Brad Bird: ​‘The great­est spe­cial effect is car­ing about a character’

LWLies talks to the Pixar god­head behind The Incred­i­bles and Rata­touille who has shift­ed recent­ly into live-action film­mak­ing. Tomor­row­land A World Beyond, star­ring George Clooney and Britt Robert­son, is his fol­low-up to Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble – Ghost Pro­to­col, and explores an illu­sive futur­is­tic utopia which holds the key to man’s fate.

LWLies: Leg­end has it that when you were 11 years old, you took a tour of Walt Dis­ney World, dur­ing which you abrupt­ly announced to your par­ents that you were going to work for Dis­ney as an ani­ma­tor one day. Is that an apoc­ryphal sto­ry, or is that the way it real­ly went?

Bird: Well, every­thing is true except for me announc­ing that I’m going to work at the stu­dio some­day. The first time I went there I was 11, and I met all of the top ani­ma­tors. I was just start­ing to get inter­est­ed in ani­ma­tion, and inter­est­ed to the degree that I hunt­ed peo­ple down – any­one who knew any­body at Dis­ney. A friend of my par­ents went to school with [The Jun­gle Book com­pos­er] George Bruns. I grew up in Cor­val­lis, Ore­gon, and Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty is where Mr Bruns went to school. I met him, I had a mil­lion ques­tions for him about Dis­ney, and he offered to take me to the stu­dios if I could get down to Los Ange­les. So he intro­duced me to all the top peo­ple, and they were very nice to me, but there was this look in their eyes…

I remem­ber Frank Thomas and Ollie John­ston, because when I met them George said, ​‘He’s work­ing on his first ani­mat­ed film!’ And they kind of gave me this lit­tle smile like, ​‘You’re gonna lose inter­est in two weeks, kid, and we’ll nev­er see ya again.’ And they were kin­da shocked when I showed up three years lat­er with a 15-minute film. So once I had that film, they kind of flung their doors open and were incred­i­bly gen­er­ous with their time and exper­tise. They were just start­ing to get the idea that their ani­ma­tors weren’t going to live for­ev­er, and nobody was being trained in that lev­el of ani­ma­tion, so I was kind of the first… When Frank Thomas signed my Illu­sion of Life book, he wrote: ​‘To the only old-timer in the new gen­er­a­tion.’ I thought that was cool.

I have a work­ing the­o­ry that, to some degree, each of your films are about incred­i­ble things that are hid­ing in plain sight.

Heh. Yeah, I think that’s true. I think all of the most impor­tant ques­tions in life aren’t prov­able. You can’t prove that some­body loves you. You can feel it, you can be con­vinced of it, but there’s no test, there’s no way to mea­sure or record it. There’s no way to explain why a joke is fun­ny, you just know it and it does it for you or it doesn’t. All of the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tions – is there life beyond this? Is there an organ­is­ing force? Is there a God? All of those ques­tions that baf­fle every­body are also unprov­able, and I think there’s a lot of mys­tery and won­der to life that is just in every moment, sit­ting around us, wait­ing to be revealed.

One of the things that tick­led me about Walt Dis­ney when I was young is that he seemed to exist in that place, either in a state of won­der or pur­su­ing won­der. Won­der could be found in edu­ca­tion, won­der could be found in cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­in­ing the future – he seemed to be sort of an impre­sario of won­der. One of his many quotes that I love is: ​‘I don’t make movies to make mon­ey, I make mon­ey to make movies.’ In oth­er words, every time that he got mon­ey rained down on him, he didn’t stick it in a pile and caress it, he imme­di­ate­ly threw it out into some­thing else, and that was real­ly inspir­ing to me, because what inspired him was doing stuff and mak­ing things.

Giv­en your love for Dis­ney and how clear­ly it man­i­fests in this movie, I’m curi­ous how formed the project was when you first came onboard. Were the con­cept and the script still flu­id, or did Damon Lin­de­lof have a draft that was set in stone?

Yeah, it was still flu­id. Damon and Jeff Jensen had con­coct­ed a his­to­ry that pre­dat­ed the events of the movie. It was all about this secret soci­ety that exist­ed, and they knew their his­to­ry and it was a fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry. So they had this ice­berg. And even in the film we could only show the tip of the ice­berg, but they had the ice­berg even then, and we still had to fig­ure out what to reveal of it for the movie. Many of the things they had back then are still in the film, but there are also a lot of things that changed once we start­ed work­ing on it together.

