A couple years after I saw Pixar's groundbreaking computer-generated short LUXO JR., I was introduced to the hand-crafted claymation magic of Aardman Animations through the Oscar-winning CREATURES COMFORTS, and I've been slightly obsessed with the creations of Aardman ever since.
Aardman has been around since the early 1970s, with most of the world first discovering their genius thanks to a little music video you might have seen for Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer." As a follower of animated shorts through various traveling animated festivals, I remember seeing the Lord-directed works ADAM (1993) and WAT'S PIG (1997), both of which were nominated for Oscars.
But before long, years-in-the-making shorts featuring Wallace and Gromit began infiltrating our lives, followed in 2000 by Aardman's first feature, CHICKEN RUN, co-directed by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park and Aardman co-founder (along with David Sproxton) Peter Lord. Lord has also co-directed (with Jeff Newitt) Aardman latest stop-motion feature, THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS, an inspired action-adventure-comedy that is just about as much unbridled fun as I've had in a very long time. What other film would have Queen Victoria (voiced by Imelda Staunton) as the very portrait of pirate-hating villainy?
I had the great fortune of first meeting Lord last summer at San Diego Comic-Con after the Aardman panel for THE PIRATES!, and he greeted me not only with a handshake, but also with a close-up look at the actual Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant in the film) posable model; he even removed the character's lower jaw to show me how they changed one mouth movement to another. When Lord came to Chicago recently, he brought along a differently dressed Pirate Captain figure, as well as the one for Mister Bobo, the silent "man-panzee" sidekick of Charles Darwin (David Tennant). I felt like a kid set loose in a toy store examining the working of these figures and uncovering the complexities of what some might think is simple stop-motion animation.
I've included here the entire recent interview I did with Lord (conducted after I'd seen the movie twice, including a Q&A screening we did the night before our conversation) as well as snippets of our Comic-Con interview (prior to me seeing the film). Please enjoy my talk with one of the great creative forces in animation, Peter Lord…
Capone: I’ll try not to repeat too many of the questions from last night.
Peter Lord: That's quite alright.
Capone: Oh, you have the man-panzee with you today.
PL: Oh yeah, he came along. There he is. “A man-panzee, if you will.”
Capone: He must not have as many mouth pieces, because he only has a couple of expressions.
PL: No, he’s quite simple really.
Capone: That’s great.
PL: He’s got this Gromitty-like brow, because he doesn’t wear a hat. Most of the others wear a hat. He’s an interesting thing, you see, because they wear hats, that brow thing, which is like Wallace’s brow and Gromit’s brow, you can’t do that when people have either hats or hair, which is why actually the design is quite limiting. [Laughs]
Capone: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you brought the pirate captain with you to Comic-Con, I seem to remember him having rings on. I looked at my notes, and I thought there was one that just said “PC” on it.
PL: Ah, okay. You're right. Well that must then have been the pimped-up captain who appeared at the Pirate of the Year awards.
Capone: I looked at my transcription, and we talked at length about the rings.
PL: It’s in the “Pirate of The Year Awards,” when he thinks he’s got the prize and he goes on stage, and it’s such a big moment for him and he doesn’t. We had the same clothing, but it was all like zebra skin and lined with white polar bear fur.
Capone: What do you use to animate water? There’s a lot of it in this movie, but I know sometimes it looks like you use actual water footage at some points, but when you actually have to animate it…
PL: Like the sea?
Capone: Yeah.
PL: Well that was all CG.
Capone: It is? Okay.
PL: Yeah, it was interesting. That was a big challenge. Well not challenge, but there was a long discussion about it, because there are other ways of doing the sea. I mean in JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, they did a very stylized sea. And also in that Johnny Depp film about Peter Pan called NEVERLAND…?
Capone: Sure, FINDING NEVERLAND.
PL: Also there, so they are very stylized theatrical looks. We discussed those things, but that wasn’t right, so we went for the CG sea. So I had a CG team developing it, and there was also experimentation. They would change the scale to try and make it match the ship better, and they’d make the water look bigger relative to the ship and that made the ship look smaller, but then it created the illusion like the whole thing was shot in a tank like an old '50s movie, like BEN-HUR, and we thought “That’s an awful lot of money to spend just to make it look like it’s cheaply shot in a tank.” So we abandoned that, but then we did make particles of water, where the water splashes off the bow for example, and give us little particles of spray, they’re big bits of spray, like unusually big, and we would maybe make the surface less complicated than the real sea, because the real sea is crazy complicated. So we would just stylize it. On the other hand, there’s liquid like Charles Darwin’s got a glass of wine and that’s “theatrical water,” it’s thick stuff like Jell-O, and you can animate it actually in the glass.
