NYCC 2023: Scott Pilgrim Creator Bryan Lee O'Malley (Plus Bendavid Grabinsky) Talk to Anime Herald

Note: Due to the time constraints, this will be published on the main Anime Herald site next week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Author: Seth Burn
• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

io9: Was there ever a version of the show where you didn’t use the film cast?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: We didn’t know if we would have the cast. We had to start writing and planning it without knowing. At a certain point, we thought, “If we can’t get one of them, we probably shouldn’t use any of them. We should just recast the whole thing, because it would feel so weird to have almost everyone, and then one person ‘clangs.’” We definitely talked about it. Fortunately, they all said yes pretty early on. We were just blessed to have them.

Comic Con dot com: Considering the way that the book and the movie developed in parallel, was part of the appeal [in] coming back to this world bringing a lot of Ramona’s story into this version, since that kind of didn’t get a chance to be part of the film?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: Right, because yeah, the film was being developed alongside and it probably influenced the way I was writing the last couple of books. The first draft of the movie was around books three and four. I was working on book six while the movie was being worked on, so they kind of knew what I was doing.

The movie had to “Go, go, go!” And it has to mostly be about Scott’s story. So yeah, it definitely appeals to have more Ramona. But not just that. Try to get more of everyone. Ironically, except for Scott. But we did some fun stuff with Scott too.

Anime Herald: This series allowed us to spend a lot more time with the evil exes. Is this something you had thought about? Trying to develop their own stories within the Scott Pilgrim universe?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: It’s something I had thought about over the years. Especially after meeting the actors, and what the actors brought to those characters. “I could have done so much more with these guys in the books.” I was young and naive; I didn’t know what I was doing. Over the years, I’ve thought “There could have been more of this, there could have been more of that.”

The anime was a really cool opportunity to do that. But, it had to make sense. It had to be part of a larger story that made sense to me. When we settled on the plot of this version, it really appealed to me to do those scenes. To have more villain scenes. I love anime villain scenes. I always think of Sailor Moon. The villains going up to the main villain and asking what their next assignment is. Scenes like that always appealed to me. I always pictured in my head that those scenes are happening somewhere in the background of Scott Pilgrim. This time, we put them in the foreground.

Agents of Fandom: You mentioned you didn’t want to replace one or two of the original voice actors if they weren’t able to return. What was the reassembling process like? Was there anyone super gung-ho? Was anyone tougher to lock down?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: Honestly, almost all of them were super gung-ho, which is really impressive. We sent out a letter. Edgar Wright wrote a nice note. Me and BenDavid (Grabinski) wrote a nice note. We emailed it out. I remember it was around noon. We were writing. We were in my office. BenDavid was lying on my couch. I think within fifteen to twenty minutes at least one person wrote back, “I’m in!”

We were like, “What?!” We started freaking out. The next hour or two we kept getting emails. We were not concentrating on work at all. It was a really exciting day. And it was unilateral. The biggest stars, the smallest stars. Everyone was like “Fuck yeah!” It was a beautiful day.

Obviously, there’s more complications when everyone is telling their agents they want to do it. Ultimately, it all worked out, so I’m really happy.

Vital Thrills: You talked about how you have these side stories in the back of your head. I’m wondering if there’s anything from the development of the comic book, that got left out of the comic book, that wound up in the show?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: The only thing I think about is the twins’ story, and maybe a bit of Roxy, too. Roxy and the twins later in the comics. I had more flashbacks and more backstory in mind for Ramona and those characters. Ramona’s college journey. I had mapped it out, and I never got to use it in the books. I think we got it in. It’s still not as much as I would have originally thought I would have done but I think you get the gist of it in this version, which I’m happy about.

io9: How did you go about updating the series, which is very of its time, and has, for the lack of a better word, kind of a shitty main character.

Bryan Lee O'Malley: You have to use a certain definition of “shitty.” I think he’s a well-written shitty main character. People are still arguing about him twenty years later, so I think I’ve done something right.

We found a way to work with the other characters a bit more, and look at Scott from new angles. Ultimately, I don’t think he’s a shitty character. I think he does some questionable things. He’s not doing it out of malice. I’m not going to sit here defending him all day. People will have to watch the show to see how we handle that. I did try to handle it with all the sensitivity I could.

