Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw, Jeff Kinney interview

It's been really satisfying seeing the Wimpy Kid world come to life because I feel like these animated movies really are uh Greg springing off the page and onto the screen. I can't believe how faithful the adaptations are in terms of style uh to the original books, and I think that for a reader of the books, they've got to feel really good that this really is Diary of a Wimpy Kid come to life.

I think in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw we really get to the heart of the parent-child relationship, specifically the father-son dynamic. And it's really uh fun to see this really explored because we don't often get to see a story told from the point of view of the father and the son, and it's really uh I think it's a really funny story. It's really relatable, and I think that people will be able to see themselves in these characters.

With each one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies we try to explore the dynamics between uh friends and siblings, and it was time to really look at the relationship between Greg and his father. My envisionment of a Diary of a Wimpy Kid is that Greg and his father really are basically the same person. They're just growing up or they're living at different times in a way. They're just different ages, and I really wanted to prove and show that they really are the same person and they're just yearning to connect and they need to find their common ground.

The visual style of my books is very graphic, it's really simple. It's actually just about as simple as a drawing can be. And so it maps really well onto animated characters. And it's a different kind of style, it's a different look than you're used to because of course we see these Pixar movies and things like that that that have really, really complex mouth movements and things like that, but we're really mapping a really graphic style. They're almost emojis onto these 3D characters.

It's been fun for me as a screenwriter to learn how to write a screenplay. And when I first wrote these books, I was in my 20s. I wasn't a very good storyteller back then, but I think I've gotten better at it, and it's a real privilege for me to be able to revisit the stories I wrote so long ago and to turn them into really um deep stories that have some emotional resonance.

It's been a real privilege getting to see my stories come to life on the screen. And not just for this generation, but for the whole span of readership because of course I started writing these books 18 years ago. So I'm on my third or fourth generation of kids right now that I'm writing for. And so I think it's really cool that those 26 and 27-year-old uh original readers can watch these movies and feel a little bit of comfort in them. And then there's a new crop of uh readers and audience members coming up who are seven or eight years old who are enjoying them as well and might start reading the books because of these films.

This is the time of year when families get together and they can sit down in front of the TV and watch a beloved holiday classic. So here again, it's a real privilege to be able to write stories that are viewed by the whole family. And I think what makes our stories a little bit unique is that they're stories about the Heffley family. You don't often see a movie that's about a whole family, and so I think it's really special and it's really uh special because families get to enjoy it together during the holidays.