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Brad Bird

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Director Brad Bird

Story : One of the most dynamic creative forces at work in today’s American cinema, two-time Oscar-winner Brad Bird began as a Disney animator and served as a consultant on the first eight seasons of The Simpsons before making his feature directing debut with the acclaimed Cold War fable The Iron Giant. That set the stage for Bird’s subsequent Pixar productions, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, two films that revolutionized the art of animation with their extraordinarily sophisticated characters and visual storytelling, earning a combined nine Academy Award nominations and more than $1 billion at the global box office. As he makes his first foray into live-action filmmaking with this month’s anticipated Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol.

 

(Q) : I want to start at the beginning and sort of go through some of how you got to where you are today. You never know if you can believe everything you read on the internet, but there is a story about you that you kind of declared at the tender age of 11 that you wanted to be a Disney animator, which you eventually became. So what was it that sort of led you at such an early age to know that that was what you wanted to do with your life?
 
(Brad Bird) : Well I think that it’s not that unusual for kids to enjoy animated films, and I was not an exception in that. I think what was maybe different is that when you’re a kid you see this forest of legs and you think these kind of slow moving people and you go I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to grow up and do that. I think it was at a certain point, the first memory I have of maybe there’s something different was when my parents would listen to a Jonathan Winters album.

And here was a guy who was doing all these weird voices and really being kind of crazy and people liked it, it was fine, it was kind of cool, and he got to make albums, and people liked him. So I started going maybe it’s not so bad, and then I realized that it was somebody’s job. I knew that animation was done by each drawing was a little bit different and I knew something about the process, but I saw Disney’s “Jungle Book” and something snapped in me that this wasn’t just any cat moving this was a panther, it moved different from a cat.

And then it was more specific than that, it was an arrogant panther. Then I realized it’s somebody’s job to figure out how an arrogant panther moves, and then I thought hey man, this could be a cool thing being an adult. If there’s a job where somebody gets paid to figure that out then there’s a place for me in this world.

(Q) : Were you artistically inclined as a kid? Were you drawing a lot?
 
(Brad Bird) : I started at three doing drawings and they were stick figures like any three year old would draw. But later on I figured out that the very first drawings I did were sequential. They were meant to be viewed in a certain order, and I would tell the story and take the pictures and put the front one in the back and explain what was going on, and I think from the very beginning I was trying in my crude way to make movies. So later on when I got a chance to actually do it on film just in the process of figuring out what that is you’re getting a crude grasp of the language of film.

Whether you’re doing it in paper or shooting it on your iPhone your first shot is a choice. Do you begin with a close up or a wide shot or whatever, and in doing that you kind of start to realize what the language of film is and then you start to notice people that speak it really fluently and really well. And once I started to pay attention to that it’s like it’s endless. There are so many great filmmakers and they’ve been making them for a hundred years.
 
(Q) : You also quite early on in life had the opportunity to be mentored by one of those people, Milt Kahl, one of the legendary old men of Disney animation who animated “Lady and the Tramp” and “Pinocchio.”

(Brad Bird) : Everything from “Snow White” through I think “Rescuers.”
 
(Q) : So how did that come about? How did you come to his attention? What did you learn from him? What was that relationship like?
 
(Brad Bird) : Well I started my first film when I was 11 and right around that time a friend of ours who knew someone who worked at Disney got me into Disney and I got a tour through the studio. And I saw Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston when they were kind of making a film and they introduced me to this guy who was a composer, did their scores, named George Bruns. He introduced me and he said “He’s just started his first animated film,” and he gave me this very patient look that I still remember, which basically what they were thinking is you’re going to be interested for about two weeks kid, and then I’ll never see you again.

Great, nice coming through here. And I think they were shocked when a few years later I had a 15 minute film, and you could kind of see the characters get drawn better and move better as it gets towards the end of the film. So my parents had the attitude of you start at the top and then work your way down, and then whoever takes the time to talk with you is the best you can possibly do. And you better start at the top and get a no and then go to the next one and get a no, and then whoever you get is the best person you can. So I sent the film when it was done to Disney Studios and they responded.

