Genre: Period
Premise: The true story of the first and only African Samurai in feudal Japan who rose from being a slave for the Jesuits to fighting as a Samurai in the unification of Japan.
About: Screenwriter Stuart Paul sold this project to MGM back in 2019. He also sold a spec around that time called “Terminal Point,” to Universal. Don’t know what that one’s about but the title sounds cool so if you’ve got it, send it my way!
Writer: Stuart Paul
Details: 121 pages
Period pieces.
What happened to them!?
They used to be a Hollywood staple.
I’m guessing it’s Marvel’s fault. I mean, samurais used to be bada$$, right?! These days? They’re superheroes without powers. And who wants that?
Not to mention, period pieces require patience in a world that no longer has any. So that might be why it’s so hard to push these through the system these days. Let’s see if Stuart Paul’s period piece is good enough to get made.
It is the late 1500s. Iosufe, 25 years old, is minding his own business in his home country of Mozambique when Portuguese warriors swoop into his village and brutally slaughter everyone, including his two children. Iosufe is then separated from his wife and thrown on a boat, sent to far off lands to be a slave.
Eventually, he meets Valignano, a Spanish aristocrat who is spreading the word of God across the world. Valignano has never seen a man as enormous as Iosufe, and so makes him a de facto bodyguard. Through Valignano, Iosufe starts to become educated and cultured.
After many months, the two hop on a boat to the Far East. The last place to conquer for Christianity is Japan, so Valignano sails there and begins his mission. The only problem is that there’s this guy named Nobunaga who is trying to take Japan from the current Emperor. And if he becomes Emperor, he will likely put an end to Christianity.
So Valignano and Iosufe travel to his city to negotiate with him. When Nobunaga sees the physical specimen that is Iosufe, he becomes obsessed with him. Seeing this, Valignano gifts Iosufe to Nobunaga in the hopes of gaining political favor from him. For the time being, at least, Nobunaga promises not to take over Japan.
Nobunaga immediately calls for Iosufe to be trained in the ways of the samurai, something the rest of the samurai aren’t so keen on. But after several trials, Iosufe, who Nobunaga renames, “Yasuke,” (meaning, “Idiot”), becomes a samurai.
Nobunaga then brings his army to the last major opponent between him and the Emperor, where Yasuke proves his worth by leading the charge and taking over the city. But after he learns that the women and children of the village will be slaughtered, and he will lead it, he must ask the question, has he become the very man who destroyed his own life? With renewed purpose, he plans his escape in the hopes of finding his wife and reuniting with her.
When you write a script like this, there are two things you must get right.
- There must be sophistication to your writing.
- You must be entertaining.
By sophistication I mean you must have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. You must write with specificity. You must write with discipline. The dialogue has to sound like people speaking back during that time. And there’s no room for messiness. Yesterday’s script, the Michael Bay comedy biopic, had endless room for messiness. These scripts don’t tolerate it, though. They must possess a novel-like attention-to-detail.
Ironically, if a writer can excel at the first thing, they tend not to excel at the second one (write entertainingly). This is because the writers drawn to this subject matter prioritize authenticity so heavily that they forget it doesn’t matter unless the script is entertaining. They’d rather accurately describe the architecture of Rome than write a baller conflict-heavy dialogue scene between the hero and the villain.
Yasuke gets an 8 out of 10 in the sophistication department and a 6 out of 10 in the entertainment department. Which averages out to a solid 7 out of 10.
On the plus side, the writer gets the main character right. It’s hard not to root for someone whose kids are brutally murdered in front of him (and when I say brutally, I mean brutally), whose wive is taken away from him, and who becomes a slave. I mean, if you’re not rooting for Yasuke, there’s something wrong with you.
But then the script runs into a unique problem. Our main character has zero agency over his journey. He’s a slave. So he’s not making any decisions. He’s not being active. He’s just following others around and doing what they say. This makes for a frustrating reading experience because whenever a big moment arrives, it’s whoever’s leading Yasuke that makes the decision, while Yasuke just stands there and nods.
I suppose the argument against this is, “Well, he’s a slave. Slaves can’t lead or it would defeat the point.” I understand that. But then you have to ask, was it the right call to write the script in the first place? Cause it was you who wrote a movie where your hero’s situation necessitated that they stay passive the whole time.
It’s not that Yasuke doesn’t have some great moments in this. He does. Heck, he fights a ninja. And he has this killer sword battle with his rival at the end. But these moments combine to make up, maybe, 7% of the movie. The other 93%, Yasuke is standing around, either watching or listening to people more decorated than him make decisions.
The script still does a lot of things well. One of the issues I commonly run into in scripts with tribes is that we’ll start the movie off with a hunt. The characters, and our hero, then kill the animal they’re hunting. A good portion of your audience isn’t going to love meeting your hero as an animal killer. Some people don’t care about this, obviously. But it’s dangerous in the sense that the audience is forming the majority of their opinion about your hero during their opening scenes. So if you want to make that character likable, you have to take that into consideration.
“Yasuke” had a clever solution to this. They had a lion kill a bunch of Yasuke’s cattle. So, now, when Yasuke and his tribe went off to kill the lion, they’re not just killing an animal for sport or food, they’re killing it for revenge. I noticed how much more I was rooting for them to take down the lion for that reason. So they showed how capable our hero was on a hunt, all without making him barbaric or heartless.
The writer also does a good job of keeping the plot going despite an elongated time frame of 5 years. The trick with this is to keep introducing goals.
-Now we have to go to Japan.
-Now we have to start a church.
-Now we have to convince the Emperor’s rival not to attack him.
-Now we have to take down Nobunaga’s rival.
The plot always had purpose. And as soon as one goal was reached, it was replaced with another. When readers complain about a “lack of momentum” or “weak pacing,” this is often what they are talking about. Writers aren’t staying on top of their hero’s goals.
The script reminds me a bit of that old Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai. It has just enough going on to keep us invested. But, in the end, it still feels like a movie you should see and not one that you want to see. It’ll make a great trailer. But I’d put the ceiling at ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The gap between your hero’s last accomplished goal and announcement of his next goal is where boredom gestates. So if Yasuke’s goal is to kill a rival bad guy, and he goes and kills him, that character goal has now concluded. Let’s say the next character goal is to escape Nobunaga. If you wait 15 pages after Yasuke killed Rival Bad Guy to announce that he plans to escape Nobunaga, your script will have 15 pages of stasis. You are not moving forward. You are staying in place. Stasis is where boredom sets in. So try to eliminate any of these gaps in your script.
