Story By/Lead Actor Kento Kaku & Creator/Series Director/Writer Dave Boyle talk to The Inside Reel about style, tone, direction and characterization in regards to their new Netflix action series: “House Of Ninjas”.
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00:00 [Music]
00:15 [Japanese]
00:27 [Music]
00:38 Dave, can you talk about taking sort of that aspect, you know, especially with your background in independent filmmaking, obviously, you know, studying here in America, stuff like that,
00:51 but taking it, finding the right tone, finding the right, obviously, music, obviously you love music and that plays very much into this, but also the pacing, you know, and that's reflected both in the fight sequences, because you'll slow down and, you know, push in,
01:07 you'll speed up and slow down and all those sort of add to sort of the dynamic of what the show is showing and how it feels. Can you talk about that from a stylistic point of view, but also from a directing point of view, because it has to be pinpointed very specific scenes throughout the series?
01:24 I mean, you know, we're dealing with such big themes, justice, family, you know, heroism, right and wrong, and all the tradition, all these kinds of things. They're big operatic emotions.
01:39 But what we talked about, you know, from the beginning was trying as much as possible to make this family feel really real, make them feel like a real family and making sure that this feels like real everyday Japan.
01:54 It just so happens that these operatic, crazy, you know, things are happening under the surface unnoticed by the public. So I think, you know, in terms of directing, we wanted to have the performances just feel, feel, you know, at a good level where they feel real in a lot of ways, naturalistic and real, but also not ignore the kind of operatic big emotions that are under the surface.
02:22 So it became a way for us to kind of tie together all those tones in a way that really, really felt good to us as the creators. In fact, like when we were all getting ready to start shooting and we gathered together the main cast for playing the Tawada family, so Kento, Taya Kimura, and everybody else in the family.
02:46 And we were running through some scenes together and stuff. And one of the things that we did was we just listened to some music together to just to give everybody the idea of this is what the series is going to feel like. We played that song, Our House, the Graham Nash song that actually plays at the opening of the series and also in episode five.
03:06 You must know about the cruise ship incident. I think it's probably a new kind of poison. They're planning something.
03:15 Once everybody kind of just sat and listened to that song, everybody kind of had the idea of, OK, this is the story that we're making. Like it's a poignant story. Yeah, we have a lot of action and bloody violence and stuff like that. But this is a poignant family story about a deep well of emotion.
03:40 And so, you know, as much as possible, we tried not to put a lot of that explanation or things into words. We tried to just, you know, really push on the emotion. And so that's where a lot of the directorial choices came in of just like, you know, not using slow motion in certain places.
03:56 We didn't use it a whole lot in the action scenes. We use it more often in sort of emotional scenes. And then just really trying to make sure that even though we have all these plot, you know, there's tons and tons of plot going on.
04:10 There's lots and lots of stuff going on, but we're not sort of expending our energy on explaining all that, but focusing on the characters who are experiencing that and making that into an emotional experience for the viewers.
04:21 And so music was really a key part of that. I got a shout out Jonathan Snipes, who did the original score. And we took a lot of inspiration from, you know, from kind of 70s like giallo movies, which is a genre that which is sort of a very, very weird out there reference for a ninja show.
04:40 But it just felt like that was something that is big emotions played very straight, you know, but it's also entertaining. And that was sort of the mark that we were going for.
04:51 [Music]
05:18 Kento, I wanted to go back as far as like approaching it from a performance standpoint. You know, this character is very physical. He's very emotional at times, but he's also very strategic.
05:31 And it's funny because you almost physically transform just in your face in many of the scenes, you know, from and this is obviously due to lighting, but just in the poise, your movement, everything, the way you walk, the way you talk, everything.
05:46 Could you talk about getting into sort of that mindset of him and sort of living in this character's shoes? What did it take? I mean, obviously you did the research, but saying that and then becoming that is two different things.
05:59 Can you talk a little bit about that process and being on set doing that, if you don't mind?
06:04 [Foreign]
06:15 [Foreign]
06:44 [Foreign]
07:13 [Foreign]
07:18 I was just going to add to that. You know, we, a lot of times we would kind of be scratching out Haru's lines on set.
07:28 Like we, he, Kento would often come to me and say, do you, do you need this line? Do you need this line? Do you need this line? And then before you know it, there'd be no lines left, which I thought was, which I thought was a wonderful, wonderful instinct.
07:43 [Foreign]
08:12 (whooshing)
08:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]