Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
The only summer movie I have thoroughly enjoyed so far this year (okay, granted we’re only a couple weeks into the summer movie season) has been the new Dreamworks CGI spectacular OVER THE HEDGE. All the film wants to do is entertain the bejesus out of you, and it succeeds without pandering or talking down to audience members of any age. And thank the gods for Steve Carell as Hammy the squirrel with ADD. My talking plushy of Hammy is in the mail!
I had the chance recently to speak with the film’s co-director Tim Johnson (along with Karey Kirkpatrick) about the film, the technology, and the wildly talented vocal cast. Johnson also directed ANTZ (which I actually liked better than A BUG’S LIFE) and SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS, both for Dreamworks.
Here is our spirited conversation…
Capone: Was that you who was here with the film in Chicago a couple weeks ago with Wanda Sykes and Jeffrey Katzenberg?
Tim Johnson: I was indeed. Chicago is my hometown, and I got to be here for all of...well, I did spend the night, all four hours of sleep that I got. Frustrating, you know, to see my beautiful hometown from windows and hotel rooms and then have to dash off.
C: That was a fun morning. The movie was great and then all the stuff that Jeffrey showed us beforehand [which included a cute short slated to run before OVER THE HEDGE and some work-in-progress scenes from FLUSHED AWAY].
TJ: I thought it was cool that he did that, actually. I’ve always admired Jeffrey. He will always play to confidence, you know. He’ll always take a chance. To show an unfinished scene from a movie that’s coming out in the fall I thought was kind of cool. And to show the short that those guys came up with was fun. I’m glad you liked it. Thanks.
C: The short is going before OVER THE HEDGE, right?
TJ: I think that the short is going before OVER THE HEDGE, but it might be only in New York and L.A.--I’m not sure how many markets, if it’s going everywhere or not. You’ll have to ask somebody smarter than I.
C: Even better then that we got to see it that day. For the animated films that you’ve done, it’s always been a co-directing situation. Is there a certain aspect of your movies that you tend to focus on? How do you split the directing duties?
TJ: It’s pretty much side by side. It’s really a partnership. But, of course, over the course of three to four years to make these things, you do need to take a vacation every now and then, and occasionally, just the demands of production necessitate two people in two different places. So, dividing up duties just is sort of a matter of necessity as production sort of demands it. But, with Karey, especially, the two of us just sort of co-captained and worked side by side.
C: So, it’s not like one kind of handles the actors and the other handles the animation?
TJ: No, we both really love working with actors, and so sometimes one of us would read with them and the other would be in the booth. Other times, we’d both be out there. It just sort of depended on what served the performer best.
C: It struck me as I was watching the film that the castadults are going to get that.
TJ: For me, even for the adults, it’s less aboutbut it really, genuinely, it’s not even about sort of selling the movie. It’s just about: these guys are famous for a reason, because they’re really, really damn good. And, when you’ve got a skunk, and you start to say, “God, what would it be like to be a skunk. I bet it’d be rough. I bet people would run away. I bet you’d be sort of defensive.” So, you just go, “Well, who would be the best person to voice it?” and you come up with Wanda Sykes.
Same thing with the possum: what does the possum do? They play dead. If you’re an animated possum, you better really play it, really go for it.
C: And, the possum considers himself an actor, so you’d HAVE to cast William Shatner.
TJ: You gotta have Shatner, yeah. So, for all of these voices for us, we were really lucky, because everybody said yes, but it was such a no-brainer. We cast Steve Carell before he’d had success with THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, or even, I think, BRUCE ALMIGHTY. But we loved him in “The Daily Show.” We saw a combination of warmth and manicness that could bring Hammy to life.
C: I will say there was a part of me that was tempted to spend the entire time we had together talking about Hammy, because...
TJ: [Laughs really loud]
C: ...from the minute I walked out of the theater that was all I could think about it. Whenever anyone asked me about the film, I immediately launch into “Steve Carell as a crazy squirrel...You have to see it!” It elevates the movie to a point where...if there’s a plush doll of Hammy with Carell’s voice in it, I’m going to buy it.
