The Big Picture

Writer BenDavid Grabinski reflects on his long-standing relationship with the Scott Pilgrim comics and the excitement of working on the new Netflix series adaptation. The new series takes a different approach than the 2010 film, with surprises and new directions that fans may not expect. Collaborating with Bryan Lee O’Malley, the creator of Scott Pilgrim, allowed Grabinski to delve deeper into the characters and explore new aspects of the story while maintaining the same voice as the original books.

Writer BenDavid Grabinski has been waiting quite a while for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off to, well… take off. The new Netflix series, which begins streaming on November 17, is an expansion of the Scott Pilgrim comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley that were first released back in 2004. This new adaptation is quite different from the prior one, 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, even as all the same main cast return to reprise their roles. For Grabinski, who wrote the series with O’Malley, it is the culmination of a relationship to this story and characters that began when he first picked up the comics nearly two decades ago. Before the series hits Netflix, we spoke with him about taking big swings, its anime influences, the importance of having Edgar Wright in your corner, and what the future holds for this world. As a note, this interview was conducted while SAG was on strike before a tentative agreement was reached.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Release Date November 17, 2023 Cast Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Brie Larson, Chris Evans, Mae Whitman, Alison Pill, Ellen Wong, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Aubrey Plaza Main Genre Action-Adventure Genres Comedy Rating TV-14 Seasons 1 Streaming Service(s) Netflix
COLLIDER: How did you come to meet Scott Pilgrim and get to know his world first? Was it the comic books or the film? What was your first entry point?

BENDAVID GRABINSKI: I got the first book when it came out. I had read some sort of blurb about it in some website or whatever and I bought it. I got all the volumes the day they came out, most of them at midnight, I was a huge fan of the books. It was just the perfect time of my life for that to be coming out. Bryan [Lee O’Malley] was writing and drawing those books when he was that age and they came out when I was in college. The first one came out when I was 20 or 21 or something. I loved it and then I was super excited about the movie and I saw the movie so many times in theaters. I got the video game and I played and played that. I did the actual linear progression of when the things came out. That’s one of the interesting things about Scott. Some people will say the movie was their favorite movie when they were in middle school and then they read the books or some people say they have only played the video game. It’s been really interesting to me to find out a lot of people have a different entry point to the character and story.

You said you watched the movie so many times, do you know how many times?

GRABINSKI: I don’t, but it’s definitely near 20 times. It’s a ridiculous amount. When it first came out, I saw it maybe six or seven times. Then I would see it at midnight at New Beverly a lot. Then I made a short in 2010 or 2011 that one time played before a midnight showing of it too. So that was not just for fun. I’ve seen it at midnight more than 10 times and I saw the Dolby re-release that came out in 2021 or whatever. Just a ridiculous amount. I know it way too well.

So when you’re sitting down with Bryan and talking with him about collaborating on this, was that a surreal experience after all this time?

GRABINSKI: It’s sort of a weird background thing which is that I ended up meeting Brian about 12 to 13 years ago. Then we ended up becoming really close friends and we never had any intention of working together or doing anything related to Scott Pilgrim. This all kind of happened by accident, which is that Netflix had reached out to him and the producers of the movie asking if he had any interest in writing an adaptation for anime. Then we just got dinner and we’re talking about it. I think just because we have years and years of just talking about everything, we talk about every movie we watch or show we’re watching or game we’re playing ad nauseam about the creative process. He reads every script I write and gives me notes and stuff, and he was talking about the pros and cons of doing an adaptation. We just started talking, and I ended up impromptu pitching him a bunch of ideas that ended up being the exact show, which is there’s a lot of surprises in the show, which I’m being vague about, that people are not expecting. That stuff really all just came together in our first conversation, and then we’ve just spent three years now working on it every fucking day.

When you say you’re being vague about it, I want to ask questions that get at that without giving anything away. The first episode goes, I’ll say along a familiar path, but it’s almost like it’s a magic trick where it’s luring you in, there’s the punch line, and then you’re off to the races. When did you all decide that the first episode was going to play out that way to set you off into everything else?

