Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is, at once, the ultimate Scott Pilgrim story and very much not what fans of the graphic novel series — or the 2010 movie adaptation — will be expecting. Co-written by Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski, it’s an expansion of the world (and worldview) of everyone favorite (least favorite?) member of Sex Bob-Omb that stays true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the original.

To say more would be to spoil it, but Popverse’s Graeme McMillan talked to O’Malley and Grabinski at New York Comic Con about the show, the ways in which it’s different — without spoiling anything, I promise — and why O’Malley used to be a snob about movies. Read on to find out why Takes Off might be the best version of Scott Pilgrim yet… and why BenDavid Grabinski should do more promotional interviews.

Popverse: Bryan, you just announced the 20th anniversary editions of Scott Pilgrim [the comic], and here you are doing the anime. This is a story that you have been living with for more than 20 years, because you worked on it before it came out —

Bryan Lee O'Malley: That is true. I lived it.

What is it like doing what is, it feels like, the ultimate version of Scott Pilgrim? The anime is based on the comic in a way that the film isn't, but it's got the actors from the film, and it's got elements of the game in it as well…

O'Malley: It's kind of corralling everything into the new thing. And also the fandom, the years intervening. It's all kind of here now, yeah. I mean, it's cool. It felt good. I was very scared and nervous at first — “reticent” is a good word. I didn't want to retread the same exact territory. I didn't want to pretend I'm 25 again. But then I had dinner with BenDavid and, I said, "Netflix wants me to do an anime,” and he was like, "Well, you just do this and this and this." I was like, "Wait, what?" It was completely something I had never thought of.

BenDavid Grabinski: I would say that the concept of the show and the initial thing all came from my dumb brain. But then after that, it became a hybrid, two dumb brains thing. Bryan still loves Scott Pilgrim, but also when you're doing the same story for 20 years, you want to feel like, “How can I have a new way to tell it?” And I blurted out a bunch of ideas that became the concept for the show, and Bryan really responded to them. And I think my job was to always have a fresh perspective on something that in his head had sort of become concrete.

O'Malley: It congealed.

Grabinski: My job was always like, "Well, but what if we did this?" And then that would lead to Bryan suddenly having new ideas, where I was just always trying to push it to do something that felt like it was the same voice as everything he's done before. But I wanted to make something that was endlessly surprising and felt like the most exciting new version of the story that we could do. And once Bryan got on board with that, he had a million new ideas of his own. But I think it was my job at the beginning to be the guy who's like, "Hey, let's just push this as far as we can, while also feeling consistent with everything that came before it."

O'Malley: For me, it had congealed, but BenDavid was 30 seconds in the microwave for my brain. Suddenly things started moving again in a way that I hadn't anticipated.

Grabinski: Then it went from, we had a dinner where it started with him being like, I don't know if I want to do an adaptation and do the same thing again. And then by the end of our dinner, his point of view of the whole thing had changed. And then he went to Netflix and Edgar [Wright, executive producer] and everybody and said, “This guy BenDavid has a take, but I think it's the way to do it, and we want to do it together.”

But this wasn’t a dinner where you two were already working together?

Grabinski: It was a friend dinner.

O’Malley: He had a movie, and I had watched his movie for the first time, and we went out to dinner after.

Grabinski: And we were mainly just supposed to talk about me and my work, but he brought it up, and he was just venting, as we've been friends a long time. Bryan and I have always shared stuff with each other. We've had a million creative discussions where every script I've written since 2011, he's read before anybody gave me feedback. He's working on Seconds and other things. I give him feedback on that. And we just have had so many creative conversations, but we've never worked together. So our dinner was really just me being a friend who always has dumb ideas saying, "Well, you could do this and you could do this, you could do this." And by the end of it, it accidentally became like, "Oh, let's actually literally do this." When I was talking about it, at no point was I thinking I'd make the show.

O'Malley: It was semi a joke, and then it became real.

