When 44-year-old writer/director Koki Mitani was young, he got so excited watching "Twelve Angry Men," a classic American jury-room film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, that he wanted someday to make his own original version.
And he followed through on that wish -- in 1990, Mitani's reworking of the original screenplay by Reginald Rose, "The Gentle Twelve," brought him to prominence in the theater world. Now a torchbearer for cutting-edge, mainstream drama, Mitani held the nation's TV audiences in thrall in 2004 with his weekly episodes of "Shinsengumi" on NHK, an adventure series charting the bloody, last days of Japan's feudal system in the mid-1800s that starred a member of the pop idol group SMAP, Shingo Katori.
Before he made his version of the play, Mitani had discovered there actually once was a jury system in Japan, from 1928-43, and that most of the cases that came before the juries resulted in acquittals. Putting the two together -- his U.S. inspiration and the idea of judgment by jury in Japan -- Mitani came up with "The Gentle Twelve," an engrossing depiction of human nature and a brilliant analysis of the workings of the Japanese mind, both individually and in a group situation.