Comic Con dot com: The opening credit sequence feels like the history of anime title sequences. How important was it to get that anime feel?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: That was the first thing in our outline. We love anime openings. Let’s do a cool one. We were super hands-off with it. I think that was the key. We asked Science SARU to do something cool. I sent them some clips of anime openings that I like. Let’s find a Japanese song. They found a Japanese band. They sent us five bands. We liked one, Necry Talkie.

Necry Talkie wrote a song for the show. I don’t know if you’ve seen the lyrics translation. It’s about being in an indie band. It’s very specific to the show. It has such a good energy. The same person who directed the third episode, directed the opening. It happened late in the process. It’s still pretty new to me. I love everything they did. It brings it back to the comics, back to the video game. You can feel the love for Scott Pilgrim in that opening, but you can also feel that it’s foreign, it’s anime, it’s something else. I love how it all came together.

Anime Herald: Lucas Lee, himself, is about 100 feet away from us. Have you ever considered expanding into the Lucas Lee universe?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: We’ve definitely talked about it a lot. Not officially, but yeah. As we were writing this we thought “We should do a Lucas Lee movie, It would be so cool.”

Anime Herald: It would be so cool.

Bryan Lee O'Malley: I don’t know if it would ever happen. If the show is a hit, and Chris wants to do it, I would love to do anything with Lucas Lee. He was a standout; as we were writing this, we thought, “Oh, we could write that character forever.”

Agents of Fandom: Scott Pilgrim’s story has existed in multiple different mediums, and the main portion of the story is the fights. Did the anime medium allow you to try something new with the fight choreography that you hadn’t been able to do in the other mediums?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: Yeah. Anime has the power of anti-gravity. You don’t have to use wires or anything. If you can dream it, and draw it, it can happen. For the most part, what BenDavid and I learned was to write as little as possible. They would go wild and come back with something amazing. We’d try to shape it a little bit. We’d rewrite the scripts to match what the storyboards were giving us.

Those scenes in particular, every big action set piece, we’d take a leap of faith. We’d ask Science SARU. Every time, they did something incredible. I’m really proud of them for all the scenes.

Vital Thrills: The movie had to compress the story so much. Was the anime a bit truer to what you had in your head when you were doing the books?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: On some level, I guess that might be true. What I specifically had to do was write the characters the way I would have written them back then. And try to not think about the actors, and the fans, and everything that’s happened in the last fifteen years. And then you bring the actors in, and they’re doing this version that’s so close to my heart.

But then, they bring something new to it. I think any time you’re doing something like this it will evolve in a new direction. We really had to embrace that. I think, hearing the actors… they’ve all grown up, gotten better at acting. But [they] also aged. Their voices sound a little different. Hearing that, paired with the drawings… that’s the magic of anime. I’m super happy with how all the characters feel. They all feel like themselves to me.

io9: What was the narrative editing process like?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: We wanted to make the story legible to people who hadn’t seen the movie or read the books. The story beats are kind of still there, even though the story has changed a lot. Ultimately, I had to put the books away after day one of writing. I thought about them a lot, I reread them. But, I didn’t want to be too beholden to them. I wanted to “feel” the story, as opposed to doing a transliteration of it.

Comic Con dot com: What was the process for rebuilding the musical landscape?

Bryan Lee O'Malley: It was a little scary. The first thing I did was hire Anamanaguchi, who did the video game soundtrack. They have so much versatility. I think they proved that here. I basically wrote the Sex Bob-omb songs with them. BenDavid keeps telling everyone I sang the Sex Bob-omb songs initially. All the demos are me. I was doing Kim, too. 1-2-3-4, in higher register. I’ve always loved writing songs. I didn’t want it to be all about me, so, it’s mostly the band. We had so many different things I wanted to do. Indie music isn’t the only kind of music I like. We tried to go into new directions. At the end, it gets pretty wild, pretty eclectic.

It felt a little boring to redo the same songs. We have some nods to the songs. It’s kind of similar to redoing jokes. It might feel a little flat. We tried to come up with something new for each of those moments.

Anime Herald: When this project was just a glint in your eyes, what was your pitch to the studios?

