Hayashi/Yamazaki extra wrote:Q: How did you decide who was responsible for the script of which episode?
Hayashi: The director had already planned out episodes 1-6 in considerable detail and handled the script for episode 1 himself, I was put in charge of episode 2.
Yamazaki: From around episodes 8-11 onward [7], the rough structure of the episodes had been decided upon, but it was still undecided which characters we wanted to focus on and what they would do, so we collected everyone’s ideas and distributed the episodes among ourselves. It was close to a voting system.
[...]
Hayashi: [about klaxxohime] I made an appeal to the director to give her the appearance of a very young child (laughs).
CONTINUE section wrote:Q: Hayashi-san, for this work, you were in charge of the script together with Nishigori-san, but what specifically did you contribute?
A: I performed supporting tasks such as turning the plot Nishigori-san had created into the original script and doing the series composition.
Q: So this means that at the time when you joined, Nishigori-san’s plot, the setting and the rough course of events were already in place?
A: That’s right. The setting was fixed, and there also existed rough sketches for the characters, klaxxosaurs and so on. The outline of the story was already visible to a certain extent.
[…]
Q: Regarding the emotional state of the characters, did you feel that, fundamentally, what Nishigori-san wanted to depict was how the children change and grow up in response to their surroundings, or was it the love between them?
A: Both of them… If I had to choose one, I’d say it’s a multiprotagonist drama. Of course, portraying their love is important as well, but more than that, I got the strong impression that he wanted to write a multiprotagonist drama about these children including Hiro and Zero Two. Because of this, in the beginning, before starting work on the actual script I created a prototype and we compared it with Nishigori-san’s vision, but I tried to properly incorporate such emotional elements. [8]
Q: In depicting such a relationship between the adults and the children, Hiro’s, and by extension the children’s situation, is likened to that of birds. The bird motive in particular is very easy to understand, but why birds?
A: From the initial stages, Nishigori-san really empathized the birds. They’re strongly incorporated in monologues and there are many parts where they’re linked to the characters’ emotions and circumstances.
Q: So I was thinking, maybe it’s precisely because the children were linked to birds and other organic metaphors and inspirations that the Franxx were named after flowers?
A: Hm, now that you mention it… I never asked why they were named after flowers (laughs).
Q: […] The issue containing this interview will go on sale after episode 24, the final episode, has aired, do look for forward to seeing the finished version of episode 24?
A: I really look forward to it! I wrote the script for episode 24 together with Nishigori-san. I think it turned into a spectacular and moving ending.
Q: Had episode 24 already begun to take shape during the initial production stages to some extent?
A: It looked like Nishigori-san had a lot of trouble deciding on a conclusion. He squeezed in small elements even after the broadcast of the series had already started.
Q: I see. When was the script for episode 24 finished?
A: My work was finished around the time the first few episodes of DarliFra had aired. I had originally turned Nishigori-san‘s basic outline of the plot into what could be called a very rough draft of a script, and without finalizing it, Nishigori-san started drawing the storyboard at once.
Footnotes
[7] This sounds a bit strange, 第8~11話辺り以降 basically means „around episodes 8-11 and then everything after that“, which especially clashes with Nishigori’s claim that episode 13 was pretty much planned from the start, so TL /a/non thinks that episode at least should be exempt from this statement.
[8] TL /a/non was not sure if their inadequate knowledge of Japanese is at fault here or if this is indeed worded as ambiguously as it seemed, and cannot tell for sure if そういう情緒的な要素 is supposed to refer to “love” or not.