Capone: I can’t remember if there was any in the scene with the bathtub, with the surprisingly curvaceous pirate. There’s a lot of foam. I can’t remember if there was actually any water in that or not.
PL: There’s no water. It’s all foam and the foam is tiny glass beads buried in a base of wax, glass beads in wax. Old school. [laughs]
Capone: When we talked at Comic-Con, you also had mentioned, in terms of the historical value of the film, you said it was “sensationally inaccurate.” But the idea of scientists traveling on ships the way Darwin does in this film, and we get an example of that in MASTER AND COMMANDER with the scientist. Was that a pretty common thing back then? How else would they get to these exotic locations?
PL: Yes, it was. That's right, they did, and even people like what we might think of as adventurers like Captain Cook who found Australia, he had a botanist on board as well. They mixed it up a bit. That much is accurate. [Laughs] That’s the only thing that is. But they mixed up empire building with a bit of science as well.
Capone: That’s one way to build an empire, having the top scientists make all of these discoveries that they could bring back for the Queen.
PL: Hoping for something really useful and valuable. I love it. There’s something about it. I must say though I feel so free about it, because I’m actually privately a pedantic person and I like to get things right. But there’s something about this film that is so liberating that you can stick together people that weren’t together in history. My official line is “It’s set in the olden days” and that’s about all you can say. “Sometime in the past…” So Darwin appears, and yes of course he was on the ship, and it was written in the original book, that was where the idea came from.
The story now goes in quite a different direction, but that was in there from the start and it’s funny, because again the writer [of the source material book THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS], Gideon Defoe, is quite academic actually and has an immense respect for Charles Darwin and so do I, but we just give him such a bad time. He’s just become the whipping boy for the film. He’s always taking the pratfalls and always getting knocked about. He gets tarred and feathered at one stage. He has a terrible, terrible time. [Laughs] Of course, I’m sorry and the film should probably go out with an apology, because I do take these things seriously, but it doesn’t look like we do.
Capone: You said that you had 40 units? You said sometimes they are building on stages, sometimes they're pulling it down. But typically, how many do you have actively filming at one time?
PL: I think the maximum you could have would be 30 actually filming.
Capone: Can you sing the praises of your production designer [Norman Garwood] a little more? As I said last night, the thrill of being able to just focus my eyes on what was going on in the background was just as fulfilling as watching the main story. Aardman films tend to do that all the time anyway.
PL: Yeah. Yeah, we love to make a world which is rich and we don’t do it to blitz your brain. [Laughs] It’s not meant to be exhausting, but it sits back as it should in the background. But when you have time to read it, it’s full of details and stories of fun. It’s a tiny little thing, but in the Ham Night sequence, which is set in the crew’s quarters, the galley there, and there’s stuff everywhere. There’s barrels of gin and tonic and stuff like that and there’s one shelf which is labeled--it always makes me laugh--“Medicines and Poisons,” like what a great idea that was to put those two things together, you know?
That was from the production designer, Norman Garwood. He has done BRAZIL, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, HOOK, "The Benny Hill Show" [GLORY, CUTTHROAT ISLAND, LOST IN SPACE,] an amazing credit list, and he does these hundreds and thousands of drawings. He had a little office, and the wall was just black with drawings everywhere, and every drawing was very highly detailed with tons of detail. There was detail everywhere and jokes, and before the details and the jokes, he also has a big design idea. There must be a big idea in there somewhere or else it would all be jumbled. So he has a big idea, and then he’d bring it to life with small intimate detail, funny notices, sight gags, just everywhere. Interesting enough, at the start we did look at some drawings by Ronald Searle just to get some… He had done some drawings for this Gilbert & Sullivan pirate-y thing. So we used some details from him, but mostly we were overwhelmed by Norman’s crazy drawings that dominate the scene.
Capone: You mentioned last night something I found kind of fascinating about the optical trick you had to do with the 3-D.
PL: Oh yes. Yes, the regular 3-D is based on the distance apart of human eyes, which is roundabout three inches, and we based ours on the distance apart of the Pirate Captain’s eyes, which is only half an inch. You might think “Oh, then you don’t get as much stereo,” but that’s not the case. It’s like we just scaled the whole experience down to make the viewer feel that he or she is the same size as the captain.
Capone: And you don’t short change anything in terms of foreground or background. I think the 3-D looks phenomenal.
PL: I’m really happy with it, yeah.
Capone: Aardman has dabbled in so many styles of animation over the years. Why is it important that you continue doing stop-frame animation? And not only do you continue doing it, but PIRATES would appear to be the largest-scale production that Aardman has ever done.
