David S. Goyer

David S. Goyer (born 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American screenwriter, director and novelist. He is best known for superhero and science fiction films, and for adapting comic book material to cinema and television, which has made him a familiar name in Hollywood over the past few decades.

He studied at the University of Southern California, where he was a student of the screenwriter Nelson Gidding and later returned to Gidding's class as a guest speaker. He sold his first screenplay, Death Warrant, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, in the late 1980s. Over time he mixed action and horror films with comic book work. A self-described comics fan who used to write to letter columns, he wrote the JSA series for DC Comics, centred on the Justice Society of America, which debuted in 1999.

His name is tied to the Blade trilogy and, above all, to Christopher Nolan's Batman films, written with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. His superhero stories often return to one question: what happens when a person becomes a symbol? Dark City (1998), co-written with Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs, shows his interest in science fiction with a claustrophobic atmosphere. As a director he has made genre films such as Zig Zag and The Unborn.

In recent years his work has spread across other media. He co-created FlashForward, based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer, and oversaw Da Vinci's Demons and Foundation, the latter loosely based on Isaac Asimov's books. He also writes fiction, including Heaven's Shadow (2011), the first book of a trilogy. His legacy lies in how superhero cinema of the 2000s embraced darker plots and characters facing moral dilemmas, while his career continues across television and independent production.