The Heroes team is in the middle of shooting in downtown L.A.,
currently doubling up as Tokyo
and for the locals Hiro and Ando,
their destiny is about to take a significant step.
Mark!
Background!
Action!
Hiro Nakamura is a big comic book enthusiast
and always believed that he was meant for something special.
Let's come forward! In front of me. No, in front of me! I want you in front of me!
And he kept trying hard and hard to...
kind of reverse time. And finds himself, one day,
that he actually can.
Action!
He's a big child. Someone who never lost his dream.
Very naive, you know, but very passionate, very truthful...
just as a big grown-up kid.
He's always dreamt about being a superhero and he
believes in it and he's vindicating.
The stopping time phenomenon is basically
a combination of incredibly advanced
special effects with, you know, really old school just kind of
mime theatre, if you will.
What happens is... we have everybody, you know, set up
and we rig their hair with wires, so it looks like they're standing up.
We had to put them into positions of motion:
the girl that's jumping rope, she's sitting on a little bicycle seat
that has a green stand underneath her and her feet are up,
so it looks like she's taking a jump... and she's holding just the handles of the rope
and later on we put a 3-D rope in and cleaned out
the rig so that she's just literally frozen, you know, in the air.
And then we added on the 3-D elements which were
the content that was sitting on top of
the vendor's table, which were boxes and toy boxes and
little robots. And so
when we crash through it you got in the air
brown boxes, toy boxes and little robots. So...
I said to Masi: "Here is what's gonna happen: when you go down
there's gonna be these toys in the air, so duck,
look and wherever you do this I will put objects",
you know.
And so he went like, "Ooouu...", and the shoulder
bumps into a robot in the air and all that kind of stuff.
So in the end what you get is this
really interesting, cool shot that looks like
the world has stopped and yet we're moving through the space of it.
Our special effects team is amazing, awesome.
They're just... I mean, the stuff that they've done... how really people...
and the great part is that they do it in a way that
doesn't take away from the show. It's just little
sprinkles and icing on the cake,
but it's so spectacular and yet it sort of, you know, makes you,
you know, sort of living this reality even more, you know. And that's the amazing part.
From childhood genius to adult superhero,
Masi Oka is no stranger to computer graphics,
dividing his time between acting and being a digital artist.
But for Hiro Nakamura, his one mission is to follow his destiny
and he's having a ball along the way.
For a foreign character to be embraced by an audience is very surreal, you know
Nobody would have ever thought of that, in fact the character was an afterthought of
Tim Kring, it was the last character to be added into the pilot.
After reading the first draft of the pilot I felt a kind of overwhelming
sense of angst at the end of it, where every character was reacting to these
powers in the same way. And this was where the origin of the
you know, the Hiro character, the japanese office worker...
I thought I need one character who would take this idea
as the greatest thing that ever happened to him.
He works in a cubicle all day, he has a typical 9 to 5 job and
he's what's known as a "clock puncher" and
I guess Tim Kring decided: "What would a clock puncher want?"
I wanted to create a character whose life was very...uhm...
felt very trapped by circumstances,
very confined in the way that many people who work in large corporations
or at an assembly line, they feel like they're just a cog in a wheel.
And I thought: "Wouldn't it be great if that character could
teleport himself into adventure? Into another life that was not of his making."
To finally have that one final moment where he truly believed himself
and knew he could do it,
and have him teleport from the subway into New York...
this is the moment when his dream came true, when everything he believed in came true.
-Yattaaaaaaaaaaa! (I did it!) Hello New York!
At first he's just excited to be in New York, he's just "Oh, my God! This is New York!", you know,
"I've never been here"... and this is so cool and, you know, he's just walking
and the next thing you know, he's passing this news stand
with a comic book with on the cover a character that looks awfully like HIro.
The great thing about Hiro is that he never doubts it for a second.
For Hiro, who grew up on comic books,
this is just another day. Another day in a Hiro's world, you know,
so this all makes sense: a character who could jump time and space and he can teleport,
an artist that can draw... you know... paint the future:
he doesn't think it's strange.
The one thing he was confused about is the fact that he also
timetravel at the same time.
- November 8th - November? Noo. October.
He starts to realize in that moment that
there's a reason why he got this power
and he knows that all heroes have a destiny that they have to, you know, that calls them.
And when he sees the bomb he realizes that's his destiny, his calling.
So that kind of sets his whole journey off, realizing
he's the one who saw it, he's the one who could see it
and he's the one who has to stop it.
But every hero needs a sidekick,
and with Hiro and Ando on the journey together,
they look set to make the perfect team.
With Hiro and Ando... you know, Hiro is kind of the funny guy,
Ando's a straight man who's also reacting: "Oooh, what the...?", you know.
Ando and Hiro has sort of become this one entity
and we're being compared to a lot of different,
you know, famous dynamic duos in history, like Batman &Robin.
