Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.
I've already gone on record and saying how much fun I had with MONSTERS VS. ALIENS. It's the kind of film that I think has something for audiences of just about any age, and the 3-D kicks ass in 18 different directions.
Conrad Vernon is the co-director (along with Rob Letterman) of MVA, and he's an animation filmmaker with a solid track record. In addition to co-directing the best of the SHREK films (that would be SHREK 2), do yourself a favor and find on YouTube or somewhere else his short film MORTO THE MAGICIAN, his fantastic collaboration with Steve Martin. Not much more to say about him other than the guy knows his classic '50s monster movie and alien invasion epics, and he's a ton of fun to talk to about all things animated, his fantastic MVA cast, and all things geeky. Enjoy Conrad Vernon…
Capone: I think MONSTERS VS. ALIENS this might be the best use of 3-D I've ever seen.
Conrad Vernon: Oh good.
Capone: There's a scale to everything. You have these humongous characters and creatures interacting with these human-sized characters, and the depth of field is so noticeable in a way I haven't really seen to this degree in other 3-D films. The Golden Gate Bridge sequence is awesome.
CV: Thanks. When we first started out making this movie, we wanted the stakes to be high and to be real. We wanted to make an animated action film; we didn't want to cut the action short to get to more goofy gags. We didn't want to shy away from anything because 3 year olds might get a little scared if we do too intense action scenes. We wanted to push this and get the real action in there. Also, with the 3-D, when we were first asked to do this in 3-D by Jeffrey Katzenberg, our first reaction was "Oh." We were kind of worried about that. We liked where our story was going and what we were planning to do; we don't want to cheese it out by poking stuff out at the audience. This is like CAPTAIN EO stuff we're dealing with here. We were a little hesitant. But the braintrust on this movie all sat down and said, "Okay, let's not cheese out; let's use this to tell the story only." And we told Jeffrey that's what we wanted to do, and he said, "I don't want you to cheese out. Use it to tell the story. Use it as a tool to tell the story."
So we went really lightly forward, and we didn't use it a lot. We just wanted to understand it before we started using it heavily. So we started looking at what shots we liked in 3-D, what shots we didn't like. And we approached it like a stylistic tool, like you would use color or music or anything else. So when we went in and did it, we made sure that the 3-D always supported the story and that there was a reason for it. Once we did that and controlled it in that way, I think, that's when the 3-D shines. It pops out at you when it's supposed to, and it takes a backseat when the story is most important.
Capone: Had you guys been tracking over the last couple of years how other films--animated or live action--have been using or abusing 3-D, and saying, Okay, we like that; we don't like that?
CV: There were a few films out there in 3-D, but we didn't really…there were some things where we said, "We're not going to do that. That's not the style of our film," or "That's really cool. We do like that." There wasn't a lot out there. I think there was BEOWULF, and we had seen MEET THE ROBINSONS and MONSTER HOUSE. That was about it. So we kind of had to say, What is it about 3-D that is such a turn off up until now. I honestly think that no one was controlling it; no one was taking the reigns and using it. And the post- process is dangerous because you're making your movie and then you're slapping the 3-D on and dialing it up or down, but it's like, if it works, great; if it doesn't work, oh well. And we were actually looking at the shots from layout on. The very first time our layout person would throw out a shot, we were putting the glasses on and saying "That shot doesn't work," or "Here's a better way to do that shot in 3-D, but does it also work in 2-D?" So we were constantly crafting it and bending the 3-D into our film instead of having to bend our film around the 3-D.
Capone: I noticed one very fun reference that I don't think a lot of kids are going to get--the HOUSE OF WAX reference right at the beginning.
CV: [laughs] They might not get the HOUSE OF WAX reference, but still, watching a paddleball flying straight over your head is pretty fun. We gave ourselves a rule--no poking crap out at the audience. We're not going to do the Count Floyd from SCTV "Here, have some pie." But our board artist Hamish Grieve put that in his board, and we all laughed so hard that we said, "Okay, we made the rules, so we get to break them." So we put that in at the beginning.
Capone: Since you're credit with the story of this movie, tell me about where the germ of the idea for this film came from.
