Ep516 - Dave Boyle, Showrunner Netflix’s ‘House of Ninjas’

“I wanted to be a filmmaker for as long as I can remember,” says Dave Boyle. “I wanted to be a writer-director but after I made my first couple of independent films, I was making more of my living as an editor. I didn’t really start pursuing screenwriting as a professional until I had done a couple of micro-budget films.”

This would include films like Big Dreams Little Tokyo, White on Rice, Surrogate Valentine, Daylight Savings, and Man From Reno. “That’s when I became passionate about writing as the end result. I think it was always a passion of mine, but from the beginning, I had this sort of omnivorous jack-of-all-trades approach until those things melted away.”

This renaissance approach eventually led Boyle to the new Netflix series, House of Ninjas. The story follows The Tawara family, the last shinobi clan. The description reads, “It had abandoned its roots after an incident in the past, but now the family must take on the greatest crisis in Japanese history, one that threatens to shake the nation to its core.”

“As I started focusing more on writing, I wrote my couple of spec scripts and finished Man from Reno, that’s when I started getting more jobs as a screenwriter. The passion was always there but it wasn’t the focus of my career for a long time.”

Being an editor and director also shaped his writing. “You end up in trouble in editing because you realize if you had done this and this while writing, I wouldn’t be in this pickle right now. It definitely taught me a lot about structure. I was making some arrogant mistakes that I thought I could get through directing and editing.”

This three-prong approach also changed the perspective of what he liked to write. “Eventually I realized the stuff that I was addicted to reading was the stuff I should be writing. Initially, I saw myself as a slice of life [screenwriter] for human dramas, but in everyday life, I love thrillers and detective stories. Genre, that’s my true passion and that’s what I should be writing, instead of fitting a square peg into a round hole.”

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