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Thats the purpose of the film, Walter replied.
To make big boys cry.
That progenitor is comics writer Joe Kelly, and the story he and artist J.M.
Ken Niimura initially crafted a decade ago has become a modern classic of indie comics.
To explain it too much is to spoil a significant portion of the surprises.
On one hand, he was inspired by his own growing child.
It was the first time I really ever thought about the mortality of my parents.
Inspiration struck in an unlikely setting.
And I had a yellow pad, and I just wrote the whole thing down in basically an hour.
The outline for the story really never changed.
It was just eight, nine pages of a free-associated Heres the story.
Very rarely do you get that kind of lightning-in-a-bottle moment.
Even the title emerged fully formed.
It was alwaysI Kill Giants, he says.
It just felt right and it felt like Barbara.
At the time, Kelly had the luxury of being able to do more or less whatever he wanted.
But it was a deeper cut that brought the scribe to Niimuras attention.
I was a huge fan, says Niimura.
He asked Niimura if hed be interested in collaborating and got an enthusiastic yes.
I spent more than half a year working on the designs and the backgrounds, Niimura recalls.
At the beginning, they were in my style, but a little bit more realistic.
He trails off for a moment.
I dont know, the character designs, they didnt work.
They werent iconic enough.
So, for Niimura, it became a go-big-or-go-home endeavor.
I re-did them and made them a little bit morecharacter-like more cartoony in a way.
That philosophy proved to be crucial in the visual realization of Barbaras head.
Her glasses and expressions got bigger.
Frustrated, he still wanted something striking going on up there.
So, too, does Barbaras mystical, enormous, giant-fighting hammer, Coveleski.
Its an odd name for a weapon, one with roots in baseball and Google.
It was a gift of the internet, Kelly says.
He turned to his computer for guidance.
So Niimura took inspiration from fantasy gameWarhammerand made the weapon twice Barbaras size and covered in accoutrements.
You see it and you totally know that that wouldnt possibly exist in real life, Niimura says.
The juxtaposition of the real environment versus this design that actually doesnt work, works for me.
But what would a story calledI Kill Giantsbe without, well, giants?
He also kept giving them a slightly more scandalous attribute: enormous swinging penises.
I said finally, Ken, why are they all naked?
But its something that every one of you should be reading,saidcritic Richard George.
It won laurels from theYoung Adult Library Services Associationand theMinistry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.
Vultures own Dan Koislistedit as one of the best comics of the year.
Fans clamoring for a movie adaptation couldnt have known how far along that process actually was.
As it turns out, Kelly had written a screenplay forI Kill Giantsalmost immediately after completing the comics script.
Editing the screenplay affected the way he thought about the comic and vice versa.
It was a very organic, kinda circular process.
Ive never done it since.
I wouldnt normally simultaneously do that.
Kelly recalls making a bold statement to Columbus in their initial meetings.
Columbus was game for that, and the film went into development.
Enter Anders Walter, for whomI Kill Giantshas been a rocky road.
However, after that success, hed fled from Hollywood back to Copenhagen.
The process that ensued was, for a time, not a happy one.
Hurdles abounded and the production fell apart at one point.
Saldana waffled on the proposal for months, then finally took a meeting with Walter.
We really didnt talk that much about the film, he recalls.
And I was like, Hey, wait!
We have to talk aboutI Kill Giants!
And then she just looked at me and said, Hey, relax.
Im going to do it.
But that wasnt enough to get the production to the finish line.
The finished product is unsurprisingly, given Kellys involvement a more or less direct porting of the comic.
However, a few changes were necessary.
Kelly was reluctant to lose them, but came under pressure to do so.
And the early days of talking to higher-ups demonstrate that it couldve been worse.
We did meet people very early on who were like, Could she fight, like, 120 giants?
Could that be part of the story?
And its like, No, no, thats not what this is about.
Unsurprisingly, those motifs have resonated with comics fans on a soul-deep level.
Cosplay with enormous Coveleskis and well-worn bunny ears is not uncommon at conventions.
People really dig deep and the book strikes them in a really meaningful way.
