It’s Emotional Business: A Conversation with ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Animated Series Creators Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski

Scott Pilgrim meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers, but learns he must defeat her seven evil exes in order to date her. Then things get even more complicated. Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley.

Having been part of the prime demographic for Edgar Wright’s explosive live-action spin on the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series in 2010, it was both a dose of nostalgia for characters I know and wanted to revisit and a warm welcome to escape once more into this retro-gaming-love-hinged-turn-it-up-to-eleven world, when Netflix released the animated series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

The OG creator, Bryan Lee O’Malley took on the creative challenge of adapting his own work as an animated series, with his dear friend and collaborator BenDavid Grabinski (Are You Afraid of the Dark?). And they did so in spades. It’s not only animation eye candy – it’s a storyteller’s creative dream, from hitting theme out of the park to rich character development – and let’s not forget, a stellar soundtrack.

Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski discussed with Script the challenges of adapting the graphic novel, balancing creative freedom and fan expectations, their favorite scene, and emphasized the importance of a unified vision and tone, and adaptability in bringing their ideas to life. 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Carrying over your animation style from the graphic novel to this series, is really cool to see. I'm so I'm curious about for you as the creator and now running the show and giving it another life. Was there any pressure in terms of fanservice, because you have people who are diehard fans of the graphic novel, or people who grew up watching the live-action version or were you just trusting your instincts on this one?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: I mean, fanservice is always close to the top of our minds, because you can't not do that in this day and age. And fans are just viewers and they're everyone. And we're so fortunate to have a fan base stretching back 20 years. People have a real fondness for the property. So, we tried to take advantage of that as much as we could and play with it, but not be beholden to it. For better for worse, I think mostly for better. [laughs] But I'm sure some fans are miffed that we took a different direction, but I feel like it was for good reasons.

Sadie: In terms of just the overall thematic element of this, when Knives says, 'It's emotional business.' I think that really carries out not just for Scott's journey, but for all the other characters. Was that the North star for you?

Bryan: No, that's really funny that you say that, because I don't think anyone said that. I think that was one of BenDavid's runners, he kept putting 'emotional business' in there. We don't think about how it thematically applies necessarily, but then it just pops out at the end and, you're like, 'Oh, that makes sense. That's what we were talking about the whole time.' Maybe he knew all along, but I think a lot of it is instinct.

Sadie: Did you know the whole time BenDavid?

BenDavid Grabinski: I mean, obviously, anything that you think is a positive element of the show was my idea from the beginning, there were no accidents. [laughs] Nothing is just a joke, it all means something very important. In that case, the weird thing though, is the stuff that we tend to write jokes about or write towards is also emotionally the same bullseye we're trying to hit. The things all kind of fall under the same umbrella where anything that we're having the characters say or do is sort of working in service of some underlying thematic or emotional element. Sometimes, just the way you do it is very dumb.

Bryan: [laughs] Well, because it all feeds together. It's smart and dumb. Once we got to the end, there's a line where Ramona is like, not being beholden to what you've done in the past, 'I'm not defined by what I've done in the past.' And once we got to that line, I was like, 'Oh, that does kind of wrap things up.' And that explains some stuff about Todd and Wallace - all the characters kind of dovetail into this one thing. So, I was like, 'Maybe that's a theme. Maybe that works.'

BenDavid: The book always had a really strong point of view and something to say. And I think that we both just try to take it much further and make it more complicated than it was before - just kind of building on top of it. Because a lot of that stuff is already there. Just this version of the story, we tried to make it just a little bit weirder and kind of bring our own life experience to it.

Sadie: What was that creative collaborative process like breaking the story, laying out these character journeys – basically going to pen to paper and then making the animated series?

BenDavid: The fun thing about all of this is that on a long enough timeline, it starts to get blurred about where things came along in the process, because everything became very fluid from day one, where I had the sort of the initial kernel of the idea of what this new version of the story would be. But the second Bryan responded to that, everything became just us either texting each other back and forth ideas, or one of us writing something, send it to the other person, seeing how they felt about it.

And everything just kept getting more developed, and more different, where the second we had one sort of idea that was from a character perspective, it would lead to ideas for other characters. And it was just like a multi-year process of just making the initial idea that we had for the show, have just a lot more depth to it. And trying to figure out how we could use as many characters as possible in service of that new story.

Sadie: How did you guys initially connect and go, 'Yeah, we should be partners on this and run with it'?