TJ: The thing that is great about him. What you can’t underestimate about him is, yes, he’s funny, and yes, he’s unpredictable, but he’s got so much heart. He’s so vulnerable. And, that’s why he’s popular. It’s one thing to get the laughs, but when you get the laughs, and you’ve got that sort of heart and soul of a three-year-old kidthat’s the thing.
C: Trusting, that’s exactly it what he is.
TJ: That’s where Carell just pulled it off, because Carell just tapped into some inner naive little kid, who just adores everything. For him, hanging out with RJ the Raccoon [voiced by Bruce Willis] is like hanging out with a high -school quarterback. It’s like, I’m with the cool kid.
C: What direction, if any, was given to Carell that resulted in that performance? Was there something that you guys talked about?
TJ: It was the first voice he did. We described the character. We said, “He’s, like, this energetic guy. He probably has, like, ADD, but it’s never slowed him down.” We showed him all the stuff, and we said, “Well, let’s just try it and go ahead and be a little hyper-caffinated for us.” And, the first voice he did for us was that [imitates the squirrel]...that absolutely huge, big personality.
C: The hands-down best scene in the movie is where he drinks that...is it soda or coffee?
TJ: It’s actually the Mach 6 energy drink. We wanted to do the Red Bull parody there.
C: That’s the greatest scene I’ve seen all year.
TJ: Fantastic.
C: That is the funniest. It takes you a while to realize what’s going on, but then once you do, it’s priceless. Can you describe this animation style? It’s bordering on realistic, but it’s definitely got some surreal qualities to it.
TJ: I like to call it, sort of, photo-unrealistic. Most animated films proceed from its origins, which is drawing. In order to design an animated film, you start with a blank canvas, you start to draw and paint and illustrate and PhotoShop, or whatever your medium is.
But, that makes it a sort of additive process, and you keep adding things to it, but photography is a subtractive process. So, when we see a motion picture, we’re actually seeing the aesthetic of photography applied. When we see animation, we’re the aesthetic of illustration applied.
I wanted to reverse that. I wanted to say, “Let’s take stuff away in this movie.” So, right away, we took away focus. It’s a very shallow focus, and it’s lovely like dappled light in back of the characters of out-of-focus imagery. We took away exposure. The human eye sees 12 stops; a photograph sees five.
So, we let the blacks go really black, not light gray or purple. So, we really tried to go for what happens in photographyand really push them. There was a bit of a fantasy and a bit of artfulness to the way the world collapses in and focuses on the characters. This is a picture with a real strong point of view from the animals. We used every trick we could from photography rather than illustration to make that point.
C: A lot of the shots are from down low.
TJ: Yeah, you know, we just said, “It’s the animals that are six feet tall, and the rest of the world is gigantic.” Like they’re people, not like they’re little creatures. It’s not the animals that are small, and the world that is huge.
C: Where did the idea come from to use more everyday animals that people might see in their backyards, rather than the more exotic creatures we’ve been seeing.
TJ: That’s sort of part and parcel with the idea, you know. This is based on a comic strip, and that comic strip looks at human beings from the point of view of these backyard animals. And, so Verne [Garry Shandling] and RJ and Hammy are strongly based on the characters in the strip, whereas we invented Stella [Sykes] and Ozzie [Shatner] and Penny [O’Hara] and Lou [Levy] and those characters, but they’re really all based on experiences I had in the suburbs of Chicago--looking at a porcupine that was in the field in back of my house or the possum that was always on the fence, giving me that weird look at night, and raccoons we’re always at our garbage can.
I don’t think these are unique experience to me. If anything, we’re the ones who are living in their backyard, so I think we’ve all got run-ins and experiences. Maybe you heard that in Central Park the other month someone ran into a coyote. So, this is not a strange thing to find that we may have tried to shove the animals aside, but they found a way to live in between the cracks.
C: I noticed that among the film’s writing staff was Len Blum. I was actually kind of shocked to see his name because I know him from STRIPES and MEATBALLS and, more recently, Howard Stern’s PRIVATE PARTS. What did he bring to the script?
TJ: Well, Lenny has got a great observational wit about him. He was an unbelievable collaborator for the first couple years of it, and he gave us a lot of the character and the tone and structure of the picture. It was just a brilliant thing working with Lenny. He is a comic genius. If you ever get a chance to meet him, his waters run deep. He is a soulful man, a really funny guy.