Speak­ing to your lack of expe­ri­ence direct­ing live-action, you’ve said that you spent most of your time on the set of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble in lis­ten­ing mode. Did you feel a lot more con­fi­dent this time out, and did that allow you to com­port your­self differently?

I was in lis­ten­ing mode main­ly before we start­ed shoot­ing on Mis­sion. It got to the point that a cou­ple of crew vet­er­ans were afraid that I wasn’t going to step up, because a direc­tor is sup­posed to be some­body who gets out there and starts bark­ing. Once we start­ed shoot­ing, I had very def­i­nite ideas about what I want­ed, but I also have a lot of respect for expe­ri­ence, and I had a lot of tal­ent­ed, expe­ri­enced peo­ple on the crew of Mis­sion, and I want­ed to hear what they had to say – maybe I would agree with them, or maybe I wouldn’t, but I would be stu­pid not to hear what they had to say.

I think that atti­tude was a byprod­uct of being men­tored by Disney’s mas­ter ani­ma­tors at a young age, because these guys were in their late ​’60s and early’70s and they were at the height of their pow­ers, and their atti­tude was not, ​‘I know every­thing, so shut up and let me tell you how to do it,’ their atti­tude was the atti­tude of a stu­dent. They said, ​‘When you get to the end of a film, that’s when you just start to feel like you under­stand the char­ac­ter, and you want to go back and fix every scene you did. But now it’s over and you have a new film and you’re back to not know­ing any­thing.’ So if the best guys in the world had the atti­tude of the stu­dent, then I should too, because any­one who is not open to learn­ing some­thing new or try­ing to grab some­thing that is just beyond their reach… well, that’s what makes art great, and that’s what makes being on Earth great. For as long as you’ve got, I think you should always be press­ing and stretching.

It sounds like one of the hard­est things for your crews might be adjust­ing to a direc­tor who actu­al­ly val­ues their input and treats them decently.

[Laughs] Yeah, I do, but I also am vocal. In any sit­u­a­tion you can go a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways, and tal­ent­ed peo­ple will have very good rea­sons for going dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but you can’t go in all of those direc­tions. So you have a peri­od where you’re open, and then you have a peri­od where you say ​“This is where we’re going, and we’re not going any­where else.”

Your two live-action films have both involved large-scale spe­cial effects. Is there any crossover there with work­ing in ani­ma­tion? Does the same skill set apply?

Def­i­nite­ly, in the sense that – when you ani­mate – you’re forced to pre-imag­ine things. In ani­ma­tion, you’re not just try­ing to imag­ine per­spec­tives and sets, you’re imag­in­ing ges­tures. You’re imag­in­ing the moment when a character’s heart breaks down to 1/​24th of a sec­ond. Ani­ma­tion actu­al­ly got me into film­mak­ing, which sounds like a strange thing to say, because once I had to fig­ure out which shot was a close-up and all of that because I had to draw it, I start­ed notic­ing that crafts­man­ship in live-action films.

I noticed that cer­tain direc­tors were more effec­tive at get­ting you to feel chills, or to laugh, or get­ting you to feel emo­tion­al about a char­ac­ter. It became very inter­est­ing to me why that was. Why does Hitch­cock suc­ceed at get­ting a chill to go up your spine right at this moment? How has he con­struct­ed it? How has he laid it out? Why does John Ford let you feel the open spaces in the West? Why does Kuro­sawa get you car­ing about the samurai?

I’m real­ly glad you men­tion Kuro­sawa, because I’ve always felt that the scene in Rata­touille in which Remy is scur­ry­ing through Gusteau’s kitchen has always evoked the Sev­en Samu­rai sequence in which the samu­rai are tour­ing the vil­lage at the begin­ning. I can’t think of any two films that do a bet­ter job of intu­itive­ly accli­ma­tis­ing view­ers to geog­ra­phy so that the film’s cli­mac­tic action sequences can exploit it later.

Oh, thank you! Well, my favourite direc­tors are ones who are always cog­nisant of space, because one of the things that’s inter­est­ing in film is that your cam­era is exist­ing in space. It’s the art form that deals in space and time more specif­i­cal­ly than oth­ers. Your cam­era is con­tin­u­al­ly in dif­fer­ent places in space, and you’re look­ing at it dur­ing time that is fixed – it’s not like a book where the time is some­what deter­mined by the read­er. My favourite film­mak­ers are able to con­stant­ly update you as to where things are.