GRABINSKI: That was my initial pitch. We were talking about it and he was talking about why he didn’t think it was a good idea to do the same story again. I blurted out, “Well, what if you did blank where the pilot seemed like it was the exact same story, and then blank happens, and then we’re doing a brand-new version of the story with this cast of characters?” It’s been that thing ever since. It’s amazing to me though that we’ve been able to keep it a secret this long because that was really important to me. I just thought as a fan myself, half the fun of it would be never knowing where the show is going. I guess I’m gonna find out if I’m right or not. It was definitely baked into the concept of it, which is that we wanted it to be super surprising and also not telegraph to anybody what it was gonna be exactly beforehand. I think it also works if you’ve never seen any version of it. Somebody watched them and their first take was, ‘Wow, I didn’t know the comics were so different from the movie.’ So they thought that the comic was this story, which I thought was a really strong accidental compliment. It still feels like it’s the same voice and the same world of the book.

Absolutely.

GRABINSKI: How much have you seen?

I’ve seen all of it and I do want to get further in a little bit. Again, we’ll have to be vague because I think there is that thrilling moment of realization of, ‘Oh, we’re really going completely in our own direction where we’re not tied down to any of the movie, any of people’s expectations.’ It sounds like that was always the plan that there was no way you were gonna do this just to do a retread of it. Was that scary?

GRABINSKI: The weirdest thing was the pilot was the hardest thing to write. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to redo stuff that was really familiar to some people. I didn’t want it to feel like a cover, but I also didn’t want to repeat jokes. If you’re gonna do new ones, they still need to be funny, but you also still need to catch everybody up. That was weirdly the hardest thing to do because it’s important setup, but it’s also misdirection. There’s just a lot of weird things going on there. I just know from day one the thing that was the most exciting to us was just doing new stuff with all of these characters. The idea of having new fights that people aren’t expecting and new conflicts and just adding shades to everybody felt like the most fun thing to do. When you’re doing it with Bryan, you don’t have to worry about it not being the same voice as the book and everything. He’s always there.

There’s a lot of ideas I did end up having that Bryan felt were wrong for Scott. Most of them end up in there, but it’s a very good kind of filter. Every single thing I do, whether we’re writing or working on the music or working with the cast, there’s always Bryan there. Our rule was that nothing would go on the show that either of us didn’t like, as simplistic as that sounds. If there’s something that I didn’t think was funny, it didn’t go on the show. If there’s something Bryan didn’t think was funny, it didn’t go in there. I think it kind of streamlined the process, but it was just years of the two of us working on everything. That was the most fun idea to me was to just go back into this world, but just do a bunch of new shit.

Image via Netflix

I wanted to ask what you’re saying about Scott and who Scott is. Who do you think he is and did that change over the process of this project?

GRABINSKI: Well, that’s a tough one to talk about without getting into spoilers. I would say part of what we felt like doing was because so much of Scott has been explored. The book spends so much time with him, and he has a whole movie. A lot of it was really trying to get deeper on Ramona this time. I still think we found some new ways of looking at Scott and a lot of unexpected elements there, But I thought making this feel like it was Ramona’s story was the biggest value that we could do here. I think that we’re just trying to make her even more interesting. She’s already super interesting in the books, but that was the thing that was the most exciting to us.

When you talked to Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera, what was their impression of the series, and what was it like subsequently working together on it?

GRABINSKI: It would have been tough if they didn’t like this new thing, especially Michael [laughs], which will make sense when you see it. But they were just so into it. Michael, after every recording would text Bryan and be like, “I think this is gonna be so good, dude.” He was just so enthusiastic about it. Mary loved working on it and really liked the finished episodes. I think that they thought it was really fun to be able to revisit these characters but not be repeating the same stuff. I don’t think it’s that often you get to do that. It’s not a sequel, but it does get to do all kinds of new stuff. So it feels a little bit like a sequel metaphorically, you know? Also, you just get to be 23 again. Who doesn’t like that? That’s the fun of animation.

Image via Netflix

I wanted to ask about animation influences because there’s always been a very close relationship between Scott Pilgrim and anime, but were there shows that were particularly influential for you that you felt were informing this series?

GRABINSKI: That’s a super easy one because my favorite anime of all time is Cowboy Bebop, but it didn’t have a big influence on this. For me, it was Evangelion and then there’s a really direct Bubblegum Crisis thing in Episode 7. For Bryan, a lot of his touchstones were Sailor Moon when we cut to the villain in the pilot away from everything and he’s sitting in his lair doing his stuff. One of our favorite things about anime pilots or movies is just finding the guy in his deep dark area, whether it’s a cave or up in a spaceship or a skyrise, sitting there surrounded by screens or minions, like plotting their evil thing.

