Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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[Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Sheep Detectives.]
The Sheep Detectives should technically not have worked.
The Amazon MGM film, adapted from Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full, follows a flock of Irish sheep solving the murder of their shepherd, George Hardy (Hugh Jackman). While the cast includes human actors like Nicholas Galitzine and Emma Thompson, the focus remains on the sheep, voiced by stars including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart.
Screenwriter Craig Mazin, known for The Last of Us and Chernobyl, found that Swann’s bestseller stretched new creative muscles for him. “This movie on paper should not have been made,” Mazin tells The Hollywood Reporter. Initial skepticism of perhaps a “very silly” story gave way to discovering a “gorgeous, philosophical” one, Mazin says of first reading the novel years ago. “What I loved most is she [Swann] had these very thoughtful sheep, but they were limited by their understanding of the world, and you had to discover that limitation with them.”
An Agatha Christie aficionado, Mazin embraced the challenge of crafting a sheep-led whodunnit. To make it suitable for a family audience, the book’s darker plot points were adjusted and the ensemble was streamlined, but the core became a “meta exercise” in mystery tropes.
“If this is going to be a whodunnit and all they know about the world is whodunnits from Agatha Christie, it should be an Agatha Christie whodunnit. It should follow those rules,” he explains of the sheep who become obsessed with mysteries after Jackman’s George read them stories every night. “The thing is, [Agatha Christie’s] Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot do not solve the case until the very end. They struggle, and I love that struggle.”
Hugh Jackman stars as George Hardy in The Sheep Detectives.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
When crafting the mystery adaptation, Mazin says a concern was there weren’t “any real stakes,” which is imperative in a mystery. So he ensured the dramatic tension felt real by focusing on justice. “Hugh Jackman had to make us fall in love with George in about 12 minutes,” he notes.
Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the smartest of the flock, uses a mystery novel George would read to them every night as the blueprint for crime-solving. However, the lingering issue preventing her and the rest from truly finding their culprit is that they’ve never actually left their farm.
“They’re scared. Everything is new to them,” Mazin says. But what they lack in world experience is compensated for with their observation skills, including “the ability to look into someone’s eyes and see if they’re telling the truth,” pattern recognition and the “most important skill that sheep have that no one else has [which] is the ability to forget things.”
Moments of “sheepiness” sometimes thwart them, with Mazin pointing to how sheep Cloud, “the most beautiful sheep, finds a bracelet that [Molly Gordon’s] Rebecca has left in the field, and she keeps it because she’s obsessed with it, because it is the thing that has no end.” The bracelet proved to be an important piece of evidence in the case but “she just looks at it as a circle that goes around and around and around, and she hides it from the rest of the sheep. I thought that was the most odd and beautiful thing. Your process of solving a mystery gets somewhat thwarted by the fact that one of your own can’t seem to stop looking at a bracelet.”
Given “most of the elements of the mystery in the novel couldn’t quite be ported over,” Mazin had to “create a different engine” and “tried to do as much of the Agatha Christie math” as he could — though not without facing some hiccups along the way.
From left: Molly Gordon stars as Rebecca Hampstead, Kobna Holbrook-Smith as Reverend Hillcoate, Nicholas Galitzine as Elliot Matthews and Hong Chau as Beth Pennock.
Alex Bailey/Amazon/MGM
Mazin acknowledges that “every screenwriter has a delicious five-hour version of the movie that nobody wants to watch,” but his challenge was to tell the story in “a screen-efficient amount of time” while introducing each suspect, who also had to appear to be “credible and have a motive.” Among those rationales were “financial motives, a scorned heart, a dangerous secret, and there’s jealousy,” he says, adding that Hong Chau’s Beth — and her involvement as a suspect — was among one of his biggest narrative tests, as her role isn’t explained until the “very end” of the film.
On the surface, the film directed by Kyle Balda has all the elements to make it a fun family mystery described as a “Babe meets Knives Out,” but Mazin emphasizes the film has an emotional core, which he learned has prompted people to cry while watching the film.
“This movie, to me, was always an opportunity to do a coming-of-age story. Lily is an adult sheep, but she’s a child. Her innocence about death and life and the world, it’s profound, and it also makes sense. They’re sheep. They’re paragons of peaceful behavior and watching her struggle with reality is a tough one. She gets it wrong before she gets it right, and she gets it wrong because of something about her that is very sheepy. She has to grow up in order to solve the case.
“We never stop learning, and we never stop being confronted by difficult things, and they change over the course of our lives,” he continues. “The sheep on the surface, they’re solving a mystery, but really, what they’re doing is they’re dealing with grief and loss.”
From left: Nicholas Braun and Galitzine
Alex Bailey/Amazon/MGM
The flock is also changed for good when their outsider winter lamb Sebastain dies after defending Lily and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) from aggressive dogs, a scene that Mazin says he cried while writing. “No matter how bad flocks of sheep have treated him in his life, because he was a winter lamb, he still comes back to defend them. He says, ‘You’re my flock. We cannot separate ourselves.’ The people that we admire the most and find the most noble, are those who put themselves aside for others, even when those others treat them poorly. It is a beautiful, noble thing for anybody to witness.”
From Swann’s approval of the adaptation to MGM and executive Courtney Valenti’s support in helping make the adaptation, which faced a decade-long developmental process, Mazin says the success of the film has been a great surprise.
“It has done really well. We knew it wasn’t going to open like a blockbuster, but it’s done four times its opening weekend, just in the United States alone, which is a great number. I think we’re at like $125 million global for the movie. They did a great job with the trailers and everything, but once that opening weekend hit, the marketing was word-of-mouth, and we have been thrilled that so many people have found it.”
“I am extraordinarily proud of it, and everyone who worked on it,” added Mazin. “This one matters to me. Everybody went in thinking, ‘This is going to be dumb.’ Sure, animal movies often are dumb, and we over performed!”
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The Sheep Detectives hits streaming June 24 on Prime Video.
