The Sheep Detectives' Craig Mazin Wrote The Script A Decade Ago, And MGM Rescued It [Exclusive Interview]

It's no secret that because show business is largely concerned with avoiding risk wherever possible, most films only get made because they're similar to something else that's already been successful. This is partially why cinema's currently stuck in a sea of reboots and remakes. Yet, in an earlier era of Hollywood, it was more common to adapt plays and novels as a way of attracting a built-in audience. Although novels are still a big draw these days, some successful books can take a long time to get made into feature films. This is especially true if they're unique enough to confuse major studio heads.

That's exactly what happened to "The Sheep Detectives" and its source novel, "Three Bags Full," which was written by Leonie Swann. The book was published 21 years ago and finally found its way to the big screen this year via the film version from director Kyle Balda and screenwriter Craig Mazin. As Mazin told me during a recent chat, his history with the project goes back nearly two decades. At the time he first read the book, Mazin was known primarily as a bawdy comedy writer, penning scripts for films like "Scary Movie 4" and "The Hangover Part II." During the intervening years after Mazin wrote his first draft of "The Sheep Detectives," he went on to create and showrun two highly successful HBO series, "Chernobyl" and "The Last of Us." It's fitting that "The Sheep Detectives" is finally seeing the light of day now, after Mazin's artistic range has been more widely realized. During my talk with the writer, Mazin detailed his relationship with the film over the years, how he balanced the human and sheep characters evenly, and why tackling the mechanics of a classic whodunit story is tricky business.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

/Film: I wanted to ask you first how this story, "Three Bags Full," came your way? What excited you about adapting it, and how did you go about it?

Craig Mazin: So, this would be about 17 years ago, not kidding. 17 years ago.

Wow.

The producer, Lindsay Doran, came to me with a book. She said, "I'm not going to tell you anything other than this: A shepherd is murdered, and the sheep solve the crime." And I was like, "Give me that book." [laughs] And I read it, and I had an experience that I think a lot of people are going to have when they see this movie, which is, "I think I know what this is. It's talking animals, it's going to be cute and adorable and fun." And by the time I got to the end of the book, I was crying, and couldn't stop thinking about it and felt quite moved and quite changed by it. And I said, "Okay, yes. Yes, I would like to do this." Then Lindsay spent seven years working out how to get the rights to it because it was rather complicated, and she did, and then 10 years ago, I wrote this script.

And it sat there for a while. No one quite knew what to do with it. I think because it was like, "Well ... we have space for a very silly movie, but this is something else, this is more [than that], and we're not sure what to do." And then Courtenay Valenti, who runs MGM, sort of rescued it and said, "We're making it just as it is." And I hope that the message, it's hard to get out to people exactly other than to say: It is adorable, it is cute, it is funny. There is a lot more going on to this movie.

Oh, absolutely. Did you have any trepidation, when you first got the story and first were tackling this material, about doing a talking animal movie? Because they do often have a cultural stigma, yet so many of them are generally beloved, too. People have the idea in their head of like, "Oh, they're just cutesy," like you were just saying, but at the same time, people love "Babe."

Well, "Babe" is the one, and that's really what we aspired to. That was a movie that you thought was one thing and you came out going, "Wow!" And what a lot of people forget is that "Babe" was made by George Miller, who made the "Mad Max" movies. And for that alone, he is a legend. That level of range, that's remarkable. But that was the movie that made us feel like we could do this, that you can do more with this because inherent to sheep — in particular, sheep — is the notion of innocence. And this was a great way to tell a coming of age story, but do it with actors who are adults because the sheep are grown up, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is such an adult, Bryan Cranston is such an adult, and yet they're not. They're childlike. And so, they learn some difficult things, but also some beautiful things. They grow up.

One of the most delightful elements of this movie for me while watching it was that it's not fully sheep-centric. The humans and the sheep form a really cohesive ensemble. All of them are contributing. Was that a quality that you had to fight to maintain or did it happen just naturally?

