Believe it or not, there is some pretty great animation coming out of studios other than Pixarr and Studio Ghibli. Case in point: last weekend's massive hit THE CROODS, which follows the adventures of a family of cave dwellers that must cope with the scary, every-changing world outside their cave. I'll be the first to tell you that big box office is no measure of a film's quality, but in this case, the good guys won.
The "guys" I'm referring to in this case are co-writers/directors Kirk De Micco (who wrote and directed SPACE CHIMPS) and former Disney man Chris Sanders, who has story credits on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, THE LION KING, and ALADIN. Sanders went on to director on of my favorite Disney animated films of the 2000s, LILO & STITCH, and he went on to direct on of DreamWorks Animation's (which also produced THE CROODS, with Fox distributing) biggest non-SHREK hits, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (although he is not involved in the now-in-production sequel).
There are few things I enjoy more than talking to folks involved in animation. If you ever want to meet someone with more creative energy and love of movies than you can handle, just talk to someone on the creative team behind an animated film. And Kirk and Chris were no exception. Please enjoy my talk with them…
Chris Sanders: Hello.
Capone: How are you, Chris?
CS: Thanks for coming.
Capone: It’s good to meet you. [Point out the hotel window over looking Michigan Avenue in the middle of an active snowstorm.] Welcome to Chicago.
CS: We are so happy. We hope that we get snowed in so much.
Capone: I think the odds are better than you think.
CS: We just want to walk around.
Kirk De Micco: Get some pizza, walk around, make snowballs.
Capone: You’re in a good neighborhood, since everything is within a few blocks from here.
CS: Yeah, the snow is supposed to peak around three o’clock.
Capone: So before we start talking about the movie, I noticed a couple of names in the credits that I think are worth asking about. Is Roger Deakins just on retention at DreamWorks Animation for doing visual consulting?
CS: That's a good question. You know, he sort of is. Hopefully they will do that.
Capone: He did RISE OF THE GAURDIANS and DRAGON and RANGO…
KDM: Now he’s doing DRAGON 2.He was much more involved in DRAGON than he was, for example, on WALL-E. He was on WALL-E I think for a few days, and for DRAGON he was there pretty much the entire time.
Capone: What about this film?
CS: Well the great thing about Roger was him helping us and the studio be happy with taking away lights in the cave and going with some really dark interiors, which was necessary for the storytelling and also I think that opening stuff, that whole first act, which is that hard light and that blown out look. We wanted to give it that arid, rough, harsh, but yet still appealing quality. That was a big part of where I think he helped us get everybody comfortable with, and then with the fire light sequence, you know when she sees fire for the first time? Because it’s not “comedy lighting,” you know?
Capone: Is that standard-issue stuff for animation, to have a live-action cinematographer come in and advise like that?
CS: No, I think it’s pretty unusual. I think our situation is very unusual. One of the things that Roger has done for us, what Kirk is talking about and I guess I’ll just second it, he’s all about removing light. It’s very easy to overlight an animated film. Lights are easy to place, relatively speaking, in a scene.
KDM: Because you don’t have to rent them.
CS: One of the things Roger was amused by was that he could put a light in the shot and you don’t see the light, you only see the light hitting. The light strikes the objects, but you don’t see the actual fixture sitting there, because the fixture is invisible. I think he was pretty amused by that and was pretty cool for him. But yeah he’s all about removing light.
If you’ve seen his films--which is everybody I think--everyone is so enamored with the way his films look. It’s an incredible sense of reality, while retaining a great mastery of the art of lighting. It’s artistic, but it also feels real. Roger is all about removing lights, and in HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON that was one of the things, he was taking lights out of a shot. For instance, we have this moment [in THE CROODS] where Eep finds this torch; she's seeing fire for the very first time, and really the main light source is just that torch. It would be very simple and very easy and very tempting to come in and go “Let’s put a little light on this rock over here. Let’s get a little more light on her nose. Let’s get a little more light on her hair.” Pretty soon, you’ve over lit the shot, and Roger helps us not do that.
Capone: I can’t remember if I read this somewhere or if it was actually in the credits that John Cleese was involved in the story. What’s the history there? There is actually a credit in the film, right?
KDM: There is credit. He shares story credit with us. Yeah, John and I first started writing together at Disney on THE TWITS by Roald Dahl; we adapted that book, which sadly has not been made. We both love Roald Dahl and we came together on that project and started working on that; and Dreamworks had read the script, thought it was funny, and I went over and looked at all of their projects that they had at the time. This was in 2004 or very late 2003.
