‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off:’ Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski On Creating Their Dream Project

Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski are the creative force behind Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The creator of the original Scott Pilgrim comic, Bryan Lee O’Malley was determined to make the show and tell a new, fresh story. BenDavid Grabinski was more than happy to go along with that idea. From there, the two collaborated to add new possibilities as well as take the personalities of the original cast and dig deeper into the characters that didn’t receive as much attention. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, they talk about their creative process, rendering the comic in anime, and working with Science Saru, all of which helped make Scott Pilgrim Takes Off a dream project for them.

Awards Daily: You guys did something pretty brave taking this very well-known IP and changing so much but staying true to the style and overall message of the original work. How did you guys deconstruct the story to get there?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: Good question. Having written the books and collaborated on the movie and the game and now years later hearing that Science Saru was interested in Scott Pilgrim, that was the impetus to think about revisiting it. What could we do artistically with an animation studio that powerful? But I was at a loss and then I talked with good friend BenDavid about it, and we had a really good, fruitful conversation about it and got the ball rolling.

BenDavid Grabinski: I really responded to his desire to not do the same story again, and we both loved the idea of a show that was more Ramona-centric and got to spend time with the supporting characters. I then impromptu pitched what if Scott loses to Matthew Patel and seemingly dies. I also had a vague conclusion that it was older Scott who kidnapped him. But the second we had Scott gone we were both very excited creatively about where we could take the story from there and then there was no going back. Neither of us could consider doing the same story again and we felt very lucky that someone let us do this instead of just doing a cover version of the original.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: We were fortunate that someone let us be bold. We weren’t at the budget level where we were getting too much attention and were able to sneak under the radar for a while. Then, once people noticed what we were doing, the show was already coming together and looked really good and that was very helpful.

BenDavid Grabinski: When you do something new, weird and risky it’s amazing how quickly it goes from maybe it’s a bad idea to it being completely normalized. We eventually reached a point that everyone involved forgot that the core idea was extremely risky in the first place, because it was working. But it could have been a disaster! All the best stuff is very close to being a fiasco.

Awards Daily: Touching on some of those changes with old Scott being the villain, so to speak. Scott’s immaturity and his overcoming that is a big part of the original story and here we see him working incredibly hard to get back to being immature, actively fighting for it. How did that concept come into being?

BenDavid Grabinski: It was very much in our core original discussion but not in a fleshed out way. Once we started breaking down the story and working on it we just started chasing the ideas that felt thematically interesting and correct with what we were doing.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: I feel like there was a dip in the middle that this is too cliched, we can’t do this, but we found a way that made us both really happy. Our director Abel Góngora contributed a lot to bringing old Scott to the level he is at the end.

BenDavid Grabinski: I think the real key was casting Will Forte, because there aren’t a lot of actors that could sell this version of Scott in this way. There are shades where he can be really annoying or seem too much like a psycho. I think there’s a great combination of our concept of him, how Abel executed it, and what was inspired by what Will was doing. Will started recording before we had a finished character design of old Scott, so his performance led to Abel and his team doing a design, and then Bryan sketched something inspired by that design and also hearing Will’s performance. So all of those things fed off of each other.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: I forgot that we recorded Will before anyone else because we are trying to find the voice for the character.

BenDavid Grabinski: We hadn’t even seen a character design for him yet, because we thought it was important to get him in early because he was a new character and he was the only one that hadn’t been in any other version. So we wanted Will to feel like he was helping create the sensibility of it. Because he wasn’t following a performance from the movie, and he was doing his own thing.

Awards Daily: As you mentioned, Ramona gets to take center stage and the evil exes get a lot more time. Part of that is we get to see a lot more of Ramona’s background with the exes and she is as much to blame for the pain in the relationships as they are in some cases. So, are these ideas you had in your head a while ago, Bryan, or did they come out in making the show?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: A bit of both. I think I had some regrets, especially after getting to make the movie and meeting all the actors playing the evil exes. I wanted to spend more time with them and it kind of shamed me a little bit. Who are these exes? I felt like I had written them very thinly. So maybe in some way I had that in the back of my head and that I had wanted to flesh these guys out.

BenDavid Grabinski: I think the really fun thing about it was that luckily what Bryan had already done had left room for new shading. There’s a lot of stuff that is already there but then we got to just make it a little more deeper and complicated. Scott Pilgrim’s story is 100% about flawed people, every single person in it is flawed, and we just wanted to make everything messier and more complicated. Where it’s not binary; not all the breakups are one person’s fault, or the conflict was just driven by one person. Or if you felt like it was one way we push it even further. We are not contradicting anything, we just wanted to make it more interesting if we could, something you could only do from having the books come out 20 years ago and there being a movie and a video game. We had both gotten older, and you can kick the tires a little bit more. If it was an original project not based on anything it would have been a bit more of a headache. We just got to build on top of stuff that was already good.