No, it was scripted. It really was ... there are things that we knew we were borrowing and adapting from the novel, which were there, and then there are characters that [we] were adding, or complications that we added. But yeah, the sheep on [Hugh Jackman's character] George's pasture, they just know George. They begin to learn about other people, and they begin to learn about other people's truths, and the way people lie, and why they lie. And they also then get reflected back some things about people that are unpleasant that they realize is true for them too. So they learn from each other. And of course, we have a wonderful policeman played by Nicholas Braun, who learns everything from the sheep, including how to do basic police work. [laughs]

He is so great in the movie.

He's fantastic.

This is a bit of a writing nerd question, but I wanted to know from you, because at the core, this is a whodunit. Is writing a whodunit as fun as it seems to be, or is it more tricky than we realize in terms of suspects, motive, opportunity, clues, all that?

Such a great question. It is not fun, until it works. It is math, and it's a lot of gears, and it's a lot of thought. And me dredging up every lesson I've learned from — I've read every Agatha Christie novel, really just her. There are a lot of great mystery writers and whodunit authors, but to me, I just keep coming back to her as the sun around which everything else revolves, and thinking about how smart it was, and how crafted it was. So, there's two kinds of thinking going on here: There's this very left brain machinery engineering, and then there's a very right brain tale of feelings. Blending these two together was something that Leonie Swann did so gorgeously in her novel, and it's something that we worked really hard to do here with our movie.

Now, your body of work obviously has been a little bit more adult-themed than "The Sheep Detectives." Did you, during this process, find yourself having to maybe tone the humor down? Were there any gags or elements that maybe pushed the envelope too much?

No. No, I'm not really ... I'm always thinking about the audience. And in this case, the audience is literally everyone on the planet, as far as I can tell. That's who this is for. A human. And there are ways to be fun and funny that don't winnow down an audience. I love stuff that absolutely kills for a certain group, right? That's fun to me. I love movies like that, that children can't watch. But there's also something beautiful about something everyone can watch together. So at no point did I ever think, "Oh, this is a little too edgy." I just, in my mind, I'm like, if I wouldn't want to sit there watching this with my kids when they were little, then it wouldn't be right for this. But I also, if this is a joke that would make adults go, "Oh my God, not that again," I don't want to write it. So, I want to write just for this. And I was writing for sheep, so it was easy.

Did you hand in the script before shooting and then they shot the script or was there more to it? Because I know that there's obviously, in comedy and things like this, there could be opportunities for discovery on set and improv, but there was also an animation element to this. Were you involved when shooting was happening?

Yeah, so I've been involved throughout, they were very nice about including me. When the actual live-action shooting was happening, I was in Canada working on Season 2 of "The Last of Us." So, I wasn't there for that, but I was around for all of the post-production, including the animation and getting all the voices going with everybody, and Kyle [Balda] and Tyson [Hesse], who's sort of the head of animation, these guys were amazing. And yeah, watching the actors do what they do is fun, and [they] actually pretty much stuck to the script. Every now and then we'd kind of do a little wander off, which was fun, but you kinda have to stick a little bit to the script with this because it's so tightly woven as a story, and you just have to make sure that the tone stays consistent and the story stays on point.

I know that there is a sequel to the book, so would you be interested in more "Sheep Detectives?"

I've written a lot of sequels in my life, I don't know if I have more in me. [laughs] I don't know. I will say that it's a very interesting experience to watch this movie. Normally, when I worked on movies, I would write a script, and then we would shoot the script, and then I would watch with an audience, and it was all like a bundled experience. But because I wrote the script 10 years ago — and made changes along the way, but not huge ones — I watch this movie now and there's some separation, which is actually quite lovely. I can enjoy it because there is a little bit of a separation from the experience of writing, which is usually very painful, and the experience of watching the movie, which in this case is a delight. And I think it's a gem. So, I don't know. Would I want to go back and do that again? Maybe if this connects with people the way I think, in a strange way, I would want to probably just take a little bow and walk away.

"The Sheep Detectives" is playing in theaters everywhere now.