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Legend of the Guardians: Writer John Orloff

Writer John Orloff explains how, with the help of technology, he never felt limited when creating the film world of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.

How did you get involved with Guardians?

An executive I knew at Warner asked me what kind of movies I was interested in and I said I’d love to do a fantasy or sci-fi film, but nobody hires me for that because they want me to write non-fiction-based material. She sent me a number of books, including a full book set of Guardians. I read the first one and thought it was unlike any world I had ever seen before, it wasn’t incredibly derivative of Tolkien like so many fantasy books are and it had its own universe and its own rules. That was almost four years ago.

The film condenses the story of the first three books. Why?

One of the first things I said when I read them was that the first book was not really a complete story, and the first three should be one movie broken down into three acts. That meant taking 900 pages of original source material and distilling it into a 105-page screenplay, which was one of the biggest challenges – figuring out how to remain faithful to the spirit and ideas of the source material but at the same time making it into a movie that was not nine-hours long.

Being an animated film, do you feel less limited in terms of the scenes you can write?

I think because the line has been blurring so much since Jurassic Park; it felt as a writer that you could write anything, and somehow somebody would figure out how to make it. It’s not my job to figure out the budget; it’s my job to figure out the best and coolest story with the visual ideas I have and then the director can bring his visual sense to it and then, if something is too expensive to do, they’ll come back to me and tell me.

That of course didn’t happen on Guardians because it’s all CGI, so anything is possible. There was never a question of “Can we do this, can we have these birds talk, fly through a tunnel, fly through fire, etc.” Of course we can!

Did you come to Australia during production?

No. I had other commitments on other movies, but Emil Stern, the other writer who contributed to the script, did the work in Australia during production. Everything is an act of collaboration and I can’t tell anymore in the finished film what is totally mine and what’s a little bit mine and what’s mostly mine. I can’t tell anymore.

The film was conceived to be as photoreal as possible. How did you decide what these owls would be capable of in this realistic world?

I can’t write something that won’t stage properly. How can an owl do that movement? Some of the first drawings that came back from Australia were of tools, and at one point, we saw the owls were capable of making them. It didn’t make it to the final draft of the movie.

Bubo is like a blacksmith, and there was a scene where we saw how he did it, and their technology is incredibly crude, basically just fire, and they have their claws and can hold things, and from that, we just extrapolated it to simple bronze age technology.

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