CV: It started in 2004. I was in Cannes for SHREK 2, and I was looking for the next project I wanted to do. Dreamworks had given me a script about a large group of monsters, there were about 12 of them, and there was an alien element to the story--it wasn't necessarily an invasion. I was looking at it and I said, "This isn't different enough. This isn't satyrical enough or the kind of style I like doing." I said, what is it about this that I'm reacting to? You read it; you're interested in something. And I think it was the monster element. So I immediately turned the script over and started writing "Ed Wood," Criswell, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, THEM, WAR OF THE WORLDS, all of the '50s sci-fi and horror movies. And I said, "This is fertile ground for animation for a few reasons. One, these old monsters, every film geek knows all of these. They love the old sci-fi, b-horror films, young and old. And if the really little kids don't get it, they're still going to love the monsters, because kids love monsters. And the adults will love them as well. We can imbue these old characters with something they never had before, which is personality. A lot of the natural comedy comes out of the schlockiness of these old films.
Dreamworks gave us a budget to buy about 100-150 old '50s, '60s, and '70s b-movies. And we watched a lot of them, and we started noticing themes. The camera zoom, the dutch angle, the lady looking straight into the camera and screaming, the point of view of the monster, the Human Fly octagonal way of him seeing the woman. All of these cool camera tricks used then, now they are kind of cheesy and schlocky, but we still love them. So I started developing it. At the same time, my co-director Rob was talking to Jeffrey about making a DIRTY DOZEN animated film, and Jeffrey said, "That's interesting. It might work with what Conrad is working on now. What don't you talk to him." So he came over, and I talked to him about what I was doing, and it's about a bunch of monsters fighting aliens, and it's a b-movie. And he said, "You know what would be great? If they were in a prison and they needed to be released in order to fight the aliens." I thought that was a great idea, so we married our ideas together. That's kind of how the concept came about.
Capone: What it reminded me of was a the putting together of a superhero team. We get a little bit of origin story about each monster, but you do it really fast. You don't linger in the history. When did you decide that Susan/Ginormica would be our entry point into this story? I know a lot of people who complain that there are no female lead characters in animation anymore, unless they're some kind of princess.
CV: That came pretty early on for that exact reason. You can't take an audience and plop them into a prison with a bunch of monsters and expect anyone to really relate to that. We need a window in to this world. So we looked at all of the characters and said that Dr. Cockroach was the only other one other than Susan that used to be human, but he's crazy and he also doesn't mind having a cockroach head. So that makes it unrelatable, so it has to be Ginormica. So we started to ponder about what kind of story could we tell with her. Obviously, the most choice there was the empowerment story. Here's a woman who hung all her drams on someone else. She didn't think that she was good enough to get what she wanted herself, so she hoped that her man would. We walked a very fine line because we didn't want to make her too unlikable. That's where Reese [Witherspoon] helped us out a lot--still made her likable and had a great, strong personality. Still, there's a flaw there. You can't have her take that journey from unempowered to empowered without that flaw there. We told that story, and we also realized that there hadn't been a female lead or heroine in a film since, maybe THE LITTLE MERMAID or POCAHONTAS. We wanted to make sure we filled that role, and this was the perfect opportunity to do that.
Capone: So it was a deliberate decision to fill that gap?
CV: Yeah, it wasn't by chance. We definitely wanted to tell this story. It's kind of funny, she's a woman who's 49 feet 11 inches tall and still very meek, saying, "I can't do this."
Capone: In terms of the creature designs, you already mentioned that you started this process by watching the classics, but I'm curious how you settled on these creatures and how you came up with these designs.
CV: I was thinking in terms of the genre that we're telling the genre through, the b-movie 1950s. And I thought, what was a really popular cartoon style back then, other than the obvious Warner Bros. animation and Disney. Of course, I was a huge, huge fan of Mad magazine, and they started in the '50s and they satirized movies, and that's kind of what we're doing here. Why not use a style from Mad magazine to tell this story, so I looked in the magazine, and one of my favorite was Jack Davis. And the reason we picked Jack Davis was that he did such a great job of caricaturizing humans into a cartoony style but still made it look like a human being. You didn't notice the caricatures much. Peter Sellers still looked like Peter Sellers. Jonathan Winters still looked like Jonathan Winters, even though he had big floppy feet and giant hands and tiny little legs. So we had our character designer Craig Kellman, he's just brilliant, come in and I said, "Look, this is the style we're going for, this is the movie we're making." And he really sparked to it and said, "Yeah, this will be fun. I really want to do this." So he started throwing down in a Jack Davis-esque style, mixed with his. And I think one of the first humans he did was the President. He was playing with different ideas, and I told him where to push the proportions and get the feet floppy and the hands big, with these long skinny legs. Showed him a lot of Jack Davis, and he kind of nailed it.
And he kind of nailed it with the monsters too. Jack Davis did a lot of monster drawings too in Mad magazine. As far as Gallaxhar, our villain, he was the last one that we designed. He was the toughest because we didn't know where to start with him.
Capone: You didn't have that initial reference point with him.
