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.
[youtube id =”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_lMihSKkgA”%5D
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.
SPOILERS START
MC: What had to be adapted from the book to the screenplay?
JO: In the book – Kludd (the protagonist’s brother) actually kicks Sorren (the protagonist) out of the nest (instead of them both falling out together in the movie.) Sorren was actually kicked out of the nest by his mean old brother.
Also, Kludd is Metal Beak (the leader of the villains), but in the movie he’s a different character. What we eventually learn in the books is in the time that it takes Soren escapes from St. Aggies and find the Guardians, Kludd became Metal Beak. In the movie we didn’t have time to show all that, so Kludd emerges wounded and takes the mask from the dead Metal Beak, sort of saying that he’s going to become him in the next movie.
I pitched that to Kathryn Lasky, the author of the book, and she liked it.
MC: So you were talking to Kathryn while you wrote the screenplay?
JO: Yeah, we talked on the phone because she was really, really open to the idea that – and not all novelists are – that cinema is different than literature, and you have to make changes to make it work. We both agreed that the most important part of the movie was keeping the characters and the spirit of the book rather than the literal book. Two big changes are when Soren is kidnapped he is taken to St. Aggies, which is like a dark, concentration camp kind of place. In the book St. Aggies is completely different from the Pure Ones (the group of villains who run St. Aggies). I asked her, “What if the concentration at St. Aggies? What if that was run by the Pure Ones? There was a long pause, and she said, “Oh I wish I thought of that.”
I did the same thing with Stephen Ambrose with Band of Brothers Mariane Pearl with A Mighty Heart. I think it’s important to honor the source material. I think if you keep the communication lines open it’s good. The more you keep an author in the process, the more happy they’ll be with the end result.
END SPOILERS
[youtube id =”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7FNaD44OEc”%5D
MC: Who was your favorite character to write?
JO: Ezylryb, the grizzled old former warrior who is also a poet. I just thought he was a really, really interesting character. I loved this idea that Soren had been told these stories of a mythic warrior who is an enormous owl, and he meets him and he’s this small screech owl, and he’s also a poet.
Again, I wish I could have had 20 more minutes. I love that character. It doesn’t matter now. We don’t need to go into that. I would have spent more time with Ezylryb and Soren and their relationship, but the reality of the movie business is we had to make a certain length. Unlike lord of the rings where you can make a 4-hour directors cut because you shot it, in animation you only render and spend on the stuff that you’re going to use.
MC: Did the fact that it was animated change how you approached the script?
JO: I never thought of it as an animated feature. When I think of an animated feature, I think of the wonderful films of Pixar, which happen in a very exaggerated universe. The characters have bigger eyes than they would in real life.
We always set out to make the film we made. I don’t know how we would get people in owl costumes or train birds. It was always making as real a movie as possible.
One of the things I really liked was having a live action director (Zach Snyder, who) would give the movie a 3D feel – and I don’t mean 3D with the glasses. I mean where he put the camera in the screen. He would make a tracking shot; he would make a wide shot. He would do things an animation director wouldn’t do because an animated director doesn’t think of that.
We started making this movie almost 4 years ago way before Avatar came out. This idea was an incredibly different idea of photo real animation. We talked a while how we could take advantage of a fact that we could make this animated owl do things that we couldn’t with trained owls. How do you make owls have had to hand combat in the air? You can’t.