PL: It is the biggest, yeah. There were lots of sides to it. As you say, proudly showing off what we do well and what we know the public likes. We just know it. We hear it often. People love knowing that these are real worlds. That gives them great pleasure. The other side of it is that we do it very, very well, and the studio is an evolved organism that makes stop-frame films very well with a great team. Another thing is that the public’s point of view, surely they might like a bit of variety. They are going to get 10 CG films in a year, so it might be nice to have a nice stop-frame film as well. It gives pleasure and if it didn’t give pleasure, we wouldn’t do it.
Capone: You’re not going into an office filled with just computers' you’re going in with hands-on artists and craftsman and physical sets and characters that you can touch. It’s like a giant grown up playroom.
PL: It is. It really is. The people that work there appreciate it, and whenever you introduce someone from the outside world, like twice a year we had Family and Friends Day, when people could show their kids what they had been doing, and it’s so satisfying when the general public comes in and sees it. Their eyes go wide, their jaws hit the floor, because they can’t believe how beautiful it is, how beautifully made everything is, so you’re admiring the craftsmanship. You’re admiring the tiny, perfectly made ham [again, from the Ham Night sequence] We had a Spanish model maker--because Spain is very big on the ham--Diego, and he could make this ham, which is made out of wax, which has veins in it, but it’s tiny. It’s one-sixth scale and it’s translucent, and you can animate it and it’s amazing. So people love that and they love the cannons and they loved the ship; it was an amazing thing. And the sets, the finished sets, which are lit, have a fabulous jewel-like quality that everyone appreciates.
Capone: How long did it take you to actually film this?
PL: I think the filming bit was certainly 18 months, maybe 19 months.
Capone: That seems remarkably short. I mean when you’re talking last night about finishing six second a week on the first Claymation shorts. How long did it take to make the first Wallace and Gromit short?
PL: Well the first one, THE GRAND DAY OUT, took forever. That took so long. That took Nick [Park] like five years I think for the 20 minutes. If 19 months seems short, it’s relatively short, it’s because there are so many people doing it at the same time. When everyone is working as fast as they can, we would do like two minutes a week, then we're really motoring. That didn’t happen very often [laughs].
Capone: Tell me about the first time you saw the finished pirate ship set on the soundstage.
PL: It was so special. It’s hard to describe. It’s a bit pleasing shape [Laughs]. I mean there’s something about it’s proportions that your eye tells you, “That’s just perfect.” It’s big bellied. It’s a big old round tub of a ship. I bet you’d get really seasick sailing in it. It came into the studio into a green screen stage and was 20-feet tall, 15-feet long and just so full of beautiful detail and yet overall a very pleasing silhouette. When you stand back in the doorway and see it, you think, “That’s a lovely looking ship. That’s great. It’s got everything you want from a ship.” It’s quite short and squat.
Capone: I’ve seen the photos that you guys released in the green screen studio, and it's almost as wide as it is tall.
PL: It’s a fat little thing and it sat there in the studio on gimbals to make it rock and roll. But then when you get close up every bolt, every screw, every rope, every belaying pin is beautifully made. It’s two ships stuck together; it's is one of the gags that people hardly ever notice.
Capone: I didn’t notice.
PL: When you watch it next time, you'll see it.
Capone: I will.
PL: It’s two ships badly stuck together in the middle, and they were really faithful, so not only the timber, but also the front, the rigging is a particular design that belongs to 19th century, and the back the rigging is a different design from like the 18th century, and the blocks and the tackle have all been designed perfectly for the period, but they're exaggerated and comic. The guy that made it, he had all the rigging worked out in his mind, like every damn rope he had it there, and there are lots of ropes on a real ship. By the way, every day we would say “Let’s lose that one, and that one, and that one,” because it was just visually so complicated with ropes everywhere. So we broke his heart by taking away all of his rigging out.
Capone: I feel like I have a fairly healthy understanding of how stop motion, but have there been technological advances that have made the process easier or faster in recent years?
PL: [takes the Pirate Captain figure] The guys have got this... The mouths are printed on the bottom of the face, that eases the removal.
[Peter Lord pulls down the figure's rubber beard slightly to remove the mouth from the pirate.]
PL: He has a rubber beard, so that was a great invention. Rapid prototyping they call that technology.
Capone: So that's how to get the mouth movements to change?
PL: Yes. Now that’s just an extension of what we were already doing, it’s not entirely new, but the technology has certainly helped us to do it faster and more efficiently. Otherwise, to be honest no, the funny thing is it’s true to say very little in the process has changed.
Capone: He’s not clay though.
PL: No, he’s not clay, although this is [point to a portion of the head] From here up, he is. He’s probably two-and-a-half percent clay, I should think.
Capone: With the old WALLACE AND GROMIT and CREATURE COMFORTS shorts, I used to love to look for the artists' fingerprints.