Awards Daily: The Roxy fight and talk was a personal favorite of mine.

BenDavid Grabinski: That episode, I think, is really special and I’m glad it exists.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: The original is like a kid show or a video game with its simplistic morality. We really just wanted to explode all that and look at it from a more adult perspective.

Awards Daily: You also got to poke fun at some of the original ideas, especially the league of evil exes where even if they win they don’t get Ramona, and they can’t even decide which one of them would get Ramona. What was it like playing around with that concept?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: Yeah, it was really funny for me but they never really got to have those kinds of conversations in the original. You never really get to see them together. So that was one of our first big ideas. What if we get to get them all around the table together and they are arguing and bouncing off each other and it’s really funny. I think BenDavid wrote that scene, and it’s one of my favorite things ever!

BenDavid Grabinski: Almost all of the stuff I wrote for episode 2 was part of the first draft because all those people around the table being idiots is just such a fun thing for me to write. One of the first initial ideas was what would happen if Matthew won? That doesn’t mean he gets Ramona, and that just made us laugh a lot. How would he feel about that? Then you take it further and think, how would all of them feel about that? What would Matthew do next? What if he was so angry and felt so confident because he believes he beats Scott? Maybe that confidence leads him to challenge Gideon, and you just start following those emotional threads or comedic threads where they lead you.

Awards Daily: That leads to one of my favorite additions to the story that Julie and Gideon have been previous friends, and he basically becomes a bum living with her after losing to Matthew. Then they have their own strange romance. I’m curious where the idea came that these two toxic people actually liked each other?

BenDavid Grabinski: I had a simplistic pitch of Gideon going on the Dan Aykroyd Trading Places arc of losing everything and moving in with a woman that you never thought he would. It started out as an homage to that and then it got a lot different. The big key to unlocking it was Bryan coming up with the idea of Gordon Goose. The idea that Gideon used to be a different person before the story that we know and what happens when that persona comes back. Then it just became weirder, dumber, funnier, and sweeter.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: The other movie we talked about was The Fisher King, which has a very similar character arc. I love the idea of somebody losing everything and having to build back from scratch and having a relationship at the same time. It was really fun to explore that.

BenDavid Grabinski: I love The Fisher King, and I just realized now that that and Trading Places would make a great double feature. It’s such an interesting thing to create empathy for an asshole by taking everything away from them. When you get to the end of Scott Pilgrim you will be, like, I love this guy but I hate him, and it’s so surprising to make you care about someone who had everything and seemingly didn’t care about anyone. It is a fun challenge as a writer, and I just think as a viewer it is really fun to go on that journey.

Awards Daily: You have both stated in separate interviews that you are big anime fans and that’s what the style Science Saru studio works in. Can you talk about how anime inspired you guys in particular for this project?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: I was a big anime fan when I was in high school and a lot of my early drawings were based around that kind of style, and I started making manga-like comics at that time. So it has been a huge influence on my whole life. I never thought I would get to work with a Japanese Studio especially like Science Saru, who are at the top of their field, and they are wild out there artists. So it was really exciting. The biggest influence from anime on Scott Pilgrim is FLCL, which is a classic six episode show from 2001, I believe. Very wild and zany action and comedy and kissing. It was just so foreign and unique to me at that age, and I like being able to bring that feeling to people.

BenDavid Grabinski: I don’t know what I can add because I have the exact same thing. I love anime, I never thought I’d get to make an anime, I still can’t believe I got to. It was such an amazing, unique opportunity. I don’t have a bucket list because all the coolest things I have done, it never occurred to me that I would get to do them. You don’t grow up watching Akira and think, I’m going to get to make an anime show someday. It feels like a really weird goal. But also to get to work with Science Saru, who I respect for their work and I’m a really big fan. It wasn’t just getting to make an anime; it’s getting to make something by this studio that makes so much work that I already love.

Awards Daily: Final thoughts?

Bryan Lee O’Malley: I’m very happy I got to do this project. We find out that it’s not for everyone, but if you don’t like the show there are still the books and the movie, or you can just throw them all in the trash, that’s fine too. We had to do what we had to do and we had a good time doing it, and it’s just a fun little thing to look back on.