The objectives of TROLLS is to inspire audiences to dance and sing and have a good time. Not exactly lofty goals, but ones that, if achieved, will likely make you very happy you checked out this joyous little work of color and music and energy. And co-directors Walt Dohrn and Mike Mitchell have years of experience delivering a lot of those experiences to audiences over the year.
Dohrn has worked in some artistic capacity on films such as SHREK 2, SHREK THE THIRD, MADAGASCAR and the “SpongeBob SquarePants” series, while Mitchell directed. SHREK FOREVER AFTER, ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: CHIPWRECKED, the SpongeBob film SPONGE OUT OF WATER (only the live-action sequences, which were quite cool), as well as the non-animated film SKY HIGH and DEUCE BIGALOW: MALE GIGOLO (but we won’t hold that against him).
Considering they were more or less given free reign to create a Trolls universe, they’ve done a remarkable job making something that can only be considered pure, unfiltered entertainment. I had a chance to sit down with the directors in Chicago recently, and they were an absolute blast to talk to, like they’ve been working together for decades. With that, please enjoy my chat with Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn…
Capone: It seems as though one of the most important things you’d have to establish right at the beginning of this process is giving each troll a unique look. And it would have to be more than just selecting a different hair color or skin tone. That might even happen before you start bringing in actors.
Mike Mitchell: Yeah. It happened with Walt and I in his office sketching out these characters on like a cocktail napkin, just sketching them out. I member it being a lot of fun. We made Biggie, Fuzzbert, the ones conjoined by the hair—that Dr. Seuss idea.
Walt Dohrn: Well, we worked with our story team too. It was a fun couple of days, where you give everybody an assignment, and we all sit in a room together, and it’s like “What trolls do we want to see?” Just the most bizarre trolls you can imagine, then we see what makes the cut, what’s the strongest personality.
Capone: What were some of the things outside of hair color and clothes color that you were trying to capture?
MM: Personality type and also contrast, shape. That’s a big one. I think we started with shape and left all the color up to Kendal Cronkhite, our production designer.
WD: And getting into the backstory of these characters, which you only get just a taste of in the film, because there’s too many.
MM: There’s so many of them, yeah.
WD: The James Cordon troll, Biggie, who has his little pet, Mr. Dinkles—we have a whole life that he lives outside of what you even see.
MM: He's a cat person. There’s a history.
WD: Taking photos of Mr. Dinkles for his calendar. He’s this lonely cat lady, but you don’t get a lot of that in the film.
Capone: My favorite background players was—I don’t know if he’s made of glitter or a disco ball material, who that speaks in Auto-Tune and even like sighs in Auto-Tune.
MM: [laughs] You heard that?
Capone: Yeah, I was laughing my ass off. That makes perfect sense that he speaks like that.
MM: He’s a walking disco ball.
WD: He’s kind of a spokesman for the troll village because he’s just so hypnotic to look at.
MM: There’s a whole tribe of him, if you look closely. He’s silver, but there’s gold and green. They’re naked. They’ve got a lot of body confidence.
WD: And of course they can fart glitter.
Capone: What’s his name?
MM: Guy Diamond. Played by Kunal Nayyar.
WD: He needed something flashy for his name, that’s for sure.
MM: He hugs himself. Did you notice that? When they hug each other? He hugs himself.
WD: He’s a bit of a narcissist. Like you don’t get into that story either.
MM: That’s his backstory. He thinks he’s the shit.
Capone: Or that he’s on Ecstasy.
MM: I’ve got to tell you, that’s what’s so weird that you say that. I don’t necessarily want to bring up drugs for this, but we’ve been showing this all around at colleges, and I’m so excited that not just girls, but guys—college-aged kids—are going crazy for this film. They’re going nuts. And I wonder if that’s any part of it.
WD: The irreverent and edgy humor and the surreal surprises and especially the psychedelic world are all the things that we enjoyed growing up that we put into the film.
MM: And you think college kids are still into thatt?
WD: Yeah, they’re still connected to that quirky, edgy stuff.
Capone: As most things in the world often do, let’s begin with Justin Timberlake. Did you have a Plan B if he wasn’t available? So much hinges on him being a part of it.
MM: Not at all. Walt thought it was interesting that we cast the character that won’t sing and won’t dance as Justin Timberlake.
WD: That creates a tension for the audience, because they have awareness of who he is outside of the film, so you’re waiting for him to make that turn. I think it creates an interest for them.
MM: And then we went to him because I think he’s just a funny guy. He’s on “Saturday Night Live,” he’s got a good sense of humor.
WD: And he’s a great actor.
MM: Great actor, warm voice.
WD: Yeah. THE SOCIAL NETWORK—he was so fantastic in that.
MM: He was in that Coen brothers movie [INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS] too for a second. So we went to him for that, and we showed him what we were doing, and at that time we had songs in it. We had Cyndi Lauper songs, Earth Wind and Fire.
WD: Some rough demos of that stuff.
