How the Tale Began...

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Credit: Scholastic

How the Tale Began...

Matt Patches: How did you come to discover Guardians of Ga'Hoole and eventually nab the job to pen the script?

John Orloff: I wrote a movie for the same executive at Warner Bros called A Mighty Heart. Warner didn't end up making the movie, Paramount did, but the executive and I really got along. Afterwards, she asked me what else I am interested in and I said, 'Well you're not going to believe this, I've said this a million times and nobody ever listens to me. I really love fantasy, science fiction, but nobody will hire me on these jobs and I love them.'

She said, 'Oh really? Well okay.'

The meeting ended and I didn't hear anything for about six or seven weeks. She called me up and she said, 'We have these books that...and I remember how you said you like fantasy and I'd like you to take a read.' So by the time I finished the first book I was like, 'I'm all in.' It was like nothing I ever read before.

Matt Patches: And what was it about the books that particularly inspired you? I mean there's so much fantasy out there, what was the spin that was really unique to you?

John Orloff: It was the world, you know, most fantasies are derivative, it all seems to come from Tolkien. There are, of course, exceptions and I would say Ga'Hoole is one of the exceptions. I just really fell in love with a fantasy world that had nothing to do with Tolkien.

In the books, and we tried to get it in the movie but we just didn't have enough time. In the books it's actually sort of in a post-apocalyptic world, humans existed ...long gone... called 'The Others', and originally the pure ones palace was a destroyed human structure, we just couldn't get that into the movie. We only had 105 pages and it was already hard enough to distill the thousand pages of book into 105 pages, so unfortunately that's a little bit that didn't make it into the movie. But again, that was part of the thing that was like, "Wow, this is really a cool universe."

The battle cause and this whole idea of, 'Wow, if we make this right and there's this aerial combat, like aerial hand to hand combat, it's kind of like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Star Wars and air...' I mean it was just like nobody's ever f*king tried to do anything like this.

Then imagine, I hear that [Zack] Snyder wants to make it, which was like a couple months after I finished my first draft and I was like,"Are you sh*ttin' me?"