C: The character of RJ seemed custom made for Bruce Willis, who practically invented or re-invented the wise-cracking action hero type. But, I thought I read somewhere that Jim Carrey had originally been cast in the role.
TJ: Oh, yeah. Three years ago, we started exploring the character with Jim Carrey, and we were having a lot of fun with Jim in a couple studio sessions. But, you know, the thing about Jim that’s part of his genius is that when he goes into a character he doesn’t like to change characters.
He was doing back-to-back movies, I think they were LEMONY SNICKET and something else, and he said, “I’m going to disappear for seven months, and I don’t want to see you guys on a Saturday and record this character, because I have to stay in these other characters.” And, that is just not...we just can’t do it. So, it was an amicable parting, but we were exploring a pretty different version of the story back then, too.
It was really great to get together with Bruce and find, frankly, just a real warm con man, that David Addison-type from “Moonlighting,” the character that Bruce has. Bruce has been busy saving the world for the last 15 years, so to return him to that sort of happy-go-lucky con man was a pleasure for him and for us.
C: I noticed that rather than the typical use of pop culture references in a lot of the animated things today, there references to older films.
TJ: We couldn’t resist them: there are the Rosebud and Stella lines. Well, the thing for us is I think that makes it more timeless. We were already very conscious that this film isthis is taking place in our real world, in our backyards. And Karey and I thought that if we got too specific and contemporary and jokey in parody, it would actually date the film very quickly.
C: The flaw in some of those other films: Five years down the line, those jokes might not make that much sense.
TJ: Yeah, they get a little cynical, too, for me, and I really wanted the naiveté of these animals to be part of the joy of the picture, to be that sort of innocent to the world. On the other hand, it liberated us to have our sort of parody wit on making fun of products and things that we just made up. So, our trail-guide girls are delivering cookies called Skinny Mints and Neener Neeners and Smackeroons, and my favorite cookie of all is Love Handles.
And, so we just had a, like, Mad-Lib’s funny version of all of these human products and consumer culture. And, by not actually putting a foot in the real world, but in this kind of parallel universe, I think we ended up as sort of a more timeless and slightly sharper wit about the movie.
C: Are there any new technical tricks or developments to look for in this production?
TJ: One of them I sort of mentioned already, which is it’s actually hard to throw focus in an animated movie. You actually do it as a post-process. You render the image, and then you do an effect on it to get those dappled ‘circles of confusion,’ they call it. And, the thing that happens in most computer animation is to make something go out of focus, it gets blurry, darker, and less saturated. It just gets muddy, but with camerasthings stay color rich and they get these lovely dappled circles. So, we had to write special software, brand new technology, to imitate what happens in the real world of focus in the world of the computer.
The other thing is just a staggering amount of data, I mean, when you’ve got 10 animals, each hair is a polygon data. Every tree has millions of leaves on it, and all of that is more for the computer to deal with. So, when I look at what I did on ANTZ eight years ago with these characters that...you know, the reason we did ants is they had no fur and no fabric. So, it was a very accessible thing for the technology.
Now, here we are with 50 million polygons in a single frame. The computer power and the software ingenuity are now absolutely limitless, and you can really get anything on screen your imagination can conceive.
C: I was going to ask you how much easier or more difficult was it between ANTZ and this film?
TJ: You know, I always find limitations are easier. I actually think a lot is taken off the table for you in your decisions because you simply cannot do it. In some ways today, the computer is more capable and, therefore, the filmmaking is harder. You’ve got every single capability at your disposal, so winnowing out what belongs in your film and what doesn’t, the many different looks and feels that you can choose from, you really end up with an almost daunting level of creative possibilities. So, it’s very exciting, but it’s terrifying at the same time.
C: Having all those possibilities at your fingertips can almost make the process take longer, too.
TJ: Well, it can, yeah. I actually don’t think it always leads to the best filmmaking. Sometimes a smaller budget or a limited set of choices enforces a sort of creative thrift that helps the film out. So, right away, we did make a lot of rules, you know, and I think that they helped us. The Rule #1 is Don’t shoot these animals ever looking down on them, unless the story demands it. Always shoot like their six feet tall. Number 2 were these choices about making focus very shallow.