MM: And he heard saw what we were doing our pitch, and he goes, “Yes, I’ll do the voice, but I want more. I want to help you guys. I want to be your music producer,” and we were like…
WD: “Maybe.”
MM: “Maybe. Send us your résumé.”
WD: “We’ll see.”
MM: And it was really helpful, because we picked all these songs, and in a musical, you don’t want the story to stop and have a music moment. The music needs to tell the story, continue the narrative. We had a problem at the end. We couldn’t quite get it right, and he said, “I’ll just write you a song.” It’s that hit song “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” He wrote it and he got us out of a jam because we couldn’t find the song to cover the space.
WD: Those act-three endings are really hard.
MM: You always save act three for the end.
WD: That’s always such a struggle to really transform these characters’ worldview. It’s such a hard thing to do. How do you do it? Motivational speech?
MM: And we did. We had a motivational speech. And it was like “Man, too much talking.” So he helped us do it though song by writing that song for us. And it’s funny, not only did we not have a Plan B, we couldn’t have pulled it off without Justin Timberlake. There’s no way.
WD: I don’t think we’d be sitting here without Justin.
MM: I don’t think so either.
Capone: I actually got the soundtrack before I saw the movie.
MM: So you listened to that before you saw the movie?
Capone: Yeah, a couple of times.
MM: What did you think of Zooey Deschanel’s strange rap on “I’m Coming Out”?
Capone: I don’t even know if I realized that was even her. I was laughing more at her “Hello,” which in the movie is hilarious.
WD: Yeah, that’s one of the scenes that Mike and I boarded.
MM: We did that ourselves.
WD: The Bridget character was so precious to us. We’re like “We’ll do that one. We’ll take the time out to do it,” and we rough boarded it.
MM: I’m always curious about the people who buy the soundtrack beforehand. That’s so neat. Because Zooey, in the movie, everyone’s using their own voice, but Zooey came up with this really weird voice. She said it’s Cindy Brady. She said, “I wanna do Cindy Brady meets breathy Marylyn Monroe, at a heavy-metal parking lot.” And we’re like “Let’s do that. That seems so weird and strange.” She’s a great singer.
WD: It’s so great. We never get to talk about this. When she sang her songs, she worked with Brian Wilson a little bit, and I’m a huge Brian Wilson fan. She brought in this microphone, this amazing microphone.
MM: A $20,000 microphone.
WD: That Brian Wilson gave her, and she recorded her vocals on that. It was such a cool moment as a huge Brian Wilson fan.
MM: And all the technicians went crazy when she pulled that microphone out.
Capone: When you’re selecting the cover songs, you want to avoid some of the obvious ones. There are some that everybody uses…
MM: Well, “True Colors” was one that everyone uses. Our music supervisors cautioned us against it.
WD: They said it’s used a lot.
MM: And we really stuck with it. We were like “We love this song.” And that was one of our first songs.
Capone: But it makes sense in this world that practically built of color.
WD: I know. How could you not?
Capone: You said you had a couple selected already before Justin came on, but did he suggest any?
MM: Oh yeah. He helped. In fact, he recorded original ones with Gwen Stefani; Ariana Grande gave us a song for this that Justin wrote.
WD: Early on, we had a number of choices already.
MM: We listened to thousands of songs.
WD: When we’re outlining it, we put it all on the wall on cards, here’s the story beats, and we found the places rhythmically where the songs would go, and that started to dictate our choices.
MM: We lost a couple of songs. Two songs dropped out I think during that process.
WD: We wanted to “Bust a Move” with Chris Mintz-Plasse.
MM: And he was so funny.
WD: We got him to sing it, and it was funny, but it just wasn’t right for the narrative.
MM: And then our villain sang like this delicious, Disney-like villain song. Christine Baranski, she’s got an amazing voice, by the way. And it was so funny to hear a villain, evil, singing about how she was going to make everyone happy. It was the strangest song written by Benj [Pasek] and Justin [Paul], who wrote LA LA LAND. Have you seen LA LA LAND?
Capone: I have.
MM: So they wrote all the songs for that. They wrote “Get Back Up Again” for us, and this villain song that dropped out of the film, unfortunately. But we went all the way. We storyboarded it, we recorded it.
WD: It’s one of the few things we cut.
MM: We should talk about the things we used [laughs].
Capone: The trolls each have their own abilities or powers. They’re like this little superhero team, but they are very rarely destructive. That seems like a key thing, that they’re not destroying things or people. They’re just defending themselves. Were there rules about that?
WD: There were, because it was important to us that the trolls represent this optimism, this crazy optimism. It actually became a problem because they couldn’t argue. They couldn’t have conflicts with each other.
MM: They could be judgmental.
WD: It was like an improv group, where they can’t say no. Someone says, “Here’s an idea.” And the guy goes, “That’s a great idea, and how about this?” So it was definitely a challenge.