One of the projects was a kernel of an idea about these two cavemen. At that time, it was like a luddite and a mad inventor on the run, and the big thing that was there was this theme, this fear of change. Really it was the fear of technology at that point, because John has a deathly fear of technology, and he believes it’s going to ruin the world, and it has already ruined personal relationships and most conversation.
Capone: If it wasn’t technology, it would have been something else.
KDM: [laughs] It would have been something else. So that was part of what it was, and over the time that we were doing it for Aardman and we were working with Peter [Lord, co-founder of Aardman], and it was going to be a stop-motion film. It was a much more sort of domestic kind of story with a journey aspect. But it was really two villages, one was called “Crood.” It was much more satirical, and over time Aardman went to Sony, and at DreamWorks Jeffrey [Katzenberg] always believed in this concept.
Then in 2007, Chris came over from Disney we started refining it. The one thing I kept in was this fear of change, and that transitioned over time. The fear of technology, fire, shoes, that’s the fun part of cavemen; they have beginners' minds and they see things for the first time, and it’s fun working with those characters, but the real relatable, emotionally resonant fear of change is that which happens within your family, especially for a father with his daughter. So that’s where that grew from.
Capone: So you're talking about maybe 2004 start with just the ideas. That’s a long time ago, almost like ten years. Talk about that DreamWorks creative pipeline and about how the film evolved, so to speak.
CS: I was witness to probably the biggest jump in the story. When I came on the the movie in 2007, it was about a village and it was a caveman village, and Grug was the chief of that village. It still had a lot of the same elements. It had a relationship, a bit of a triangle between Grug, his daughter, and this new guy, Guy. It really centered around those three relationships, and the stresses and changes that occur when Guy comes into that mix. There were also elements of a journey, but you were inevitably anchored to this town, and that was the thing that Kirk and I struggled with for a year. We did as much as we could with that story, but it never really lifted off of the ground.
I was asked to go over to DRAGONS. They wanted to change directions with that story, so I began writing and directing on DRAGONS, and I left Kirk with this problem. [laughs] Kirk called me one day and he said, “I want to pitch something to you,” and I came down and Kirk said, “No more village. One family loses their cave, and they go on the world’s first family road trip to find another one.” It was like somebody finally turned on the lights, and I said “You’ve done it. That’s it. That’s the story.” That’s the movie we made. So Kirk jettisoning that town was pretty much the same effect as pulling up anchor and allowing this story to finally sail.
Capone: One of the things I love talking about with people who have directed animated films is talking about the evolution of the look of the characters and how that changes. What were some of the bigger leaps in terms of how you wanted them to look?
KDM: Yeah, the characters never really went through a change. It was just a very lengthy build. We were very, very careful during the creation and the design of the characters to get characters that weren’t overly glamorous to live in this world. We wanted them to be visually appealing, but we also wanted the characters that could live in that environment to be believable. So I think Eep is the character that you most want to talk about. Grug was relatively straight forward; we just wanted a big powerful guy that could believably protect his family in this world.
Eep was a different case, because we wanted her to be visually appealing. We wanted her to be pretty, but we wanted her to be caveman pretty. So we gave her this body…if you watch the summer Olympics, she’s got the broad shoulders and this amazingly V-shaped back like the swimmers and the gymnasts have. She’s a powerful character, but if you look at her shape, she still has these lyrical shapes and these very graceful shapes. Those big shoulders terminate in very small hands, and her legs terminate in very small feet. So she’s got a lightness and a grace that keep her fast and agile looking. At the same time, she can also have a moment in the film where she grabs Guy and lifts him off the ground with one arm, because the Croods are really a different species than Guy. He is human being 2.0. He’s more like us; he's all about his brain. He’s really in shape, but compared to a Crood, he's under powered. So if the Croods want to keep him around, he’s sticking around; he cannot get away.
CS: We wanted this movie to start in a very…“the universal cavemen expectations.” We wanted to satisfy them with mammoth hunting and volcanoes and lava and earthquakes and tar pits, and we wanted them to be super strong and keep it broadly comedic at the beginning and take it to another place. The tone shifts over a period, which is inverse for many of our animated films with start with “dead mom, happy ending.” So we went the opposite direction, I guess, and the fun part was that opening hunt. It had this Looney Tunes energy and believability, I thin, that if cavemen had bones that were this thick, they could survive those kinds of falls; they are not like you and me. It was that believability that we pushed with the tone, but at the same time, you felt they could die, so at the end when the peril became real, you would feel it.