PL: I do to and I will say honestly that we have given that up, but not in the interest of ambition, because this technology allows us to shoot very fast. What I’ve tried to do is go for energy and ambition as the number one thing. Some of the animators wish we had all clay faces, but that was taking an extra 10 minutes a frame, and so we went for this, and I’m perfectly happy with that.
Capone: That was always the artist’s signature for me on the work.
PL: We don’t fake it at all, you genuinely see it sometimes on the ones with very large, high foreheads, and you get some fingerprints on him and also on the queen. The queen has a very, very wide face, because it’s such a big expense of clay you do see it there. It’s not technological, but an attitudinal thing that the whole studio has really gotten into is, and they’ve been really generous. This film is insanely ambitious. There are so many shots with lots of characters and just even the crew, the eight-man crew, if they're all walking along together or drinking together and you’ve got to get them all in a shot, that means someone’s got to animate them all, but armed with this new technology and fired up by enthusiasm and lead on by cattle prods, the animators keep doing these really ambitious. [laugh] There are lots of those, and “The Pirate of The Year Awards” set in the big theater--there was whole theater full of people, which in stop-frame is really hard to do.
Capone: Tell me about getting Hugh Grant basically out of retirement to do this. We haven't heard from him in a while. Did he come to you or did you go to him?
PL: No, we came to him. We had to lure him out of retirement. We had to tempt him out with this. We approached him.
Capone: Why him? That seems so far afield from what it usually is, and that’s a great thing.
PL: That was part of it. Part of it for me was that it was like a mischievous piece of casting. If you’re making a list of who’s going to play a swashbuckling pirate captain, he wouldn’t top your list; he probably wouldn’t be in the top five really. He hasn’t done that before. We chose him for comedy and timing, which he does very well, like close up, two-ended scene, character comedy. We wanted him for that. He grew into the pirate-y part of it. He could do the man, the slightly misguided man with vanity and faults and self-delusion and optimism. He could do that fine. But the guy had to run up the stairs two at a time and say, “Come on you swabs, let’s get ready for battle,” that wasn’t so easy for him, you know. But we chose him for the comedy. The reason he did it, I’m sure, is because the script was great, because he doesn’t need to work, and as you said he doesn’t even want to work particularly. He’s quite happy playing golf and doing political stuff now. But the script was exceptionally fun. He got that and knew it was a great script.
Capone: I think at this point Aardman is so well revered in the UK that you can have your pick of the acting litter.
PL: Yes, I suppose we can. I mean I must say I auditioned some people that I probably shouldn’t have done. It’s embarrassing, because they are really well-known people.
Capone: I won’t even ask.
PL: And I won’t say. [laughs] And the reason I did it, by the way, because it seems a bit bizarre, but if they haven’t done anything like it before, you want to hear the voice. People have been very generous, I must say, in doing that, which suggests that they want to do it.
Capone: You mentioned that you had encouraged improvisation. Did you also encourage the actors to play around with their movemen and really act out the scenes?
PL: I do. That’s interesting, yes. It’s nice when they do. Some actors do. Some actors want to.
Capone: I’ve seen some of them break into a sweet doing it.
PL: Yeah I know. We do record everything, almost on principal, and some actors, as a matter of fact, keep their eye on the script and don’t move very much at all, and I do like the ones that really get into it and apart from everything else, I’m grateful to them. What amazes me is you probably haven’t got two actors together--sometimes, but not often--so you get a reading artist to keep the scene alive, and some actors are acting when they are not on. Even though they are acting with a lowly artist [Laughs], they are still acting and reacting with frowns and looking around while the other person is talking, which I hugely appreciate, because it shows total commitment. Also, certainly in our world, I don’t know if it’s true of all animation, but in our world we do so value the spaces between words. I don’t just want someone to fire out the lines as fast as they can, because it’s the timing between when they are thinking and reacting where so much of the comedy acting happens.
Capone: Okay. What’s up next for Aardman? I know that you said Nick [Park] was doing something.
PL: Yeah, Nick’s got a project that he’s working on. We're at an annoying stage I will be honest with you. Nick’s got a project, Steve Box has a project, I’ve got at least a treatment for a sequel for this. So we have three ideas all in good shape, all in early days, and unfortunately nothing immediately. So the only thing immediate is "Shaun the Sheep," the TV series.
Capone: Right, and you just put the "Wallace and Gromit World of Invention" DVD.
PL: Oh that thing, yeah. It’s a semi-educational thing we did for the BBC.
Capone: It just came out in this country on DVD, which are very fun.
PL: They’ve got some good stuff in them.
Capone: It was great to see you again. Thanks a lot, Peter.
PL: Thank you. It was nice to see you again as well.