CV: Exactly, exactly. We knew it was going to have to match the rest of the characters. We just didn't know what he was supposed to look like. We tried an Atari game approach once, and we didn't like that. Basically what we did was go back to our film library and said, what are the cheesy elements that we can draw from from all these aliens. Three things they all had were some sort of giant brain, an inordinent number of eyes, and a bunch of slimy tentacles. They didn't have all of these; they only had one of these traits. So we decided to take all of them and gave it to Craig and said, "We want tentacles, lots of eyes and brain." And he came up with all sorts of different ideas, and we actually picked two or three and said, "Make one character out of these three." So he went away and came up with Gallaxhar. It was a fun design process.
Capone: You have a great vocal casts, but I must focus on Seth Rogen's Bob character. You don't have to stretch your imagination too far to see him as the ultimate stoner creature. His thoughts are drifting constantly. But then you get Kiefer Sutherland, who has that great military voice. I know people who are going to see this movie simply because Stephen Colbert is playing the president. Tell me about pulling this group together.
CV: The main cast came together after we designed the characters first and started thinking about the personalities and how they would play of each other in the story. We were looking at the characters and started thinking, Okay, the Missing Link, part fish-part ape so he can be kind of a jockey guy. Dr. Cockroach, he's erudite, he has a superiority complex, he's the most intelligent man in the universe. Bob is just a bunch of chemicals; there's no brain there--big heart, no brain. So we started to get the personalities down as to who we wanted these characters to be. As we were doing this, we had a couple of things go on where we were actually invited to go to the editing room of KNOCKED UP and see what Seth was doing. And of course, we heard the voice, we heard the laugh. We said, "That's our Bob." With the President, we saw the Press Corps dinner on YouTube and said, "This guy is a shoe in for the President. He's fantastic." Then there was Hugh Laurie, most people know him from "House" in the states, but he was also in "The Black Adder," which I was a huge fan of. And I love his "Dragnet" type of voice in house, but I also love the prince that he plays in "Adder," so I thought if we could mix those two, I think we've got a great Dr. Cockroach. And then with Will Arnett as the Missing Link, we were listening to a lot of different actors, and we just hitting anything. It was either too obvious or not right, and then all of the sudden Will's voice popped up, and it just seemed to leap right into the character, and we thought it was the most unique voice for this character we'd ever heard.
Rainn Wilson, we love "The Office," and Dwight Schrute, if he had his way, he would be Gallaxhar. He'd love to be that character in real life. With Reese, she was the first one on, and she actually wanted to do an animated film and she met with Jeffrey. He steered her toward us, and told it this might interest her. We pitched her the idea, and she said, "First of all, I used to watch horror movies with my dad when I was a little girl, so I love these old horror movies. Second, this is a great character. It's a story about female empowerment, which I love, and not just another sage advice girl on the side or the girlfriend. I'm someone who's going to save the earth." So she signed on. This is in no particular order, but Kiefer, we had heard him do a couple of other animated voices on "The Simpsons," and we didn't know it was Kiefer Sutherland. We said, "That is a fantastic voice. Who did that?" And when we found out it was Jack Bauer, we thought we had to get Kiefer in to play this general. He tells the story that coming up with the voice was a cross between the general in FULL METAL JACKET and Yosemite Sam.
Capone: I thought my ears were playing tricks on me in that one small scene with the lovers in the car, because I was convinced I heard Renee Zellweger. And her boyfriend was John Krasinski, which I did not catch. What are these people doing in these tiny parts?
CV: Our producer Lisa Stewart is a good friend with Renee, and so after she was in BEE MOVIE, Lisa said, "Now that you were a star in BEE MOVIE, how about you come and help us out with a cameo in our movie." And Renee said, "I'll do a cameo." And she was doing a movie with John Krasinski at the time, and she said, "I'm going to get Krasinski to play my boyfriend." We thought that was fantastic. So she talked to him, and they both were game, and we pitched them the scene, they thought it was really cute, so they came in and gave us an hour of their time to do the scene. It was really great.
Capone: I talked to Paul Rudd recently about him being in MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, and he said it was just a little part, which is true, but it's a catalytic role in terms of Susan's story. And he gets to play a not-so-nice guy for once.
CV: That was so funny. He came in to the first recording session, and she started going, "I just got got an audition for Channel 22." He started doing that, and started cringing and going, "I'm such a douche bag in this. I hate this guy." Yep, yep, that's the role you're playing. Keep that and play it up.
Capone: Did the fact that he'd played a newscaster in ANCHORMAN come into play when you considered him for the role?