MM: It was a challenge, and I’m so happy that you recognized the characters in each one of them, because it was so hard. You can’t put Grumpy in there. I guess that’s Branch’s role.
WD: They had to stay true to their optimistic spirit.
MM: They all had to be crazy optimists, and it made it difficult to get character moments out of that group, so we did just treat them all positive. So when they’re saved they just sing “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang. [laughs]
Capone: Branch is such an interesting character. He stands out because he’s colorless, which we find out later is for a reason. And he’s paranoid for all the right reasons.
WD: Yeah, he’s motivated.
Capone: He’s actually the smart one by the end of it. And extending that observation further, the other trolls are reckless.
MM: Everyone is very misguided except for Branch. Branch is right about everything, with the exception of one thing: he does not have a positive attitude. That’s what Poppy provides for Branch, because without the positive attitude, they wouldn’t have started the adventure and they wouldn’t continue on.
WD: Yeah, optimism is powerful. It’s actually a really practical tool. It’s how she saves them. We always thought that he was actually really reasonable in that first scene.
Capone: The lesson here is: optimism is good, but you give credence to skepticism and caution.
WD: [laughs] Caution is a good thing. You know what? It’s a balance.
MM: We try to portray the trolls, I remember in that first opening song, like “These guys are ridiculous.” There’s obviously someone hunting them, so Branch is the reasonable one.
Capone: Casting Anna Kendrick is almost too easy in getting Poppy right.
MM: She was the first one on.
Capone: But creating that personality…you put that personality in a human being, you’d want to slap them all day.
MM: Right! That was an issue before Anna came along. Even in the design of the character, the writing of the character, very naive also, she seems vapid.
WD: We were realizing it was hard for an audience to relate to that character, so we really had to smart her up. And thanks to Anna…
MM: Anna brought like a manic-ness. First, she brought brains to the game, but she also brought this—she’s almost insane. She made it aggressive instead of naive.
WD: When we brought her in and pitched her the movie and said, “Here’s Poppy, and these are her traits, and here’s Branch, and here’s his role in the movie.” And she goes, “I want to play that guy.” She more related to the Branch character, and it’s funny, Justin is more the Poppy character.
MM: Justin in real life was worried. He’s like, “Guys, am I getting too angry here? Am I to mean?”
WD: In one of the first recording sessions, he goes, “I don’t know if I should be so mean.” We’re like “Yeah, you’ve got to be.”
MM: Whereas Anna wanted to go the other way, which I think was really lucky casting on our part, because each character needed that. If you cast an angry guy as an angry guy, he’d be too aggressive. And Anna brought some smarts to Poppy that wasn’t there on the page.
Capone: Trolls had been around for a very long time.
WD: Since the ’50s.
Capone: I can’t believe no one’s done anything with it to date, but they don’t actually have a universe.
MM: No mythology to it at all.
Capone: They’ve been around for so long that the word “trolls” has come to mean something else now. How do you even begin to create a universe?
MM: That’s what turned us on. There were no rules, man. It was very freeing.
WD: That was the most exciting thing for us and the crew that it was a blank slate.
MM: We get to make a whole world. We hang onto the hair, and the ugly, cute, stumpy bodies, the naked butts, but it was an opportunity. Did we already talk about this, that we love Miyazaki films? They’re this odd, psychedelic fairytale that he creates with creatures, and we’re like, “How do we Westernize that? How do we take that and mix it up with…,” a lot of our friends work on “Adventure Time"? Do you know the show?
Capone: Of course.
WD: That surreal and irreverent humor.
MM: Irreverent, strange humor. How do we take those two things and make them into a giant, CGI, DreamWorks movie? How do we apply these things that turn Walt and I on? We love that stuff. Can we be inspired by that? That was the inspiration for TROLLS, basically. Then we also mixed in, stop-motion animation, we mixed in Dr. Seuss books, The Muppets, everything we dug, we were free to do it.
WD: We wanted to make the world handcrafted. We had a few ingredients right from the start. “We can do whatever we want.” Here are some things we always wanted to do. And we threw that at it.
MM: It took Walt and I a five-minute conversation, because we like all the same things.
WD: We went to CalArts [California Institute of the Arts] together. We’ve been around each other too long. Too long.
MM: He’s one of my favorite artist. I like his stuff.
Capone: Okay, so real quick: SKY HIGH 2. Go.
MM: It’s SAVE U — SAVE UNIVERSITY, written by [Jonathan] Aibel and [Glenn] Berger, the same writers who were uncredited on the first SKY HIGH. They wrote this film too.
WD: But you want to make a sequel.
MM: Yeah. Why not? It’s SAVE UNIVERSITY. They’re all grown up. Layla’s a teacher. They’re already working on it. SAVE U. That’s the working title. I don’t know if it will change.
Capone: Could you even have some of the same people in it?
MM: We’re still friends with all the kids that worked on it. The tough one would be Kurt Russell, if he wants to take a break from Quentin Trentino and come visit us again.