BenDavid, did you at one point be like, "Oh crap. Well, now I've got to do it”?

Grabinski: Well actually, it was the opposite. At first I was like, "Wait, hold on a second, are we actually going to do this?" And then I got really excited. I think the ideas were so cool it felt like no one was going to let us do them. And I had a very long time on this project where I kept waiting for someone to knock at the door, or call us, or have a Zoom meeting to say, "Actually, you guys need to stop. We're not going to let you make this."

"This is nothing like what we thought it was.”

O'Malley: Yes, exactly.

Grabinski: And yet it never happened. And I kept waiting for someone to say, "Hold up, let's just back up a little bit. Are we sure this is what we're going to do here?" And it just never happened. And then the cast came on and they loved it too. And it only now is starting to actually feel real, even though we've been working on it for years, because it's just been Bryan and I in a bubble trying to make the best creative decisions we can. But at every point I felt like I was getting away with robbing a bank or something.

O'Malley: We've said that many times, yeah.

Grabinski: I've spent so much of my career having big ideas for stuff, and then people being afraid of big ideas, and Bryan isn't. So he was the perfect collaborator, where if some company came to me and they owned the rights to Scott Pilgrim and they said, "Well, what would you do with an anime show?" And I pitched this version, they'd be like, "I don't know." But when I'm talking to Bryan and Bryan loves it, what are they going to say to the guy who created it?

Yeah, exactly. They're not going to be like, "You don't know what Scott Pilgrim is.”

Grabinski: When Bryan's in a meeting with me, and Bryan's like, "Yeah, this is Scott Pilgrim. This is something that I would've written if I thought of it. This feels like my voice." What are they going to say? No one can say, "Bryan, you don't know what you're talking about."

Did both of you find it hard to find the voice? Because it still feels like the books. It doesn't feel like you're coming in and being like, "Revisionist take, everyone!”

Grabinski: Well the thing is, I was a giant fan of this in a really dumb way, where I bought the books at midnight. I saw the movie in theaters more than any movie I've ever seen in my life. I felt like I saw the code in the Matrix on this, and I felt like I understood it sort of comedically and emotionally. And I also, from having a million conversations with Bryan about creative stuff, we understand each other kind of thing.

But it's everything that we're both enthusiastic about, funneled through the world of this thing. And the reason we are friends is because we have a similar sense of humor and we're passionate about the same dumb shit. There's so much stuff in the season. Someone was asking us yesterday, and this isn't like a spoiler, but they're like, "So which one of you guys is a big fan of Sondheim?" And we're like, "Both of us." We just saw Merrily We Roll Along the other night while we were here. Anything that's in there where if someone wants to be like, "Well, so which one of you is, blank?" Most of it is just, it's stuff we both love.

Have the two of you formed a hive mind together?

Grabinski: There's only one episode that is a lot of just my bullshit, but it's also stuff that he loved once he was introduced to it. But there's one episode where a lot of it is very, very specific to just... I'm a child of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and there's a lot of stuff from that that is very much my thing. And it wasn't Bryan's, but once you talk him through it and he hears the soundtrack and watches the game, he's like, "Oh, this makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't Lucas Lee have stuff that's inspired by these video games?"

O'Malley: Yeah, BenDavid is five years younger than me. Edgar's five years older than me.

You're the middle child.

O'Malley: Yeah, exactly. I'm translating video games to Edgar and then BenDavid's translating video games to me. So it's like...

Grabinski: Bryan had a time in his life where he was a snob about American movies.

O'Malley: Well, I was Canadian, so... We talking about this, I've never seen A Few Good Men. I was like, "Why would I go see that? It's so American." Just not into it.

Grabinski: One of my favorite things about being friends with Bryan is there's a lot of movies that are just so obvious. There's this one chunk of the nineties where he didn't see anything that was a cool mainstream American movie.

O'Malley: Because I was a prick, yeah.

