Welcome back to Good Day
Stateline. DreamWorks'
the bad guys comes to theaters this Friday.
And tonight,
we are so excited
to talk to the man behind the popular book series.
He's also an executive producer of the movie, Aaron
Lesley, hello.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm so good. I love this book.
I read it last night and it was so much fun.
It's about the bad guys who don't think that
they're really bad guys, especially Mr. Wolfe.
So tell us about the book.
Oh, look, it's it's a book about redemption,
I guess, and it's about characters
who've suffered prejudice in their lives
because of the way they look
and their reputations, and they want to turn it around.
And that
always felt like a good thing to talk to kids about.
You know, but the trick for me was how to take subject
matter like that and make it fun.
And I got two kids and two boys, and when my youngest
was six years old,
he was bringing home books from school
that he found so boring they would make him cry.
And I wanted to come up with something
that he would find fun, and I wanted to.
And then he was into scary animals at the time.
And I thought, well, hang on, what if I took that idea
I had about prejudice and
connected it with scary animals that were being judged,
but make it like an action adventure story.
And that's where they came from.
And it was a pretty big moment in my life, I have to say.
How lucky are your kids that they came home
with a boring books and their dad was just like,
I'll fix this. I'll make you a better book?
No problem.
That I know is it's a it's a pretty weird thing.
To do, but I it's it was one of those
real lightning bolt moments that you don't have
very often in your life.
And I remember vividly the night that it happened
because the book we were reading was particularly awful.
And I could see any desire
this kid would ever have to read a book draining from his body.
So it was it was in the it was in the nick of time.
It's so true.
So I have
four nephews that are between the ages of five and 13.
And when I was reading this
yesterday, I was like, Oh, they would love this book.
Not only is it funny
and it's written in a comic book style, but also the idea
that you kind of know you know, the big bad wolf already.
So right when you start,
it's like I'm familiar with these characters.
It's so much easier for kids
with short attention spans to get into the book so quickly.
Yeah, look, I think one of the things
when you're trying to come up with an idea,
and especially if you're looking for something
that is kind of a big idea,
is it's always nice if there's that overlap
between something that feels weirdly familiar, but
at the same time is an entirely new context.
And that's that's what happened with the bad guys.
I think and it was just a happy accident.
But this is a this is a true story.
I the day that I had the idea for the gang and this
idea of them doing good deeds, I wrote it in a single sentence.
I texted it to a friend and I said, what do you think of this?
And she texted back to me, that sounds like a DreamWorks movie.
He really she really did.
And that was nine years ago.
And it was the day I invented them.
The like 20 minutes after they'd been invented.
Somebody said that to me.
So it was kind of meant to be, I think. Yeah.
So tell us about the movie.
Like, the movie is just it's it's ridiculous.
This is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me.
I mean, I
I love movies so much, and because of that
and because of what I do, and I'm a terrible liar.
So if I didn't love this movie,
I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today.
I'd be back in Australia being mysteriously unavailable.
I am so proud of this film
because it captures the spirit of what I created in the books.
It takes all the little bits from the books
that people love but has blown it up into this thing
that is just spectacular and it's a genuinely fun movie.
It's like going on a ride or something.
It is. It's delightful. It really is.
I love that and I love that you are part of the movie.
You're one of the executive producers.
I think that's so important because so often we love a book
and then we see the movie and we're like, I don't know,
I look, it's, it's the it's
worst case scenario for authors and it happens every day.
There are trainwreck adaptations all the time.
And I was
I was like, at the beginning, I was really protective of
all of them.
And I met most of the studios in Hollywood,
and a number of them were interested.
And I was actually I didn't really want to hand it over
until I met the team at DreamWorks
because I could tell immediately they they
they they got the tone
and they had a vision for what it could be.
And they, they loved the books.
And our screenwriter,
Ethan Coen, he's had his kids were fans of the books.
And I desperately didn't want to be
the guy who ruined the bad guys.
So that was that was really helpful, too.
He told me that a number of times
as he was working on drafts, he was really nervous.
So yeah, look,
it was it's
I've been a very lucky author and in these circumstance,
this is well, the book is great, so we cannot wait
to see the movie as well.
Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
My pleasure.
The bad guys drops in theaters this Friday.
You can get the books right now.
In fact, you can win these books these two days Dateline
dot com. We'll be right back.