CV: Actually no. Derek Dietl was always going to be a weatherman. It was a question of what Susan did for a living, which we never wanted to get into that much, but he was always a weatherman.
Capone: Was Dr. Cockroach always going to be British?
CV: Not necessarily, but Hugh Laurie was always our first choice. We wanted him to sound very upscale, and British voices always do that so well.
Capone: In the history of CGI animation, there are certain films that are the first to get a certain look right, whether it's hair or fur or water. I think in this film, that gelatinous look of Bob is the most realistic-moving image that ever seen of that nature. How hard did your team work on that?
CV: Wow, we had a whole task force--we called it the Bob Task Force--and it was a whole crew dedicated to making that character work. It wasn't the only innovation, but it was definitely the biggest. We told them we had a character that needed to act, emote, make people laugh, and explode into a thousand pieces. And also he needs to be see through, he needs his arms to come out and disappear. And once they got that down, they added little bubbles in him, you can see the refraction of light through him, you can see the backside of his eyeball through the goo, and he can stretch into any position, he can turn himself flat, he can break himself in two. And then we came back and said, "Okay, now do that in 3-D." Here we go again! So they went back the drawing board, because he broke up a thousand times once we put him in 3-D. We had this moment where we went into a theater, and the played us the Bob test in 3-D, and everybody went "Whoa!" And we said, "Stop, still frame it." And Rob and I walked straight up to the screen and looked at the bubbles behind one another, the fact that you could see through Bob and he was in 3-D was just a trip. I have to give them props, they did such an astonishing job of creating that character.
Capone: What other innovations should people keep an eye out for?
CV: I've personally proud of the work we did on the humans, because for so long…there's this chart they gave us at the beginning called the Uncanny Valley, I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but it's this flow chart that says the more like a human being a character looks, the creepier it becomes. The less like a normal human being, the less creepy it becomes. Because everyone knows how a real human being acts and moves, so when anything's off, even the slightest thing, it really creeps you out. It looks like a corpse walking around. That's another reason we went for Jack Davis, we stretched the people out, we took the President's head and made it three feet long, and made his big hand. And we also wanted to get this idea that when you have a five o'clock shadow, it's this kind of blue-gray color on chins. And we wanted to reflect that, but we didn't want it to look like rubber or plastic. We wanted it to look like real skin in this realm. So they really worked hard and went back and back and back and forth trying to get the right amount of beard color to the right amount of red on the tips of the fingers and on the tips of the nose and earlobes, the right broken blood vessels on the cheeks, pores, all that kind of stuff, and not make it look too creepy, but also make it look like skin. So I think they did a great job with that, in particular the President and General Monger.
And Susan looks fantastic. She's cute as a button. That was a real challenge too because here eyes are really, really big. And they are huge eyes, and they had to figure out a way to wrap them around that head without making them look weird. So they had to go back and forth a lot on her. It was all about proportions with her, because she couldn't look completely goofy. We needed her to look as normal as possible, and be the strong character in the movie. We needed people to believe her sadness when she was sad, and really trust her emotions in the movie. But we also couldn't make her look like a real human. There was a real balancing act there.
Capone: I talked before about the use of scale in the film. Were there any particular scenes that you really paid attention to how that looked?
CV: Well we definitely paid a lot of attention to it, to the scale, in the film. Our production designer immediately gave them all specific heights. The President is 6 foot 1, General Monger is 5 feet, the Link is eight and a half feet, Susan is 49 feet 11.5 inches, Insectisarus is 350 feet. Then we gave that problem to our head of layout and our d.p., and asked them how would you shoot this if you had to get all of the characters in here? And so they started playing around with different angles and different lenses and how we would be able to shoot it. And a lot of those Godzilla movies, all you really need is a knee or a toe in the shot and hear the roar off screen, so we played with that a lot as well. We also made sure to pull the camera back. There were a lot of times when the camera would get into a medium shot, because, for the most part, that's where animated films are very comfortable, just getting into a medium shot and having the characters talk to each other. We pulled the camera way back and made sure to give a lot of air and a lot of space around the characters and make this more cinematic in general. And we had to because of the scale of the characters. We put them up against things a lot; we said, okay, you're not going to know how big this character really is unless you put them up against the Golden Gate Bridge. And of course 3-D played into that.
Capone: That's kind of the key. I wouldn't never want to watch this film or at least not that fight sequence unless it was in 3-D. I could watch that sequence 100 times.
CV: Good. I'm glad you liked it. It's a real pleasure to have you check it out and dig it. We've been getting good responses. After five years on this thing, it's like "Thank God." Thanks, Capone.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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