Capone: Did you ever consider like a limited language with the family versus Guy?
KDM: Absolutely. We had had some pretty big discussions at the very beginning. Because in the caveman movie spectrum, you’ve got QUEST FOR FIRE at one end and you’ve got THE FLINSTONES at the other. I think we're closer to FLINSTONES. We questioned whether they should even speak or if they should have a more limited language, and we pretty quickly dispensed with that, because this story was much more complex and much more subtle. In QUEST FOR FIRE, what they're doing is looking to find fire and they do go through cultural change, but it takes a great length of time to do that, and The Croods have a lot farther to go storywise and have bigger story arcs. For that, we needed a language.
CS: We actually played with this idea that we would--and it would have just confused the hell out of the children--do like JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG or HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, where he would start out speaking Russian and then we would zoom in, and they would go from "Ugh ugh ugh" to “This is awesome!” We were just like, “People will never get it.”
KDM: Not really necessary. That said, there were words that once in a while came by that just "stuck up" in a sense, and we took those out.
CS: Yeah, the only one that made it through was "sucky." When Nick Cage said “Sucky,” it was like “You know what? Let it ride.”
Capone: When I watched the film, the thing that really stuck out was just how creative you got with the other creatures, the animals of this place, because they don’t look like things we've seen before. They are not just mammoths and sabertooth tigers; they're blown out. That’s really what I’m curious about, where those ideas come from when you can start form scratch if you wanted to.
KDM: The challenge was always presented to us to invent a time period, which would give us a certain amount of creative freedom with the story and the characters. So part of the anchor for this new time period would be a zoo full of animals that you've never really seen before, and there are a couple staples in there. You’ve got your mammoth .
Capone: But this isn’t ICE AGE.
KDM: Yeah, they’re not as naturalistic. They're more pushed, more caricatures for sure.
CS: Yeah, and Shane Prigmore was one of our development artists, he did a sketch early on of a character that was a combination of two animals we know today. We thought that that was a great idea and a great controlling idea for all of the animals in our universe. So we asked that he continue along that line and he started creating these characters that were combination creatures, imagining if you rolled backwards in time that these animals fused together. I don’t know if you rolled forward in time, they would either disappear all together or they would separate. So that was just a controlling idea that we thought was kind of fun.
KDM: We wanted the family to feel grounded, because we wanted people to look at themselves and be like, “Hey, that’s my family.” That was a big part of it and I think all of these films from a screenwriting perspective, it’s like there’s always one “gimmie,” if it’s “Animals can talk. Dragons are alive.” Whatever your gimmie is, and ours was that “this was a time between times, a time that we discovered or one day will be discovered” to allow for whimsy and fantasy, so that CG and the animation can open up.
CS: That said, it’s amazing how many times during the production of this film somebody would email us and be like, “Check out this new story; they just dug up something brand new.” There were 10 major fossil discoveries while we were making this film.
KDM: When you’re making a film about cavemen, everyone is watching the news and as things pop up they send it to you.
CS: It’s always changing. That story is still changing, so you’ll never know. Before we drop dead, we may be credited with discovering something way before it was known.
Capone: These days, it’s fairly standard practice to film your actors while they're recording their voice parts. Do you use that, or do you just have that for the documentary?
KDM: Yes, we will constantly pull reference. While we record, we'll be making little notes on our script if the actor does something that we think is just fantastic. Nobody got pulled more than Emma Stone. She has the most amazingly animated expressions I’ve ever seen. She’s incredibly appealing, fresh, unusual. At one point, she actually smiles, but her mouth is turning down. It’s a very hard thing to explain.
Capone: Is there a particular technical achievement that you’re especially proud of, like you think maybe “We got this better than anyone before?” I noticed it in the scenes in water that the water looks perfect, and I’m a stickler for bad-looking water animation.
KDM: [laughs] Particularly with this one for us, there was tar. It’s not like “call up the tar department.” No one had ever done tar, and what’s interesting is they didn’t use a liquid sim; it’s actually a cloth sim. So the simulation moves more like they would a big cloak, and they used the simulation to get that, but all of those little bubbles, there were many conversations of “when that bubble would pop” like at the right moment to not distract you. So it’s that kind of control, but I think that was pretty much the coolest, because it gives the total effect of them sinking. We were constantly playing that they weren’t going to get out there, and Grug is really pulling against that tar, and it's stretching out. We went down to the tar pit in La Brea, and Chris put his finger in tar many times.
