KZ: Hi Aaron! Each character from The Bad Guys has a trait that causes them to be misunderstood. If you were one of The Bad Guys, what would be your trait?

A: Being too comfortable in my own world. It’s really good for a day like today, where I’m talking to people about my stuff, because when you do what I do, you spend a lot of time in your own head. I don’t know if that’s bad or not, but that’s what I do. This is a good thing, to speak to other people and get out and about.

KZ: Have you ever started to write a storyline, and then thought it was too ridiculous?

A: I’m the guy that wrote Piranhas Don’t Eat Bananas. There is no limit to how stupid my stories can be!

KZ: How did The Bad Guys become a movie?

A: Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that it would actually happen. I love movies so much – I can’t tell you how much I love movies, like it’s the whole universe for me. When I started creating the series, it was my version of doing a movie. It just happened to be in a book because I thought I can’t make a big movie by myself, so I’m going to do it in a book form. Then it’s come full circle and turned into a great big movie. All the Hollywood studios got interested because the books were becoming popular. I went across to the USA and I took it to all the different studios. A bunch of them wanted to make the movie, but DreamWorks were just the right studio for it; they just got it more than anybody else did.

KZ: What are your responsibilities as an executive producer on the movie?

A: The movie begins with an idea, and then someone does the first version of the script and then as an example, the executive producer and the other producers look at the script. We write a whole bunch of notes about things that we love, things that we don’t love so much, things that we think would be better, throw in ideas and then they go away. Then there’s the next version of the script and we do the same thing. Eventually they start animating it and doing little scribbly animations and then we do the same thing – we watch that and write a million notes about all the things we love and things that we don’t. It progresses from the page to the scribbly animation, to the really blocky weird middle animation, to the finished animation where all the lighting and all the beautiful facial expressions are on. As the journey goes, hopefully what happens, which is what happened here, is you start writing less and less notes and eventually on that last one, it didn’t even enter my head to have a note. Everything I was watching was just something that made me feel happy. That’s what it is. My job was to also keep the spirit of the books alive, to protect the characters and make sure that they ended up being the same characters that kids love from the books but on the screen, bigger and better somehow. That’s what I think it’s totally going to achieve.

Read more of our interview with Aaron in the May 2022 ‘Trailblazers and Rebels’ issue of K-Zone, on sale now!

The Bad Guys is in cinemas now!

The Bad Guys Episode 1: Full Colour Edition is out now!