Screenwriter John Orloff might be a veteran in the movie industry, but The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole 3D marked the first time the writer ventured into animated features. (His previous works include writing A Mighty Heart and episodes from Band of Brothers.) Though there are many things he was able to draw on his experience for, writing for a new genre of film came with it’s own challenges. The movie might have been adapted from a book for young adults, but the dark subject matter made Orloff consider the history of animated pictures and what appealed most to him about feature films today. We spoke to him about why he decided to enter the fantasy realm.
This is part one of a two part series. In the next installment, we speak to Kathryn Lasky who wrote The Guardians of Ga’Hoole books on what it’s like to see your books adapted into films, what the difference is between writing for novels and writing for movies and if she regrets anything in the film.
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Michelle Castillo: Had you read The Guardians of Ga’Hoole books before you started writing?
John Orloff: I had not read the books, and my kids had not read them either. An executive at the studio I worked with on a picture called A Mighty Heart called me in. She asked, “What else interests you?” I said science fiction and fantasy. As a kid I was always into science fiction and fantasy. And she said, “That’s very nice,” and I thought I’d never hear back from her. Six weeks later, Courtney, the executive, sent me The Guardians of Ga’Hoole books. I read the first one, and it was like no other fantasy book ever read.
MC: It can be a good or bad thing that a movie based of source material has a built-in audience. Did this influence your writing?
JO: Absolutely, (appealing to reader and non-readers) has to be a goal. You can’t just make a movie for people who read the book. You actually have to make the movie for people who haven’t read the book.
When you write a script, you have no idea if the movie is even get the go ahead. My job as the writer is just to write the best movie I can and not think about sets and costs and can we do it. My job is just to come up with the best story we can. That might sound trite, but that’s true. But that’s also what’s good.
Then it gets more complicated. Once a director comes on board, and the movie gets greenlit then more parts come into the process. We would have loved the movie to be two hours and 15 minutes long, but we had to make it 90 minutes. The first draft was 160 pages, and we had to cut it down to 100 pages, which believe me was not an easy task.
MC: Did you write this movie for a specific audience?
JO: I think that I don’t think about that. I really just think about writing a good story. I think everything else will take care of itself. I think we were hoping to write a movie to appealed to young and old – I know it sounds cheesy. I’ve been to a couple moves with my kids where I wanted to slit my throat after 10 minutes, but my kids enjoyed it. We wanted something everyone could enjoy.
MC: How does the writing process start for you?
JO: I often start from page one up and read the whole script to where the blank page is.
MC: For this movie, did you hear the characters in your head? Did you ever imagine that the owls were Australian?
JO: Very much so, but in my first draft, I didn’t necessarily think Australian accents. I’m really glad they went with that choice. At least to an American ear, we’re so used to epic fantasies to not sound American. It helps us put a little distance between us and the story to help us accept it as a fantasy.
MC: It has some dark parts for a novel, but especially for an animated feature. Were you worried how that would translate on the screen?
JO: Maybe that’s what attracted me to it. When was the last time you saw Snow White or Bambi or Pinocchio? The early animated movies, especially when Walt Disney himself was making them, were very different from the last ten or 20 years of animation movies. One of the things that attracted me to it was I love Pixar movies – they’re probably best films of 10 to 15 years – but there can be other kinds of animated movies. Something attracted me to go back to the roots of animation and make something that does have a little harder edge to them than we’ve been seeing in animation today.