Grabinski: But in between the time when the movie came out and when we made this show, there's a lot of movies and pop culture that we've watched together, that he became a big fan of. Like, Streets of Fire is one of my favorite movies ever. And the Ellen Aim character to me always felt like Envy. If someone had told me that it inspired Bryan to make that character, I'd believe it. But he had never seen the movie.

Grabinski: I know. But by the time we make the show, he's a big fan of Streets of Fire.

O'Malley: I've watched it twice in the past month.

Grabinski: So some of these things end up infusing into the new thing.

O'Malley: Yeah, you've introduced me into a lot of movies in the last 10-15 years.

Grabinski: I unfortunately make my friends watch a lot of dumb shit.

O'Malley: I'd never seen an American Werewolf in Paris, and we watched that together.

Grabinski: American Werewolf in London. I haven't seen American Werewolf in Paris.

O'Malley: Me neither. It's the extreme sports one, right?

Wait, you've never seen an American Werewolf in London? How?

O'Malley: I'd never seen it. And we watched it together Halloween like five to 10 years ago, and yeah, it was incredible.

Grabinski: The thing is, Bryan has good taste eventually.

O'Malley: That's true. [Laughs]

That's how I know you two are friends because you're getting away with saying that. Bryan’s not upset. So I know you're friends. [Laughs]

Grabinski: That's actually the whole thing is, if we did not have a shorthand with each other, we couldn't give each other shit, this would not work. Because you can't have an ego about it. There's stuff that I'd be really passionate about and Bryan would be like, "I don't think that's right for it." And there'd be stuff that Bryan's passionate about. I'm like, "I just don't think that's going to work for the show." And that only works because we've known each other so long.

O'Malley: The rule is, anything that either of us doesn't think is funny or —

Grabinski: Our rule is, nothing would be in the show that either of us hated. If one of us didn't like a joke, if one of us didn't like a dramatic turn, it wasn't there. We had to keep working until we found something we both liked. And if we didn't know each other well... And we also are people who always do our [projects] on our own. I've never had a writing partner. He's never had a writing partner. But it worked because we've had 10 million creative conversations. And I could write a script and send it to Bryan, and Bryan could be like, "No." And he could write a script and I could be like, "I know Scott's your thing, but I think that we should push this in a different direction."

And there's no ego?

Grabinski: Look, I'd say out of 10,000 conversations, there's three or four that got heated.

O'Malley: But yeah, there's definitely... I would write a whole section and we throw it out or he would write a whole section and. —

Grabinski: The thing that's so annoying is when someone's right. Like, in episode four —

O'Malley: And you fought against it! [Laughs]

Grabinski: Well, so episode two is the only one where I wrote most of it in an afternoon, and then Bryan had three brilliant jokes added to it. It almost never changed. And then almost every other episode I'd write a draft and Bryan would be like, "I really like this scene." I'm like, "So what about the rest?" But there's an episode that has one of my favorite things in the season, and the result of it was just Bryan not feeling like we had done enough. And that comes both ways. It's like you can be really excited about something, but when someone else reads it, they're like, "Yeah, but I think this could also be emotional." Or, "This is emotional, but can't we find a way to also make it funny." And it's really, if I got the note from an exec, I might get mad.

O'Malley: You would 100% get mad.

Grabinski: I might, I'd say. But episode four, there's an emotional kind of setup and payoff in it that I'd never thought of. And the episode is something that feels like very me. But then when I look at the version before Bryan got involved, I'm like, it is just jokes.

O'Malley: We cracked that together. This is the first time I think either of us just sat in a room together breaking story. I've never done that with another human being before.

Has this changed how you guys are going to work in the future? It sounds like you've both found so much value in having someone to bounce of, right?

O'Malley: It's hard to imagine writing all by myself now.