It was just a really fun way to take tropes that we love or our own influences and then see what happens when an anime studio gives their take on it too. There’s a lot of things that they put into it too and just tried to make sure there’s never anything that felt tonally wrong. We have a song in the show that is a cover of a song from an anime that I don’t wanna say. People will know when they get to it. Stuff like that to be able to say, “Oh, well, we want the band to do a cover of this song and then have someone just figure it out somewhere how to lock down those rights.” Also seeing how SARU ends up animating that sequence. There’s a lot of joy in getting to put all those weird influences into one new package.

You bring all these other creative, artistic people in on the experience, and then get to share it with the world. Are you excited to be at the end of that?

GRABINSKI: It’s really weird. Today is one of the first times I’m talking to strangers who’ve seen it. I’ve spent so much time where it’s just me and Bryan and our assistant Mal and then a couple of people I’m close with who are just unfortunately, around when I have to be watching these things 10,000 times. It’s insane to spend so much time in a bubble and then to have the bubble be about to burst. I hope people like it, but we took some really big swings and it seems like people are into it. It all came from a good place, but you just never really know exactly what people are gonna think. All I know is that we got to tell the exact story that we wanted to inexplicably. I truly don’t understand how it exists or how all the actors end up saying yes or that someone let me do this. At the end of the day, if I don’t feel like I’ve gotten away with something or like I robbed a bank and I’m not getting arrested, then I kind of feel like I fucked up when I made something anyway. I can’t believe it exists and the weird thing is now it’s just gonna end up being normalized. There was a very long time where I felt like someone was gonna knock on a door and say, “Actually, you guys shouldn’t do this. We’re not gonna let you do this.” But that never happened, I guess.

I’m glad that never happened and that knock never came.

GRABINSKI: Well, if you liked it, then great. [laughs]

I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit as there is an indication that there could be something next. Have you written other things or do you have other ideas?

GRABINSKI: Oh, absolutely not. We always felt like this is a story that we’re telling that has an ending and everything thematically we’re dealing with is resolved. I love this character in these worlds. I have a million ideas for spin-offs and all kinds of weird things, but we’ve always just felt like we were putting everything into this and then if we survive it and we get to the end of it, maybe we’ll sit down someday and say, ‘Hey, well, what if we did blank?’ But there’s nothing. It was really important to me that we made a show that, if TV didn’t exist tomorrow, people wouldn’t walk away from it feeling like there was something left unresolved in a bad way. But there’s also just the fun of it too. I love thinking about Lost and what it was like for Ben and Hurley to be running the island after it’s over. We’ll never actually see that and it’s kind of good that we don’t because maybe that wouldn’t have ended up being great. We’re at that point where the idea of making more of anything right now sounds exhausting. Maybe I’ll wake up in January and Bryan and I will be like, “Oh, hey, what, what if we did blank?” But as of now, we just always felt like we wanted to tell one story that had a beginning, middle, and end. I think that emotionally everything we set up in the season has a resolution. I really like where all the characters end up at the end, you know?

Image via Netflix

There’s also a brief reference to a different Edgar Wright project that I won’t name, which then made me want to ask, has he seen it? Have you been able to chat with him about it at all?

GRABINSKI: Oh yeah, I mean, that thing happened only because of him. We wanted to do that, and he helped that happen. I’m being vague, but he was present while… man, I don’t know how the fuck to talk about that. But yes, Edgar is an EP on the show, and he read every draft, and he would get the storyboards and the animatics and rough versions of everything. He’s just been super supportive the whole time. He’s the only reason we got to wrangle all the cast together. He’s a great break in case of emergency thing because people respect him and really love the movie. We definitely benefited from that.

That’s good to hear of creative people supporting each other and helping each other in different ways. There was that infamous story of the email chain getting restarted. Do you all still have a new one or have you graduated to a group text?

GRABINSKI: Right now, since we’re in the middle of a SAG strike, there’s not a lot of any of that happening. But that email chain still exists and now there’s separate things related to this. It’s really great how supportive and how excited the whole cast was. I still don’t understand how they all said yes. I’ve said this multiple times, and it’s a dumb reference to keep saying, but I just really didn’t want to do a Return of Jafar thing. I didn’t want to have some of the actors, but then not all of them. If any were missing, we would have recast the whole thing. So getting more than a dozen actors to all come back and say yes, was a kind of a miracle. It’s a testament to that they all really enjoyed making the movie and also just really respect Bryan. Edgar had kept Bryan involved from the beginning. They were hanging out way before the movie came out. Once it had been optioned, they all had been a really cool creative group. I’m just the new dumb guy who got thrown into the mix to do this version of it. But it’s been really nice.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S. starting November 17.

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