I like action films, and a lot of peo­ple shoot action very hap­haz­ard­ly, they just shoot a whole bunch of cov­er­age and have some good edi­tor put it togeth­er in a coher­ent fash­ion, but my favourite action direc­tors, like James Cameron or Spiel­berg or John McTier­nan back when he was direct­ing the first Die Hard film, you know exact­ly where every­one is at every sec­ond, and it makes it thrilling because it’s like you’re in the room. You know the lay­out out of the room. You know that guy is behind the sofa and he’s ready to spring out at any sec­ond and he’s ten feet away from this guy who doesn’t even know he’s there. It’s not just a series of close-ups put togeth­er with loud nois­es, it’s orches­trat­ed. James Cameron is an expert at con­tin­u­al­ly main­tain­ing a coheren­cy, and doing it at a very high speed. It’s an art.

Recent­ly there’s been news that you’ve begun writ­ing the screen­play for The Incred­i­bles 2. What’s inter­est­ing about The Incred­i­bles is that it was writ­ten long before super­hero movies came to com­plete­ly dom­i­nate the zeit­geist, and any sequel you write will inevitably be informed by how the genre has evolved. Are there any devel­op­ments in par­tic­u­lar that you’d like to touch on in a new super­hero movie of your own?

Well, I wor­ry if you com­ment too much on oth­er movies that you might just be coast­ing off their good will. There was a very lazy trend in com­e­dy where some­body would start singing the theme song from The Flint­stones and you’re sup­posed to dig on it just because you recog­nise it. So I don’t like that, I think that movies ought to work in and of them­selves. How­ev­er… I would say that the super­hero movie turf right now is very trod­den over – it’s kind of like a field that’s had too many games on it, and it’s just dried up dirt at this point.

So the chal­lenge with doing a new Incred­i­bles movie is how do you be sur­pris­ing? How do you do it in a way that zigs when oth­er films that zag. I think that the great­est spe­cial effect is car­ing about a char­ac­ter. A lot of movies seem to for­get that, and they bring out a lot of fire­balls and then won­der why the fire­balls don’t have that much impact, no mat­ter how loud and how big they are. But the truth is that the fire­ball isn’t that excit­ing unless you care about the per­son run­ning from it.

So the chal­lenge is to make some­thing that’s sur­pris­ing and stays con­nect­ed with the char­ac­ters – the super stuff that they do is the least inter­est­ing thing. It can be fun, and cer­tain­ly I had a blast get­ting to do the action sequences in The Incred­i­bles, but that’s the dessert. Every movie is kind of a risk, and you’re thrown into a new pool and you haven’t learned how to swim in it yet, so I’m going to bum­ble along and make the same mis­takes that I usu­al­ly do and hope­ful­ly spot them and cor­rect them, but what excites me about it is see­ing if I can go into a medi­um that’s kind of wear­ing itself out and have a fresh take on it and have fun with those char­ac­ters – I real­ly love those char­ac­ters and that aspect of get­ting to be with them again is excit­ing to me.

Speak­ing of are­nas that may need to be revi­talised, we are your thoughts on the cur­rent state of hand-drawn animation?

Well, I love hand-drawn ani­ma­tion, and I think the point of view that it’s out­mod­ed is incred­i­bly myopic. Obvi­ous­ly The Incred­i­bles isn’t going to be hand-drawn because it’s going to be in the style of the one we made, but I do hope to return to hand-drawn ani­ma­tion at some point, and I have a cou­ple of ideas that I think would be real­ly good as hand-drawn sto­ries. I think that it’s beau­ti­ful and I think that it has a qual­i­ty that can’t be matched in any oth­er way. There’s a real­ly cool, organ­ic imper­fec­tion to it that is won­der­ful, and it’s still incred­i­bly mag­i­cal to my eyes. When I watch Milt Kahl ani­ma­tion from The Jun­gle Book, I’ve seen it 100 times but it’s still brand new to me – it’s like a Bea­t­les song. When I see Mowgli try­ing to climb a tree that’s way too big for him to get a grip on, that’s just poetry.