CS: Yeah, we do have the benefit of living near the actual tar pits, so we could go down and reference them any time we want.
Capone: This is a DreamWorks Animation production being released by Fox. What’s the story behind that? Why is that the case? And does that have anything to do with recent layout announcement at DreamWorks Animation?
KDM: They had been talking about that that distribution deal for quite a while. I mean we were deep into production. I think it’s actually a five-year deal. But it’s the first of I think a five-year deal that Fox has. We went to the Berlin Film Festival with it, and they do such a great job marketing these movies, especially internationally, and it that was a really cool thing. We went there, and everyone was like “It’s a austere theater, be prepared. This is Germany.” [Laughs]
CS: The theater we went to had a series of very sad films that day.
KDM: Yeah, like from a Bosnian sex slave film to “…And now THE CROODS.” But we couldn’t have found a better reception. It was really fun to watch. The interesting thing was the site gags were playing right on time, and it’s a visual medium, so I think that’s why animation travels so well. Once it gets localized in their languages, it’s their movie, but the interesting thing was this one was subtitled, and so I would be sitting there and I’d be like “Shit, that joke’s not landing,” and I’d realize the kids were reading, and they’d get to the end, and I’d be like “Oh, thank god.” That timing was a little bit off. But that situation was just for the film festival; it will be dubbed when it comes out. That’s one of the things I always felt was the cool thing with THE CROODS--except the little field goal sign--there’s nothing American. Once it gets dubbed, it’s out there and it’s everybody’s.
Capone: The first two thirds of of the film is just a family-based thing, and then it turns into this adventure film that’s scary, and you almost think someone dies for a little while. Was that always the move you wanted to make? To make that turn into something different?
CS: Absolutely. Within a few weeks of my arrival on this movie, I was amazed the themes that we ran across. There are no distractions in this film as far as jobs, schedules, villains even.
Capone There are no villains, really other than nature.
CS: The villains change, and it’s not really exactly what you’d call a villain; it’s a force that the Croods are trying to hide from that finds them inevitably, and within a few weeks we knew where this film was going. We knew that Grug was going to go from being this over protective guy to standing on the edge of the world and having to make a decision of whether he was going to push his family forward or retreat back into a cave. So we knew where we were going this whole time. For that reason, we deliberately kept this film very, very light at the very beginning. It goes to a deeper place than I’ve ever gone story-wise before. So we wanted this to be disarming and fun.
We wanted it to fulfill expectations of a family going to see a film about cavemen first of all, but also we just wanted people to get to know these characters and be in this high place before we take them into a really emotionally deep place. It’s something I learned a long time ago, oddly enough when I was a kid in Colorado watching a Laurel and Hardy film called AIR RAID WARDENS. It’s very hard to find. I have one videotape of it, but I don’t know where I found it, some video store 20 years ago. But it’s this very light-hearted movie about Laurel and Hardy trying to do their job during World War II, and of course they are terrible at it.
There’s a scene later in the film that took me by surprise as a kid and I never forgot it. They basically fire Laurel and Hardy. They take away their helmets, their whistles, and there’s this scene where Stan Laurel at the moment he has to give up this whistle, he says the most simple heartfelt thing, and it just killed me and I never forgot it. It blindsided me and I thought, “That’s what we need to do with this film. We need to blindside people with how serious a situation these cavemen are actually living in,” because that’s the way I think it probably is. The Croods are dealing with the biggest questions of all. They don’t worry about their jobs. They don’t worry about their cars. They're worried about why are they even there? “What’s the purpose of it?” They're surviving, but why? So that was the thing that we knew we were dealing with, and we knew we were heading towards.
Capone: Is the hope to do another one, or do you think this will go to TV like DRAGON did?
CS: We would love to do another one. We love the characters, and if you watch the film, it practically ends with a sequel beginning.
KDM: These characters, since they have their hearts in the right place, especially Grug, through every frame of the film. He’s such a lovable guy. That part is what kept us going. A lot of the times with these characters, they have ulterior motives where they want to do this or they want to do that; he just wants to keep everybody alive. There’s a genuine sweetness, and I think that’s what kept us involved and wanting to see more.