So, we tried to make the world less cluttered and less detailed. Sometimes, I feel computer animation is like looking at a scrimshaw collection. It’s like an eyesore of detail, and so we wanted to make it kind of easier on the eyes for an audience. By putting our own creative limitations based on the look and feel of the story we wanted to tell, it does cut those sort of decisions down to a slightly more manageable heap.
C: DreamWorks Animation now, even excluding the SHREK films factored in, has got to be pretty pleased with the state of itself these days.
TJ: It’s an exciting place to work.
C: Between the Aardman work and MADAGASCAR’s success.
TJ: Yeah, and it still takes lots of chances. I really respect and have had a great decade of partnership with Jeffrey Katzenberg there, who’s always asking, “What’s the different way to approach this story? What’s a visual thing we haven’t done before?” It’s almost like MADAGASGAR really took a style and had a blast with it.
So, I really love working there because every project and all the stuff I see in the cooker coming up are trying to sort push some boundaries in different ways, and yet, they do share a sort of DreamWorks tone, which is slightly more sort of all-age appropriate, slightlybut we do have little more of sort of a social comment in some of the pictures we make, and there’s an appeal that’s slightly different than, say, what Pixar or Disney or other studios are doing. And, it gives us a slightly distinct voice, I think.
C: My last question would be, How much money are you going to charge me to actually watch the raw footage of Steve Carell recording his voice part, because that had to be fantastic thing to see.
TJ: To this day, having worked with Steve over the course of a dozen sessions for the film, I cannot picture him doing Hammy. When I look at Hammy, he’s just Hammy. And, I look at the videotapeit’s like he’s channeling some strange voodoo god. He becomes not just the voice, his eyes get big and sort of shiny, and he’s got this big, wide grin on his face, his shoulders kind of bunched up near his ears. It’s absolutely a transformation.
C: That’s exactly what I expected. You have to put that on the DVD. All of it!
TJ: Oh, we’ve got to. I mean, we put a cookie in his hand, because there’s a scene where he tries a Nacho cheese-flavored chip, and on screen, it’s three seconds of him going [imitates Hammy], “Oh, more please, more.” But, Steve did three minutes, and it’s three minutes of him spitting onto the microphone all of the chips he was eating. I was behind soundproof glass, and I still ruined one of the recordings because I was screaming with laughter. Yeah, I mean, Carell definitely needs to hold a battle for funniest man alive, because he would win it. It’s stunning to be with him.
C: I almost forgot to ask, how did you rope Avril Lavigne into doing the voice of Shatner’s daughter?
TJ: That was actually kind of a cool experience, because we had this character Heather, who wanted her to be this embarrassed daughter of this theatrical father. And, we listened to...well, I won’t say the names, but you can imagineand they all sounded like the same southern California sound.
And, number one, we wanted to set the film in the Midwest, where they have seasons; and, number two, we felt like that was a very tired voice and not a very fair stereotype even. So, our casting director, Leslee Feldman, said, “Why don’t you look outside the world of the actresses. Look at music, and here’s a tape of Avril Lavigne.” She had a tape of her being interviewed on MTV, and right away, the Canadian accent had a little different sort of music. She was so strong and tough and not this sort of stereotypical whining teenager. She was instantly Heather. And then, we were terrified because we fell so in love with the voice--would Avril do it?
So, it took a little bit of coaxing, just because she had never done any performing other than her singing career. But, we got through to her manager, who said, “Well, I don’t know! Let’s see if she wants to do it.” And, conveniently enough, she was thinking about doing some acting work, and this was a great start for her, to start with just doing voice work. And, phenomenal to work with, what a pro.
C: That way you make a father and daughter that are both Canadian.
TJ: Which was sort of an accident, but a happy one. A lot of these sorts of pairing in the picture, whether it’s Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, who’ve worked their whole careers together, and they just feel like a married couple when they’re that possum-family friend, and they did a sort of [imitates] northern Canada accent, you know.
Or, yeah, the other Canadian couple, Avril and Bill.So, it actually, somehow or another, really does make a difference. When you’ve got a fantasy, which an animated film inherently is, any little thing that has an earthy sensibility, a grounded-in-reality sensibility, just makes the audience buy into your characters all the faster.
Capone
