Remarkably Bright Creatures author Shelby Van Pelt on the octopus that won a million hearts—now on Netflix

The plot follows Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, and Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who is grieving her son, Erik, who mysteriously disappeared. People might tune in for the talking octopus, but they will stay on for its underlying themes of grief and loneliness.

Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus, with Tova Sullivan. A still from Remarkably Bright Creatures. (Courtesy: Netflix)

Van Pelt says Sullivan, the emotional center of Remarkably Bright Creatures, is loosely inspired by her grandmother. “She was someone who always kept busy, she was always in motion, always finding something to do whether cleaning or something else,” Van Pelt recalled. “I remember just sort of watching her and wondering what made her tick.”

Despite the heavy themes, Van Pelt never wanted the novel to feel emotionally punishing. “I definitely wanted to write a book that did not feel heavy, that was funny and light,” she said. “Something that one would enjoy reading, rather than something one would feel obliged to slog through.”

Marcellus, sarcastic and perceptive, became the perfect counterweight to that emotional heaviness. Van Pelt got the idea of anthropomorphising the octopus while watching videos on the internet. “Basically, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole one afternoon watching videos of octopuses behaving badly,” she  says. “Escaping from their enclosures, or, you know, in the wild, they would, like, throw rocks at fish that go by when they don’t want to be disturbed.”

What fascinated her was how recognisably human their irritations seemed. “You are watching this octopus shoot a jet of water out at a light because the light is bothering them, and one thinks, yes, I get that,” she said.

“I have been sitting in bed and not want to get out and want to turn the light off and wish I had water to just shoot at it,” she laughs. This emotional relatability became the foundation of Marcellus’s narrative voice.

Within the novel, Marcellus gradually becomes something like a detective, piecing together emotional truths the human characters cannot see themselves. However, Van Pelt resists framing him as a traditional sleuth. “I feel like Marcellus is an unwilling detective,” she said. “He is not really searching…it just kind of comes to him.”

At one point, she briefly considered turning the novel into a more conventional mystery.“But I did not get very far down that road because when you are writing in a genre like that, there are a lot of rules and conventions, and I feel like I just didn’t want to be bound by those.”

Author Shelby Van Pelt is the executive producer of the Netflix adaptation of Remarkably Bright Creatures. (Courtesy: Shelby Van Pelt)

Before becoming a novelist, Van Pelt spent nearly a decade working in financial consulting, a career she jokingly describes as that of “a recovering consultant.”

“I loved my consulting career, honestly,” she says. “But there were a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of document review.”

Even there, however, she gravitated toward narrative. “We were sort of putting together the picture of how something unfolded from a financial perspective, but you are also sort of putting together a narrative,” she said.

“I would barter with my co-workers sometimes,” she says, laughing. “You do all of this data manipulation in Excel for me, and I will draft your report for you.”

From page to screen

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

How different is the adaptation from the book? “It definitely does not match the book scene by scene,” she says, adding, “But, if you are a reader who is watching the movie, you will  recognise the story, even if some scenes are different.”

Asked about the extent of her involvement in the adaptation and how different the process was for her, she says, “I did get to read kind of every draft of the script as it came through. I got to give notes on that. Everything has to be so much tighter. If I were to read the novel, it would probably take me 10 hours, but to read through the entire script took 45 minutes.”

Although novelists are often imagined as solitary figures hunched over laptops in isolation, Van Pelt has a different process. “I had a critique partner that was reading almost every page that I wrote,” she said. “Sometimes almost in real time.”

Writing, she explains, may happen alone, but stories rarely emerge in total isolation.“It is me and my computer, and I have got to get the words down,” she says. “But I feel like I am constantly bouncing things off of people and trying to get input in real time.”

The same, as she later discovered, is true of filmmaking, only on a much larger scale. “Sometimes I wonder how they manage to make something with so many people involved,” she said. “It’s like the ultimate group project.”

Authorship in the age of AI

Now, as artificial intelligence reshapes publishing and entertainment, Van Pelt finds herself confronting new anxieties about authorship itself. “AI is being used to write novels,” she confirms, but she is skeptical about whether a machine-generated storytelling can replicate the emotional experience of writing.

“For me, the fun part of it is really discovering the story as I’m writing it,” she says. “When I sit down to write, it just feels like magic moving through my brain.”

“To use AI to do that would take that away and I would no longer enjoy the job,” she said.

She also acknowledged the ethical unease many authors feel about systems trained on existing creative work. “These machines are trained on our work,” she said. “And that is theft on some level.”

Yet despite rapid technological change, Van Pelt remains hopeful that readers still crave something fundamentally human. “I’ve been really encouraged by just how much appetite there is among readers to understand the story behind the story,” she said.

A still from Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. (Source: Netflix)

Perhaps that explains why Remarkably Bright Creatures resonated so widely as beneath its eccentric premise lies a deep longing. As for what comes next, Van Pelt is already at work on another standalone novel. “It’s a novel about a messy family that is going through some hard things,” is all she would say. Like her debut, she hopes it will balance emotional weight with humor and warmth.

Directed by Olivia Newman, who previously adapted Delia Owens’s 2018 novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, the Netflix film stars Sally Field as Tova Sullivan alongside Lewis Pullman, with Alfred Molina voicing Marcellus.