It happened about nine years ago now.īianca Schulze: So it kind of leads me to the next question I wanted to ask you because I have a seven-year-old, I have three kids but my youngest is seven and before we knew that The Bad Guys were going to be in a movie we had started reading the books together and he absolutely loves them and part of when we are reading it, it almost felt like a script and when you are reading it you could I mean it really lends itself to making great voices for the characters so it’s great for me to read aloud to him you know. And this is true, it doesn’t sound true but it is, when I went for a walk and I wrote down the first time I wrote the 25-word description of this story and I texted it to a friend and said what do you think of this? And she texted back that sounds like a DreamWorks movie and that is true it is absolutely true.

So at the time, he was into scary animals and cool cars and I had been thinking about doing something about prejudice and about characters being judged because of the way they looked, and those two things kind of clicked together in my head but then I started to sort of I was thinking about what did I love when I was his age and then I thought you know what, what do I love now and I started to think about things that aren’t for kids like Tarantino movies and heist movies.Īnd I thought I wonder if there’s a way to take the iconography, the look and feel of that but make it-hotwire it in effect for kids and that is-so it was-and all of that thought process happened in like a 24-hour period and then by the end of it The Bad Guys existed. So, I thought I’m going to write him something cooler than this. Predominately I have got two sons and they are 14 and 16 now but when they were young, when they were six and eight my six-year-old had a series of unforgivably boring books sent home with him from school those sort of readers, the early readers they send kids home with and some of them were just so boring that they would make him cry and I thought you know what I just I could see every night I could see his will to read draining from him. So where did the original idea for a gang of scary-looking animals trying to change their bad reputations even come from?Īaron Blabey: It came from a couple of things.

All of the bad guys books