John Orloff: The Man Behind the Owls (of Ga'Hoole)

Matt Patches: Were there films that you and Zack went back to for inspiration? We were discussing some of the 'scarier' films of the past...

John Orloff: In meetings, you always bring up a movie here or there as a common reference point and so you say, 'Oh yeah, remember when this and this happened and that and that?' We didn't do a lot of that; we didn't really talk about other animated movies because Zack and I didn't approach this as an animated movie.

Matt Patches: Which is apparent when you see the film.

John Orloff: We never said we're making an 'animated movie;' we're just making a movie. The way we happened to be making it is the animated way, but we were just making a movie. So we never talked about other animated movies, ever. We did talk a little bit about Star Wars and we did talk about King Arthur. The Guardians obviously have a similarity to Camelot, basically they are Camelot. They're knights that go out and do good, which is what the Knights of the Round Table were supposed to do. Those were our two biggest touchstones, Star Wars and Arthur, but again we didn't belabor it very much. To me when we started talking about the aerial battles, and yeah I guess we talked a little bit about the Death Star sequence in the first Star Wars because its aerial combat and ...yeah so again you don't want to talk about that stuff too much because then it affects you, and suddenly you are just doing that again.

Matt Patches: You didn't want to remake Star Wars with owls.

John Orloff: Right. We talked about it just very briefly and then you kind of throw it away, and move on.

Matt Patches: Zack is such a visual person, I imagine when  he came on board elements of the script may have changed...

John Orloff: Yeah it was a great...it was really fun, it was really cool for me. After he came on board we   and sat down together. The script was still a little long at that point, I think like 130 pages, and so we had two things to do. We had to cut 25 pages and we had to 'Zackify' it.

Matt Patches: [laughs] Zackify...

John Orloff: I mean that in the best possible way.

Matt Patches: Make it more 'awesome.'

John Orloff: That's exactly right! Zack came up with all these f*king ideas that I never thought of and wouldn't it be great if he did this...

Matt Patches: Any specifics?

John Orloff: Yeah there's lots of specifics...for example the scene where Soren is flying and sees this thing called a baggywrinkle, a sort of tunnel in the air, that was in the script, but it wasn't as important a moment in the script. Zack kept on saying he just has this idea where Soren sees the air, he sees the three dimensions of the air... now he didn't mean it in a movie way like, 'Oh it's going to be 3D and its going to be really cool.'

He meant the character is seeing in 3D, the character is having this moment, and so that became a much more visual sequence than I originally thought it would be. It became a much more important sequence in the movie. I mean every scene became incredibly more dynamic and visual when talking with Zack. You know? It just did.

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