BenDavid Grabinski: It was a little different than that. Edgar Wright and the studios had reached out to Bryan about possibly being involved in an adaptation. Bryan and I had dinner, just as friends. He was talking about how he wished there was a new way to tell the story. He felt like doing the exact same story again would be a mistake. The movie worked so well. The video game was great. What’s a new way into it? I had a bunch of ideas immediately that he loved. At the end of dinner he said “I want to do that version of the show.”

He went back and told Edgar about it, and talked with Netflix. He told them it was it was important to him to work with me and do this version of the show that we had come up with. We had a meeting where we were talking through our reasoning. We wanted to do a version of the story that was very surprising at every turn. When we were having a conversation about our intention behind it, everyone seemed to understand it. They knew we had a way to make the story surprising, and emotional, and give the fans something they would love, and be surprised by. And something that the people who were unfamiliar with the story would react to.

I think they could tell we were very passionate about it. When Edgar had our back and vouched for our version of the story, it just came together. There was never a literal pitch, but there were conversations about pros and cons of our version of it.

Agents of Fandom: Now that you’ve revisited the Scott Pilgim universe, are re-inspired to continue with it, and if so, what medium would you want to work in?

BenDavid Grabinski: The honest truth is we put everything we possibly could into this show. We only saw the last episode a few days ago. At the moment, I feel like I can’t even think about anything past November 17th. I love this world. I love the characters. I have a million ideas. Maybe November 17th my brain might reset, but for now, no.

Vital Thrills: In the books and the movie she’s an Amazon.ca delivery girl. In this, she’s a Netflix movie delivery girl. Did you find it ironic that they’re sending out they’re last inventory as we speak?

BenDavid Grabinski: It is not product placement. There’s a Twitter account that was called “product placement” and it had this listed. Bryan and I just thought this was funny, and a good way to let you know this isn’t a present day thing. When we initially presented it, they were like “Do you want to do something else?”

Bryan and I told them, “no.” They said they would have to talk to legal. We thought, “you can figure it out.”

It just felt like a fun signifier that this was a nostalgic piece from a different time.

io9: What is “Scott Pilgrim time?”

BenDavid Grabinski: “Scott Pilgrim time” is a funny thing Bryan keeps saying because we both have different ideas of when this takes place. Some people think the books take place in the mid 2000’s. In my headcanon, I always think Scott Pilgrim as 2010. Our idea of “Scott Pilgrim time” is in that vague zone of the mid 2000’s to 2010’ish.

Anime Herald: Knives Chau was given more screen time. Was that something you intended to do, to give her a reboot?

BenDavid Grabinski: Absolutely. The most important thing for us doing this show was to give depth and layers to characters and put them on journeys different than what you had seen before. For us, we wanted to give Knives some unexpected arcs that had nothing to do with her relationship with Scott. That felt like the right thing if we were going to do a new version of the story. I love that stuff.

Agents of Fandom: All the cast members are in very different parts of their careers now. Did that make it difficult to get the cast together? Did having more experience allow the actors to have more rein with their characters?

BenDavid Grabinski: Scheduling is really hard no matter what you are making, or how successful you are. To have all of those people who are very successful and popular and trying to figure out how to get all of that done is just a giant pain in the ass. It has nothing to do with anything, except logistics of people being all over the world, and us having needs of when episodes had to be done.

The thing that was really great is everyone was so excited about doing the show, and they had such a good experience making the movie, they were doing whatever they could to figure it out. I think everyone has their life experience, which makes their work even better. They’ve spent so much time thinking about the characters. They were great when they did the movie, but they’ve become even better actors as they’ve worked more in their careers and grown up. I felt like we were given perfect ingredients, so when I was baking the cake it was hard to mess it up.

Vital Thrills: Do you think this show was an opportunity to “De-magic pixie girl” her?

BenDavid Grabinski: We’ve never thought about her in that way. I’ve always thought she was more complicated than that. The most important and exciting thing for us was to do more with Ramona this time. The movie only gives you two hours. The video game was about beating the shit out of people. We felt like we had a good opportunity to give her more shading and make her more complicated and interesting. That was one of our “North Stars” for the project.

io9: What would you imagine a Gen Z version of these characters would be like? They are all very millennial.

