What would a Quentin Tarantino film for children look like? Probably something close to The Bad Guys, a DreamWorks adaptation of a book series about a gang of criminal animals who, after a lifetime of heists, are tasked with doing good for the world in order to avoid prison.
It has a starry cast: Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Awkwafina, Richard Ayoade and Zazie Beetz, among others. But the man behind the series is Australian author Aaron Blabey, who has sold around 30m books: a staggering, mind-blowing figure. Speaking to Blabey ahead of The Bad Guys film release, even he still seems in shock about his own success.
The 48-year-old father of two, who was born in Bendigo and now lives in the Blue Mountains, started as an actor. “I did a great number of acting jobs that all felt like ill-fitting suits,” he says. “I was a substandard actor, and I never fitted in. I worked in advertising, I taught design. When I was about 32 I wrote my first picture book, which was well received but I couldn’t make a living from it.”
Everything turned around when he turned 40: “I moved up to the [Blue] mountains and I thought I had one last go at making it as an author. In a single day, I had the idea for The Bad Guys and [another of his series] Thelma the Unicorn.”
That day turned into the rest of his life. The Bad Guys was a hit in Australia, then the US and “once it hit the school system, it just exploded.” That series alone has now sold more than 10m copies worldwide.
“Before I was 40, there was not a whisper or rumour of commercial success,” Blabey says. “My wife and I have had a bone deep feeling of throwing our dreams in the air and watching them fall on the ground.”
Not any more. Refusing to take his current success for granted, Blabey is a workaholic, writing two Bad Guys books a year to keep up with demand from his young readers. Hooked on the books’ cliffhangers, like their parents binge-watching a Netflix series, the children are hungry to find out what happens next: “It’s gigantic work putting out two books a year but I’m motivated by knowing kids globally are waiting. With that age group, cliffhangers are quite a risk. We rolled the dice, but it worked.”
The original inspiration for the series came from Blabey’s then six-year-old son, who was bringing home “these unforgivably boring readers. I wanted to do something he would love. I just started to think about the stuff I loved as kid.” He wondered if he could “hot wire” books, incorporating “iconography, like Tarantino’s films, that’s not suitable to kids, but not neuter it, do it in such in a way that you leave out the bits that are too scary or too full on.” He has a formula he follows for every book: “On my wall I have written ‘smart/dumb’ and ‘scary/funny’. That space in the middle is where the right balance is.”
Blabey has never met Tarantino, whose influence casts a noirish shadow (refracted through a gentle lens) over the film and the books, but Tarantino is “one of the five people in the world, if I met him, I think I’d have a heart attack,” he says. He sounds genuinely awestruck as he recalls seeing Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs for the first time, in a Melbourne cinema when he was 18.
With his success, Blabey is finally getting LA’s red carpet treatment as an author, that he could only dream about getting as an actor. “All the studios could just smell the potential – in a single week in 2016 I met with the heads of all the major studios and three or four aggressively pursued it,” he says.
For a children’s film, The Bad Guys is rather sexy and noirish, set in an imagined LA that evokes LA Confidential, Ocean’s Eleven and Pulp Fiction; Blabey describes it as “oversaturated sunlight as seen from a window of a diner.” The script was written by Etan Cohen, of Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder fame; “everytime I opened each draft I thought, ‘he gets this,’” says Blabey, who served as an executive producer on the film, “to keep the spirit of the books safe.”
The spirit of the books – anarchic, but warm-hearted – is something children all over the world connect with, particularly those who are not natural readers.
“Reluctant readers just dig them and they’ve latched on to it,” Blabey says. “If kids are struggling with reading, rather than carrying around a picture book, they think it’s cooler to have a copy of The Bad Guys.”
Although he plans to take a break from his hectic schedule in a couple of years, Blabey is happy where he is now. “I am in a place of playfulness,” he says. “Thirteen-year-old me would be so pleased with what I am doing!”