Story By/Lead Actor Kento Kaku & Creator/Series Director/Writer Dave Boyle talk to The Inside Reel about approach, story and thematics 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 This story comes from both of you. Obviously the story came from Kento and Dave, you know, brought your spin to it and obviously did that collaboration.
00:47 Can you talk about the sort of build of the story because there's so many things that go on in terms of mythology, archetypes, obviously, psychology of the family, of the person, of the self, that resonates throughout this entire thing.
01:02 Could you talk about that from the sort of baseline of the story, what you want to accomplish before I go into, obviously, you know, Haru, Gaku, and the tone and everything about the series?
01:16 [Japanese]
01:43 [Japanese]
02:06 [Japanese]
02:26 I got a call from a friend at Netflix who just asked, you know, are you interested in a ninja story? And I mean, I was like, who doesn't love ninjas?
02:36 And then when I read sort of the project proposal that Kento had put together, I really love the idea of a dysfunctional family who are ninjas, you know, I mean, just the possibilities are just so endless.
02:52 And the other thing that I really loved is that it took place in a modern, recognizable Japan that just under the surface of just everyday life, there could be a ninja next to you.
03:05 And I just love that image. I love that idea. I think the thing that I was tasked with and the thing that I tried to bring to it was, first of all, just a tone, like trying to decide on the specific tone of the series.
03:19 And then building out the world of like, you know, how this situation came to be, sort of what happens next for this family, the conflicts among them and everything.
03:30 And I drew a lot of inspiration from real life ninja history, a lot of stuff that, you know, I felt like a lot of the kind of ninja stories of the past had focused on two very specific, you know, the Iga and Koga ninjas that seemed to show up in every single one of them.
03:48 And I got really interested in, you know, the ninja clans of ancient Odawara.
04:17 And I thought, you know, Odawara is such an interesting place now. I thought that that'd be sort of a fun place to set the series and have that be kind of a linchpin of a lot of the world that happens around it.
04:28 You know, all these things that happened in the 1500s still have echoes in today in modern Japan. I thought it was a really, really sort of fun, a fun kind of thing to build a story around.
04:41 And then, you know, just reading about ninjas and how many rules that they had to follow and how many, you know, all the kinds of the really, really sort of how difficult it is to be a ninja.
04:54 And, you know, you put them in modern day life and suddenly they're, you know, they're modern day people, but they're living by this really ancient kind of code of conduct.
05:04 And I thought that that was sort of an, it would be an interesting dynamic to have each one of the family members have different feelings about that and different levels of commitment.
05:13 And so that was sort of the starting point. And then, you know, we worked for a long time on the scripts and Kento was involved in that process as well.
05:23 We had a team of writers here in Tokyo who were also helping to kind of develop the story.
05:28 And, you know, in the end, what we wanted to do, we wanted this to be a family story, but also, you know, have the kind of thrilling, you know, suspenseful, the kind of, because I mean, ninjas are also very scary.
05:42 You know, it's a very, it's a very scary world that they come from. And so we wanted to find that right tonal balance.
05:49 [Music]
06:15 So Kento, the idea of Haru, the, what Dave was talking about is obviously the characterization of him. It's interesting.
06:23 It's a blend of looking at the rules, looking at the code of Shinobi and how that works, but also the idea of him being a modern man, you know, in many ways.
06:33 I mean, he shows his sensitivity and yet he has to kill. You know, there's so many different sort of dynamics at play when you go into the diner at certain points at the beginning.
06:43 And then towards the end, you see sort of that reluctance of, you know, the push of not good versus evil, but the gray that pulls him back and forth, you know, that he needs to do something.
06:55 But sometimes, you know, maybe he doesn't want to do it exactly the way he's expected to.
07:01 Could you talk about that? And then I'll get into the idea of sort of the dynamic of the archetypes, especially with Gakku.
07:07 I think we just talked about good and evil. Another theme of this work is justice.
07:17 I mean, of course, the Tawara family, the Hattori family, is justice, or is BNM justice, or is FUMA justice?
07:27 But I think the interesting theme of this work is that there is justice in both of them.
07:34 I think that the ninja is not a spy, not a magician, but a ninja.
07:46 So, I think that the Japanese ninja has a unique sense of justice that he has to endure and endure.
08:04 And that's what I think is so special about Gakku.
08:08 [MUSIC]
08:18 [SPEAKING JAPANESE]
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08:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]