You're looking, moment by moment and scene by scene, how you can tell the most interesting story. So, we had this great short and we knew that we had a story about a boy and his dog. Because we had that pure emotional core, we could go on crazy tangents and always come back to Victor and Sparky. When I wrote in stuff like Weird Girl and the cat poop, Dutch Day and the windmill, it felt like it was part of Tim's universe.
John AugustJosh [Friedman] and I have been friends for years, and he said, "Hey, if you ever want to do a TV show, I can take it over and run it," and I was like, "Yes!" He's always been so busy that I never dared to ask that, but it just worked out, time wise, that this was the season where we could probably do it, so I jumped at it. So, even though I'm busy with other stuff, I'm excited to be writing this.
John AugustThe producers and I first talked about the Big Fish musical, right before we did the first test screening of the movie. I said, "I think there's a Broadway musical here." And really, from that day, we started figuring out how we would do it.
John AugustWhen Tim asked me to do Frankenweenie, he had his original sketches from before he did the short, of what Sparky looked like, and he drew Victor and some of the other crucial people. The remarkable thing about working with Tim is that, once he's read a script, he sketches out everybody else.
John AugustI've always written towards movies that take place across two worlds. Most of the movies that I've worked on take place in two worlds, or sometimes three worlds, where you have a normal world and a fantasy world that mix and overlap. I never shy away from the series stuff in the real world. Big Fish is about mortality.
John August