I sort of start to think that it's becoming like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
Hiro is sort of, like, the responsible one that's sort of burden with his mission, and...
and Ando has Han Solo sort of get to
go off a little bit and, and, and, have some fun, you know.
- Freeze! - Hands up!
Hands up!
He's a bit chromogen, you know, he's a realist, versus
this... Hiro's this idealistic, optimistic guy, you know, who
lives in his own world and dragging this
poor soul out, you know, all the way to America.
There's something really child-like about, you know, just these two
sort of young guys who have sort of the adventure of a lifetime.
you know, it's sort of... you know, it's like almost like backpacking on Europe and, and
not knowing where you're gonna go next and, and what you're gonna encounter.
You know, there's definitely a sense about them that
that, that you just find amusing and you really enjoy,
because I feel like they're really enjoying sort of this
journey that they're on. And they find it exciting and, and dramatic and
sometimes scary and sometimes, you know, amazing.
With all Heroes acting the part in this great adventure,
they have to dress the part too,
and that's all down to the costume department.
I've spent a lot of time in corporate Japan,
so my idea was very "black and white", and I thought how
wonderful it would be to have a world of that.
And everybody look like that.
I used the slim-tie... it's very rock and roll
and has very much of an attitude, and I tend, in my work, to use
a narrow tie whenever I want to have a character be just
have a character be just a little bit hipper, a little bit edgier. And then we introduce colour,
into his palette, very much. The jackets become very important:
we took a lot of pride in sort of creating some of those jackets and
making them very "Hiro-like".
Ando is a perfect partner to Hiro and certainly I've
I've kept him, even though I'm sure he would love to be cooler,
in the way I dress him I've really kept him in the "members-only" jacket, and
kept him very office working looking,
without adding a hipness to him because it makes he and Hiro
all the more interesting to look at, visually.
But it really, really works in terms of off-setting and looking at the bigger picture.
But he's a very different heroe who turns up to pass on a memorable message
- Wait! - Save the cheerleader, save the world.
- Save the cheerleader, save the world.
- We got to save the cheerleader to save the world.
Isn't that amazing? I think it's the catchiest line you could ever imagine.
It's turned into this really cool thing that everybody,
people can't figure out, they don't know what that means.
People were dressing up as us for Halloween
and chanting: "Save the cheerleader, save the world".
It's amazing how it just caught on, I just did this radio tour yesterday and
everybody on the radio was like: "Save the cheerleader, save the world".
I was at the movies the other day and I'm walking in, I'm kinda getting
my ticket, and the girl said: "Save the cheerleader!"
And I, like: "Thanks".
We've got other catch-phrases coming from what I hear. They have a wall of
of catch-phrases in the, in the writers' room.
They spend most of the time writing catch-phrases like, you know,
"Grunberg is sexy" is one of them... and "Stop losing weight!"
is another one and "He's got bad breath!"... It was on my sight.
It's interesting because, you know, it's just, it's just a line of dialogue, you know, and we
kinda just spit it out, we don't put as much emphasis on it, you know, it's
it's just part of the mission, but it just makes a lot of sense.
You know, what if a guy stopped the subway train and told you,
while everybody else is frozen, that you had to do something? I'm sure you'd probably wanna do it.
And if he's carrying a sword, that helps too, 'cause
you don't wanna mess with a guy with a sword and a pony tail.
Peter Petrelli?
What?
Are you doing this?
You're different without the scar.
It's a Hiro that knows Peter, but not a Peter that
knows who Hiro is and so you just got this strange guy that just
stop in a subway train in the middle of New York, and giving him this prolific message,
this task that he has to do.
I don't have much time. I'm risking a rift just by coming here.
The girl. You have to save her.
What girl?
The cheerleader. It's the only way to prevent it.
Prevent what?
Everything.
Save the cheerleader. Who's the cheerleader? Why have I to save her? How have I to save her?
What scar? What accident did I have?
- Wait! - Save the cheerleader, save the world.
It's terrifying and it's exciting, but it is what
keeps Peter going.
Hiro! Where are ya?
I don't understand!
Peter has no idea what it means, no idea, you know.
But then it starts of getting put back together when, when Peter
visits Isaac and sees his paintings, the cheerleader and...
really it starts to "Ahh!", click and come together like a puzzle.
Wow! This is amazing.
The way the writers connect everything, the seemingless things that don't connect,
they found a way to connect them, it's just the way to bring it together... so brilliant.
Ignore it. It's a wrong number, some japanese guy keeps calling me, leaving messages.
Episode 4 ends with future Hiro telling Peter Petrelli, you know, "My name's Hiro Nakamura, I'm from the future
and I have a message for you". And then, at the end of, you know, episode 5,
you have something that completely parallels the ending of that.
Isaac Mendez?
Who is this?
My name is Hiro Nakamura.
My name's Peter Petrelli.
I've a message for you.
It's a way of future Hiro telling present Hiro his messages
to set off a whole motion that hopefully will change the future that he lives in.