Screenwriters Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul talk "Despicable Me"

(Cinco Paul) An animator named Sergio Pablos came to Chris Meledantri at Illumination and sort of pitched the idea of a villain who ends up with these three little girls, and then they pitched it to us and we loved it.  We thought it was great, that it was really funny, but it had the potential for great heart.  We took that story and basically expanded it into 90 minutes. 

(Ken Daurio) Every time we would see something animated for the first time it was...you just get chills, it's just so much better than you expected it to be, at least for me anyway.  Especially when you see it go from words on a page to pencil drawings, to these horrible stiff...there's a phase in the middle where it's basically these stiff computer dummies just sliding around the screen, no facial movement or anything.  It's horrible.  It's very creepy and weird.  And then they breathe the life into these things and it's...it's amazing.

(CP) That is the thing that's amazing because, you know, the storyboards are just two-dimensional drawings.  They don't move, they can't perform really hardly at all in any way.  So then finally when you see these characters start to perform it's really awesome.  And it's great because it takes a long time.  You have to be very patient.  You know you've waited and waited, and then finally you see some performance and it's awesome.

(KD) Well there's so many great villain movies, and villains in movies.  So that was fun just to go and hand pick from all the great Bond villains and...everyone really.  There's Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader.  You know, everybody who was a great villain, it was fun to be able to just watch...'Oh why is that so fun to watch the villain?  Why do we always love the villain?'  And so we got to play with that and put all that stuff into our character, and then take him and make him and real guy too, which was fun, make him a dad.  And make him the guy who, he's trying to conquer the world but he also has to put snacks out for the girls or they're going to drive him crazy.  And we both have three kids so we can relate to trying to conquer the world and deal with the kids.