Grabinski: Yeah, I unfortunately do have to keep doing some stuff by myself, because there's stuff that I got to write and direct in this movie I'm supposed to make this spring. And I know the whole time I'd be like, if Bryan was in video village, we might make this even better, but I hope the studio's not reading this. Guys, it's going to be a perfect movie! It would not be better under any circumstances. It's going to be a huge hit.

So I've been writing for a living for almost 20 years, writing movies by myself. And you don't know until you write with someone else, how solitary it is, and how insane it feels. It's like you're having conversations with yourself all the time, and you don't even know that until you can just text Bryan in every moment. So much of the show is just one of us texting the other person, "Hey, what a, blank." And we're like, oh yeah. And then otherwise it's like you have to just spend a lot of time being like, "Is this good enough?"

I can also see if he thinks it's good enough. Because I feel like the show, if people love it, which I hope they do, because we really love it. I think everything in there was both of us pushing it as far as we could and never having it be enough. And we already do that with our own work. But it was really helpful to have someone else there who also felt like something was never good enough.

You just said, "If people love it." Are you scared of the reaction from Scott Pilgrim fans? Because you said Scott Pilgrim's gelled for you. It has for a lot of people, I think; a lot of people think they know exactly what Scott Pilgrim is.

Grabinski: Well, afraid is the wrong thing, but the issue is, it's just out of our control. We can only do our best. We can only do what we think is the best version of this that we think fans will love. But at the end of the day, you also have to make peace with, that so much of that is out of our control. We were thinking about the audience at every single fucking second of the process.

O'Malley: I mean, that's what BenDavid brings to it as a screenwriter. You have a really good understanding of what the audience is feeling. And that's not something that I necessarily was thinking about all the time when I write my own stuff. So I think that really helped guide it. But yeah, in this current landscape, I feel like we're going to get all the hate, all the love, all at once. So it's like you just have to accept it.

Just read half of it, read the good half.

O'Malley: Exactly. I’ll wait for Netflix to send us the good stuff.

Grabinski: I'm not pessimistic or insecure about it, or have imposter syndrome. I just truly feel like you never really know exactly what people are going to respond to. There's been some movies I've seen that felt like big crowd pleasers, and then they just didn't catch on. And there's some stuff that, to me, I'm like, this feels like esoteric, and then it makes a billion dollars. There's so many magical things that have to happen for something to be a hit. But I think it's awesome.

I was going to say, you both seem really happy and confident with it. There's no sense of nerves talking to you right now. You're both, “Actually, this is great.”

Grabinski: But we've spent years watching it by ourselves and being amused by our own show. And only now are we talking to strangers who've seen it. We've been in a bubble for a very long time.

Is it weird to have people be like, "It's good," and you're like, "Is it actually good?”

Grabinski: Someone yesterday told me it was the best show they'd seen in years. And I'm like, they're saying that to everybody. I'm pretty sure that's what they do. That's their thing.

O'Malley: I don't know if they're saying that. I don't think they are.

I love that you're not confident enough to be like, "Maybe I've just made the best show in years." [Laughs]

Grabinski: I think the show's fucking awesome, but that's just my opinion.

O'Malley: Well yeah. I don't have the hubris to say it's the best show in years, but I think it's a really, really fun revisitation of this. And trying to corral my whole life into it, and my growth and maturity, and BenDavid's too. I’m not 25 anymore, so I didn't want to cosplay my old self, rewriting this thing.

Grabinski: I just want to be on the record, but I think the show's fucking awesome. I just want to be very clear. [Laughs]

O'Malley: I think it works. We've shown it to people and we thought about everything, and you get through episode one, you get through episode two, and it works. It clicks.

Grabinski: If someone gets to the end of episode two and they don't like it, they're dumb. That's what I'm saying.

That's it! That's the pull quote!

O'Malley: You just ruined the interview. [Laughs]

Grabinski: I've just ruined my entire life. Before anyone knows I exist, they're going to think I'm an asshole. Great. [Laughs]

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off debuts on Netflix November 10.