shot cannonball massacre to multiple beheadings. The goal is for his painstaking work to be “invisible,” Cliett says. “The last thing I want is for the audience to be thinking about the fact that they're watching a visual effect.” Transcript here .