Bryan: We've just been friends for a long time. BenDavid reminded me recently, my ex-wife had a writing group and that's how we met. But neither of us was really into writing in the group setting. And we just kind of started talking outside the group. And eventually, I read one of his scripts I really liked, and we've just been talking about writing and movies ever since. And then whenever we have script problems, we just talk to each other. So, when Netflix wanted me to do a show, I was like, 'I don't know what to do.' And then he had ideas, and I was like, 'Oh, maybe I should latch on to you.'

BenDavid: Yeah, we had nearly a decade of experience of sharing our work with each other or seeing movies together and then talking about them for hours, or seeing musicals or plays. We talk about story a lot, because it's one of the only things I'm kind of comfortable talking about. [laughs] Bryan and I have had 10 million conversations that were just two creative people getting under the hood of things that we love, and we never had any intention of working together. And I do think that the years of us just having that rapport with each other led to this. And I think that by that point, we really knew each other's work.

I also knew what Bryan loved about his own work. I kind of could see a little bit of like, the wizard behind the curtain on these things. And we have a very similar sense of humor. The things that would excite me about what can be done with the story, or the characters, I think, probably on some level, were born out of conversations we had that were never supposed to be work-related.

Bryan: I would have thought it was risky. I probably would have told people it was a bad idea to work with your friend. But at the moment, this became a possibility, it never even crossed my mind that it might be a risk, or a friendship ender, or some shit like that. It's clearly a possibility. But I think our friendship just got stronger doing this together.

BenDavid: But we did have an easy rule from the beginning, which is that nothing would go on the show that either of us hated. And as simplistic as that sounds that really worked for us, which is just leave ego out of it. If there's something Bryan didn't like, it didn't go on the show, if there's something I didn't like, it didn't go on the show. And that kind of simple rule behind all of it, helped us avoid [laughs] stuff. And I also just think it also ends up making it feel like one voice.

Sadie: Going into the overall creative process to hiring your directors, the animators, the music, and the rhythm of the show - what were you looking for in making sure all these minds are staying consistent with your tone and what you want to do in this series?

Bryan: It's a very unique show because it came about with the animation studio Science SARU, it was the first collaborator before BenDavid. They were interested in doing a Scott Pilgrim show and they had this relationship with Netflix. And then I started thinking about it. And then BenDavid came on board. But our third collaborator is Abel [Gongora], our director, who works with Science SARU, and he just shouldered so much of it.

Everyone assumes I drew a lot of stuff for the show, but I drew almost nothing for the show, because they just have a squad of an international team of artists that are just incredible - way better than me. So, we just kind of fed our scripts into a box and it came out as a show. We just had to comment on it as it came out. And that's really all we had to do. There was no hiring process from our end. So, it was all kind of opaque to us, but it was pretty magical.

BenDavid: On the music end, we did the hiring. Just because that was something that's very important to us. And Abel, we trusted in to hire all the right people for everything. And he obviously did, we had no input in it in the best way possible. But on the music end, we chose our collaborators for that very specifically, because it's such a music specific project. And in a way, it's almost like a musical and it literally becomes one in the finale, so there was no way to not have the music have an overlap with our writing process.

Bryan: Yeah, we kind of ended up being our own music supervisors, we picked all the needle drops, we produced the songs very closely with Joe [Trapanese] our composer, and Anamanaguchi the band. And I was helping Anamanaguchi - I did vocal demos for some of the songs - for “Sex Bob-Omb.” We were just very hands on with the music.

BenDavid: We somehow have music writing credits. I may never have that again, where there's songs out in the world where when you look at the writers, one of them is me. [laughs] But, that's the fun of it, because it's a show about people and bands and creative people. And the stuff that they are creating is sort of organically connected to every other element of it. 

And Bryan was someone who was in bands and that led to his inspiration for the comic in the first place. He was a guy in bands writing a comic about a guy in bands. And we just took that even further because this time, we had to create new music because the movie, Edgar [Wright], just had all kinds of brilliant stuff. But we had to do our own thing, but also something that was complimentary to it.

Sadie: Yeah, and it works. There's that moment where Knives and Kim are having their first little jam session, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that is so real on so many levels.’ It's so cool just how you guys captured that.

BenDavid: That's my favorite thing to have any involvement with. I saw it...at a screening, and that scene is my favorite thing. I don't know if I'll ever top it in terms of just having my name on a project and then a sequence just working that well.