BenDavid Grabinski: I don’t know how these people would exist in a different time period. It feels like who they are, and what they do, and what their passions are of that time. I think that if you moved it to present day, you’d have to rethink everything. I don’t think I’m equipped to decide what Envy would be like in the age of TikTok. I think it would feel really false. I wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

In the same time period, it feels organic that they have the same jobs and interests. Also, they’re in a lot of places in Toronto that no longer exist. Science SARU flew to Toronto to do photo references. A lot of places from it are gone. It’s more of a nostalgia piece.

Comic Con dot com: Is Ramona’s star hand bag poised for a return?

BenDavid Grabinski: It’s definitely in the show. You can’t have Ramona without that bag.

Comic Con dot com: Oh, by return I meant seeing it again at Comic Cons, because there was that run when everyone had one.

BenDavid Grabinski: We’re having a giveaway at our panel that’s in that ballpark. I wouldn’t mind seeing it around. Everyone wants to make something that suddenly becomes a Halloween costume.

Comic Con dot com: Will Scott Pilgrim always be part of your blood?

BenDavid Grabinski: I wouldn’t mind if people really liked the show and I unfortunately had to talk about it forever. What a horrible curse.

I think it becomes more interesting the older you get, because you have more perspective about that time in your life. I was hoping the show would be emotionally resonant in some complicated and nuanced ways that come from writing it, when you are not 23. Bryan wrote the books when he was that age. When you look back at it later I think you have more of an understanding of why you did what you did. It becomes more nuanced, where back then, you were moving at 200 miles per hour. You don’t have the time to be self-aware.

Anime Herald: Did any of the original voice actors have any thoughts about their characters and how they would evolve that ended up getting into the show?

BenDavid Grabinski: No. When we started talking with them about it, they already had the scripts and were really stoked about it. Maybe if it was live action…

They have pitched us some ideas about things they think that would happen after this season. But in terms of this story, they were just on board for all of it. Sometimes they’d say, “Wouldn’t it be fun if this happened at some point?”

In terms of the story, they were really excited about all of the new stuff they were doing. They didn’t object to any of it thankfully.

Agents of Fandom: As a fellow Canadian, I appreciate how Canada-focused the show and movie are. Why Toronto, Ontario Canada of all places for the story to be located?

BenDavid Grabinski: Bryan grew up in North Bay, and lived in Toronto when he wrote the books. He was in his 20s, and he knew people in their 20s. They were in Toronto and in bands. He ended up putting his imagination and life experiences into it. He ended up making this mythologized version of Toronto.

There was this one episode that was going to take place primarily in America. I remember pitching that to Bryan and he said, “Absolutely not! Are you out of your mind?”

We’re all very protective of this Canadian magical land that doesn’t really exist, but exists within the magical world of Scott Pilgrim.

Vital Thrills: I heard you on Best Movies Never Made. I heard you talk about talk about being a ten-year overnight success story. Is the fact that this came together so quickly and seamlessly a feather in your cap now?

BenDavid Grabinski: The difference between this and everything else… I’ve been a screenwriter and filmmaker since 2005… I’ve pitched on so many things where you come in and you have a big idea and people get afraid of the big idea. The difference here is that when I was talking with Bryan about it, Bryan doesn’t worry about risk or anything. He’s just thinking, “What is the best version of the story?”

This was one of the only times I’ve had where I said “This is a really big idea of what we could do” and someone immediately goes “Oh yeah. Obviously. Big ideas are great.”

This was finally an opportunity where we were never worried about taking too big of a swing. Bryan was very supportive of us doing the most interesting, coolest, surprising version of the story.

A lot of my career is someone sending me a comic book. I’ll pitch them what I think is a really fun idea, and they’ll come back “Eh, can’t we make it exactly like this movie?” Luckily, Bryan doesn’t think in that way. In every moment we were asking “What’s the best version this story can be?”

I’m a little spoiled, because there’s some stuff that happens in this, that if I pitch something like it they’ll say “Never bring this guy into our office again. I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Luckily, the rules of the Scott Pilgrim universe are so big and exciting. If you’re making another movie and you say “Suddenly, everyone is having a video game fight” they’ll ask “What are you talking about?”

You don’t get that with this project.

Note from the panel:

Netflix reached out to Bryan with the news Science SARU wanted to make a Scott Pilgrim anime.