Zibby is joined by bestselling author Aaron Blabley and filmmaker Pierre Perifel for a special sneak peek 5-minute interview about the new The Bad Guys movie. The three chat about the small changes between the books and the movie, what it’s like to direct animated characters, and what was the last thing that made them feel tail-wagging good. Kids, listen in to this one!!

Transcript:

Aaron Blabey: Hello.

Pierre Perifel: Wow, that’s a lot of books for someone who doesn’t have time to read any.

Aaron: That’s right.

Zibby Owens: I know. That’s the irony behind it. There you go.

Pierre: I love the color-coding too.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you so much. Amazing. It’s so nice to meet both of you. I’m Zibby Owens. Nice to meet you. Thank you for providing us with amazing Saturday-afternoon entertainment. My daughter was home with COVID. We were stuck in the house. We were all masked with her really far away watching this movie. It got me through. Thank you.

Aaron: Great. I hope she’s getting better.

Zibby: She’s totally fine. She had no symptoms. In fact, she has the most questions for you. She really wants to know about Diane Foxington. Why was she different in the movie from the books?

Pierre: Different in the movie from the books, I think — go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron: I think in spirit, she’s the same. She has a different name. I actually can’t give you a decent answer as to why she has a different name. It just happened. Her character is very true to the books as far as I’m concerned because she is a character who is the opposite of the Bad guys in many ways. At the beginning, everybody’s judging them because they seem scary. In the books, you get a sense that she’s kind of perfect. In fact, she has a really complicated backstory that makes her very similar to Wolf in many ways, which is why they bond. That’s been persevered really beautifully, but she has a different name. I can’t explain —

Zibby: — I think that’ll do the trick.

Pierre: It’s true that in the movie she’s the greatest villain of the greatest Bad Guys — sorry, Bad Girl — and reformed. In the book, she’s created that league of superheroes. That’s also a little bit of a different — the idea was to make her sensationally cool and badass. That’s something we wanted to keep.

Zibby: I love that. Excellent. Another question from my kids. I hope you don’t mind. How do you direct animated characters? Do you just yell at them and hope that they hear you?

Pierre: Yes, exactly. No, of course not. We can’t really do that because it goes — to create the performances that you see on screen, you go through two different steps. The first one is recording the actor or the actors. We do that in just a sound stage. They have a script. They read the script. They read the lines. I ask them to read them different ways. They read through the sequences. We play together until we find the right tone for each line. Then we cut that together. Then those lines, those recordings based on shots, we send those shots to the animators. Those animators have virtual puppets. Imagine Wallace and Gromit clay puppets. They are not clay. They are CG puppets in a computer. They have a skeleton. They have to move them. We have ways to move with software. That craft is being given to animators. They use the voice. Then based on that voice and based on my instructions and what I want to see for that shot, how I want to see the characters emote and move, they start creating, frame by frame, a little performance and make those characters pop to life. It’s two steps.

Zibby: One of the things I loved was the overall message of the film. It just feels so good when you’re good, the tail wagging. It does. It really does give you that tingle feeling. What was the last thing that you did that gave you that tail-wagging good feeling?

Pierre: Oh, my god.

Aaron: That’s good question.

Zibby: Nothing? You both are bad guys after all. It’s terrible.

Pierre: I made a massive surprise to my kids earlier today. I got tickets for them for Coachella. They were so fucking — sorry. They were jumping around, a thing that made my tail wag big time. Seeing the joy in the eyes is great.

Aaron: You know what? I have to say it’s movie-related. I took my boys to the Australian premiere of this. They’ve grown up with this, obviously, because it was written for them. That was so big. I was worried, actually, because that was written when they were six and eight. Now they’re fourteen and sixteen. I worried the eldest especially might be a little too cool for it now, but they were like six and eight again. It was so beautiful. That was the last time my tail was wagging.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you again for delighting my whole family. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for all of your amazing work.

Aaron: Take care.

Pierre: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you. Take care.

THE BAD GUYS by Aaron Blabey & Pierre Perifel

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