Bryan: It's so complicated making a scene like that and making it feel organic. I'm so proud of it.

Sadie: Do you guys ever think you'll ever have a musical version of this at some point?

Bryan: People have pitched it over the years. It feels a little thin. [laughs] That's why we slightly did a parody of it. We were originally working with another writer who had tried to pitch before, kind of like a joke of a Scott Pilgrim musical. And it was just like, let's just play with this and just do a little medley. We stood around the piano with Joe making up songs one day, and that all became the musical that's in the show, which was a really, really fun day.

BenDavid: Yeah, that was a great time. But my general rule of thumb for anything Scott, is that I have no plans to do anything. But if someday someone came to me with some harebrained idea in any sort of medium, I'd think about it before I said, 'No.' If someone came to me at some point and said, 'We really want to make a musical.' I would take the idea seriously and talk to Bryan about it. But beyond that, I have no plans for anything.

Bryan: There's no current plans. It doesn't seem like impossible…you know, in a 100-year span or something, and maybe one day it could happen.

BenDavid: An animated show seemed impossible. So, I'm smart enough now to not write anything off. There was no point in my life when I woke up one morning and said, 'Someday I'm going to make a Scott Pilgrim anime.' And I haven't had a day where I woke up and said, 'I'm gonna make a Scott Pilgrim musical.' So, I think there's some sort of lesson learned there.

Bryan: The unknown unknowns as they say.

Sadie: Are there types of stories you're looking forward to exploring in your writing down the road?

Bryan: I'm always just expanding outward and learning so much and buying too many books and reading too many books. For me, it's always the push and pull between, like, wanting to write everything and then editing it down to one thing.

Sadie: It's like a curse where you have too many ideas. You're like, 'How do I choose one and run with it?'

Bryan: Right. And Scott Pilgrim was already kind of like a kitchen sink idea. So, it's like, how do you follow that up with anything? It's already so popular. I don't have enough years in my life left to make something that popular again. So, I'll just tinker.

BenDavid: I definitely have years in my life to make something that popular again.

Bryan: Oh yeah, yeah, he's got plenty of time.

Sadie: What about you, BenDavid? Anything that you're itching to tackle?

BenDavid: Well, I'm working on some stuff now that does have a little thematic overlap. My real desire is to just try to make sure I don't accidentally keep telling the same story over and over again. So it's actually a different impulse. But also, I have the eternal curse of every time I finish a thing and start a new project, I feel like I forgot how to do it, or I never knew how to do it in the first place. So, it's a very weird cycle of like, you can get all the way to the end of that show and then think, 'Well I don't have any ideas for a show. How do you even write a show? What is that job?’ [laughs] It's like my brain suddenly completely wipes everything clean. And then I feel like I'm back from scratch as a creative. But that makes things exciting.

I think I'm just always trying to make sure that I'm doing something new that feels like no one else could have made. I don't mean in terms of quality. I just mean, like, no one else would have done something this weird [laughs] except me or me and my partner, as in this case with Bryan. At the end of the day, I just felt like we made a Scott Pilgrim show that no one else would have made. And maybe that was a mistake, but that's up to someone else to decide. [laughs] I just like making things that I feel like, just shouldn't exist otherwise.

Bryan: Right, getting away with it.

Sadie: Any advice for writers wanting to break into animation, either feature or TV?

BenDavid: I think your collaborators are everything. In our case, we were very fortunate to have people who we had a lot of respect for, and we think are geniuses in our field. So, we just had to figure out when to not get in their way. And I think that the show would never be what it is without Bryan - I couldn't do it in a million years without him. But if Bryan sucked or they sucked, then that would be a problem. [laughs] So my real dumb simple advice is just try to make sure that you're putting together a team of people who are trying to make the same show or can enhance each other's work.

Bryan: Yeah, we were really fortunate that everyone really felt like they were paddling in the same direction, to such a degree that we were going like twice as fast, twice as hard. It's my first show, maybe my last show. So that's pretty good advice.

I think in terms of scriptwriting, I found that I learned a lot doing comics. Single-issue comics have to be super short, like a 22-page script. And it was the same with TV episodes for this. So, we had to keep cutting them down and down and down just to make room for animation or the life of the animators. Learn to be concise and get a lot of jokes and mileage out of a few lines if you can.

Watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off exclusively on Netflix.