With The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and now Ratatouille under his belt, director Brad Bird has emerged over the past decade as one of the leading talents in animated film. As fans gobble up his latest hit dish on home video, the influential filmmaker shares his thoughts on Ratatouille‘s appeal, the joy of making films at Pixar, his frustrations with certain aspects of the entertainment business, and the prospect of seeing a certain superhero family return to the big screen.
Animation Magazine Online: Ratatouille did well here in the states, but it did even better overseas. Why do you think it has had such International appeal?
Brad Bird: This country is still on a rush on what’s up-to-the-moment, whereas a film about food and slowing down and really tasting something is more of an old-world Idea. If you travel, you’ll see a lot of countries aren’t in quite the hurry that we are, and I think they’re more willing to go with that concept. We had a very strange thing in this country where we didn’t open very big (we opened pretty big) but then we held our audiences really, really well. We had way lower than the usual drop-off from week to week, in some places as low as 6% drop, which is unheard of. In this country, we were in the 20% range, rather than 50% or 60% like a lot of these films that open huge and then fall off a cliff. Word-of-mouth is what kept it going.
AMO: And you’re talking about word-of-mouth among adults, because the film is not really a kid’s movie in the traditional sense.
BB: When I was out for The Incredibles, I good-naturedly berated people about always having to say, ‘I had to wait for my kid to get back before I” or ‘I haven’t seen it yet, I don’t have kids.’ And I’d go, ‘You don’t need to have kids. It’s a movie!’ It’s so indoctrinated in people’s’ heads that it’s a kid’s medium that they honestly feel that if they go alone or with a date and no kids, they have to wear a disguise or something. I’m happy for anything that opens it up to just moviegoers. I got wrapped in the press occasionally about ‘this is going to sail over five-year-olds’ heads.’ So what! A lot of jokes in Bugs Bunny cartoons sailed over my head when I was a little kid and I still liked them. When I was a little kid, I liked Bugs Bunny and Casper, but I stopped liking Casper the moment I started growing up and I never stopped liking Bugs Bunny. So I would rather make Bugs Bunny.
AMO: The movie is hard to categorize as it doesn’t fit into any given box. It kind of follows more of a romantic comedy model than that of a family film.
BB: I didn’t know exactly what it was when I was making it. Hopefully this will be a vote for not having to have a checklist that you go down for your animated film. ‘Do you have a fart joke? We recommend a minimum of at least four fart jokes. Do you have a pop song for them to dance to in the end shot?’ I think that’s what makes movies really boring and makes people want to go to video games or something else. The more movies are unexpected, go in different directions and are gentle maybe where they’re usually loud, that’s going to lead to more vigorous cinema. I don’t like putting these things together as if they’re cars going down an assembly line. I think they need to be a little more personal, hand-made and unpredictable.
AMO: Do you feel kind of sheltered being at Pixar, or do you still have to deal with some of the filmmaking-by-committee issues?
BB: Not at all. I feel sheltered in the best possible way. That’s not to say that I go off in a room and do everything. We have a lot of people who work on these films and people make suggestions. The ones that really work well I’ll use unashamedly and the ones that don’t work I won’t use. Good ideas that don’t quite work in the movie I’ll remember for later. There is a very good core group here and a very good system to keep fresh eyes on the film. We all kind of look at each others’ films and make notes a couple of times a year on each project. Ratatouille was a little different in that time had run out on it. I really only worked a little bit on it with John [Lasseter] and Andrew [Stanton]. When they asked me to come in on it, they said ‘We realize time has kind of run out and that we don’t have time for a lot of notes, but we’re here if you need us. You’ve just got to run and we trust you.’ That meant a lot, but it was a very scary aspect of making this film. I still had to start animation on the date that was originally planned and had to hand out scenes without knowing exactly what was around them. It was like playing Vulcan Chess or something, where you’re on like four levels. I had to keep feeding the beast because the animators were going to get paid whether they were working or not. I knew that I had to have stuff ready for them to work on without having any downtime because that was the only way I was going to get all the scenes done at the quality level that I want and everybody expects. I had to make sure I was constantly staying ahead of that train. It was frightening, but it was also strangely exhilarating because you could write something, record it and get it to animation in a very short amount of time. ‘This feels right. Don’t over-intellectualize it, go!’
AMO: Let’s talk about the DVD and some of the goodies on it.
BB: We have an original, 2D-animated thing on there called Your Friend the Rat, which is done by Jim Capobianco, who’s one of the guys who worked on the original story for Ratatouille. He’s made a film that is really great and kind of reminds you of those really stylized films of the late ’50 and early ’60s that Disney and others made. It’s very ‘designy,’ graphic and funny. It talks about the rat as a beast and what it means to the modern world and stuff. What’s really cool is it’s 2D animation from Pixar.
AMO: Are we going to see more of that?
BB: You know, everybody here loves it. When everybody was shutting down all their hand-drawn divisions and getting mad at Pixar for being the people who caused it and thought Pixar didn’t like hand-drawn animation, everybody [here] was going, ‘No, we love hand-drawn animation!’ I think that with John binging hand-drawn stuff back the moment he was empowered over at Disney Feature Animation and with us doing a hand-drawn thing, people are getting the idea that we’re pro-animation of all flavors and stripes. Another thing that happened several years ago is that they were starting to get rid of a lot of the hand-drawn stuff at Cal Arts. Unnamed people involved in other computer divisions were basically saying, ‘Look, if you’re training them for the industry, the industry is all CG, so don’t train them for anything else.’ When Ed Catmull heard that happening, he went down there and personally told the Cal Arts guys they were insane. Anyone can learn the box later, but school is your chance to try out a lot of things and to learn concepts. 2D is still the best way to try things because you don’t need to spend a year building a character. You can do three or four good sketches and you’re off to the races. It’s only because it was Ed Catmull that they listened. In other words, the irony of it is he had to be a computer guy for them to listen to the importance of hand-drawn. Pixar’s heart has always been in the right place. CG just happened to develop here, but the reason for doing these films and what got us into the business is all classical animation of all kinds, whether it’s clay animation from Nick Park or stop-motion from people like Henry Selick. There are many, many, many different ways to do an animated film.
AMO: Do you personally keep up your 2D chops? Do you ever sit down at a desk and draw?
BB: I’ve flirted with the idea of doing a scene of Krusty for The Simpsons Movie, but there was no space at all in my life during Ratatouille. I still draw as a way to express what I want. I’ll whip out a sketch in storyboarding, staging or animation, but, if I were a serious animator, it would take me about six months to get warmed up.
AMO: What’s 1906? Is that your next film?
BB: Yeah. It’s a live-action film and I was just starting to work on it when they asked me to come on to Ratatouille. I had to put it away and turn out the lights for a little while, but now the lights are back on.
AMO: Is there a new animated film in on the horizon?
BB: My ideal career would be to bounce back and forth between live-action and animation, depending on whatever I’m passionate about at the moment. I have a lot of ideas that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time and it’s only been in the last ten years that I’ve had the chance to make any ideas. I have animated films I want to make, I have live action movies I want to make and I have movies that bled the two. Some are comedies, some are scary, some are more romantic, some are a little more political’they run the gamut. I like all kinds of different movies and would like to make all kinds of different movies.
AMO: Are there any characters from your past films that you would like to revisit with a sequel?
BB: If I could come up with a whole story that was good for The Incredibles’I love those characters and I am familiar with them and comfortable with them, and would love to put them in other situations. But it would have to be something that was not just, ‘let’s do it again because it worked out last time.’ It would have to be something that I’m really pumped about getting on the screen, and I have about have of that. I have a collection of elements and ideas that are about halfway there. I’ve been gathering materials and researching aspects of the premise, but I have these other things that are kind of in the foreground right now.
AMO: But Pixar isn’t real big on sequels, is it?
BB: I wouldn’t say it’s a business plan. Things can certainly change, but a sequel has to be driven by an idea that somebody’s passionate about. We’re in a very bizarre time in the movie industry when sequels actually make more money than the originals, and part of the reason for that is the audience from theatrical combined with the audience from DVD is pretty much the audience for the next theatrical one. Financially, studios have all this incentive to sit there and repeat themselves and you get a weird phenomenon of filmmakers following up a film with another film and yet another of the same thing. This summer, we paid the price for it. We were the only big, original film. Transformers was a TV show, Simpsons was a TV show and everything else was a sequel. Jud dApatow [(Knocked Up)] was one of the few guys who made a couple of original movies, God bless him.
AMO: So Ratatouille was at a disadvantage?
BB: Here’s the thing: we actually did really well, but there have been some articles where people are determined to paint us as some kind of disappointment, which is really odd to us. Is it just a better story if it’s a disappointment? It’s still going and is doing really well. What is the agenda of people who are saying that it’s a big disappointment? Is it that we’ve done too many movies in a row that have worked out? I can’t fathom what drives people to be so on that. Those people are at an absolute minimum as the press has been really nice to us for the most part, but this undercurrent, this strain that’s almost like a need for bad news.
AMO: If any live-action movie makes $500 worldwide, as Ratatouille has, it’s a huge hit.
BB: There are still people out there trying to say, ‘It didn’t make as much as Nemo.’ Well, how many films make as much as Nemo? At Pixar, people don’t measure a film’s worth by how much its box office is above or below a previous film. Everyone just wants to make films that we like and we’re happy when people see them. You don’t see this phenomenon in sports. You don’t see a guy hit a homerun and they take a tape measurer and if his next homerun is not quite as far as the first homerun, then he’s going downhill! It’s just ridiculous and I’m at the point now where I’m not mad about it as much as I am confused. Do you want us to make sequels? Would that make you happy? Should we try to make bad films? What exactly are we doing that’s pissing you off?
AMO: It seems that a lot of people were waiting for Pixar to slip up because they have a track record like we’ve never seen with any other studio.
BB: It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a film that doesn’t work out. But what I’m not getting is why, as a moviegoer, would you want someone to fail? Are there too many satisfying movie experiences out there and we need to cut back? I don’t get it. The thing to take away from this is we’re really happy to make movies and we try to make things that are fun to watch. We’re really happy with the response. It’s a rare place and that’s why when they asked me to come on to this, I wanted to do it. There aren’t many places on the Earth that don’t focus-group these things to death. If you want any demonstration that Pixar doesn’t focus-group these ideas, does anybody seriously think that we went out and got a bunch of pie charts and came back with the conclusion that what people want to see is rats cooking in France?
Ratatouille is now available on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in North America and is currently the top draw in theaters in a number of major overseas territories. Visit the official website at http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/ratatouille.