And I think they were just at the point where they were realizing their animators weren’t going to live forever and nobody was being trained in that kind of animation. It was all TV animation, so nobody was learning how to really move things in space in a full way. So it was just a fluke of timing and really amazing for me. But I couldn’t talk about it with anybody because no one knew who these guys were. If it had been a sports star or something people would have really been impressed.

(Q) : Well because you grew up in a small town in Montana, right?
 
(Brad Bird) : I was born in Montana; I was raised in Oregon.
 
(Q) : In a small town.
 
(Brad Bird) : In a small town. It’s a college town; it’s not that small.
 
(Q) : But what was going to Los Angeles? I mean was there a culture shock at all there?
 
(Brad Bird) : I grew up in a college town and they had a library that had major newspapers from all the cities in the library, so I remember opening the “LA Times” and the movie section went on and on and on and there were full page ads and articles every day about something going on in the industry and it just seemed amazing to me. Yeah, it was kind of culture shock. It seemed great because there was a place where these things were being made.
 
(Q) : And say a little bit more about this film that you made, this film that you sent to Disney. What was it? What was the story? How was it animated? What did you film it on?

(Brad Bird) : I filmed it in 8mm. I mean super 8 existed, it’s just that we had to find a camera that could shoot one frame at a time. And a friend of ours had a Lecina, which is Leica made an 8mm camera and it was kind of ahead of its time in a lot of ways but it was an older format so he was interested in getting rid of it because it was 8mm, it wasn’t a super 8. So I used that and we just jury-rigged it up into an enlarger and stuff. I mean it was all very improvised.

We didn’t have a peg hole system or any of that stuff, we just kind of did it until you did it right. And what was the story? The story was the tortoise and the hare, but it was a kind of a weird version because the hare was actually a good guy and the tortoise was trying to slow him down, and it ended up in a five way tie. I mean it’s its own version. It’s closer to like a Chuck Jones film than it was any of the other versions of the tortoise and the hare.
 
(Q): Tunes,” Warner Brothers school?
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah. How can you not love Chuck Jones? No, I mean all that stuff is great. But again, it was a bunch of people who I was really impressed with but I couldn’t talk about it with any of my friends. And it wasn’t until I got to CalArts that suddenly I was around a lot of other freaks who knew who Tex Avery was and who knew what Chuck Jones’ Three Bears films were. So it was like “I’ve been looking to talk about this for five years! Finally I can!”
 
(Q) : And I think some of those were the same people that you ended up working with when you went back to Disney.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, John Lasseter.
 
(Q) : Starting on “The Fox and the Hound.” That was your initial foray at Disney in the pre-Pixar era. You mentioned earlier that when you sent your film to Disney they sort of were realizing that these old men were not going to live forever. What was the state of the company when you went back for “Fox and the Hound”? Because I think we think of that as being a kind of dark chapter in Disney animation.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, it definitely was dark. It was weird, because you were at this great studio where all this amazing stuff happened, but when we were arriving on the scene all the masters were retiring. And the guys that were taking their place were guys that had been there for 20 years but they were never good enough to rise to the top under the great guys. So they moved to the top positions and then what’s that quote, A people hire A people, B people hire C people, you know what I mean? And that’s kind of what it is, because they don’t want to be topped by anybody. So it was this bizarre atmosphere where there were these amazing young artists who were kind of being held down.

“Fox and the Hound” is a perfect example because it has the last animation of the old men, Frank and Ollie did their last animation on that film, then they kind of left. It was a weird movie because they would have you change scenes if they had any motion that was slightly intense in any direction. If something was funny they’d go “Tone it down.” If something was scary they’d go “Tone it down.” If something was emotional, “Tone it down.” So you had this movie that was like a flat line, and if you want to see the clearest example of what was just waiting to happen there it’s the bear fight at the end.

They actually ran out of time and the guys who were directing it there was no more time to tell people to tone it down. So they had to go with whatever, I was gone by that point, but all my friends, they knew that they had this sequence and whatever they did they had to pain and put on film. So they just said we’re going to kick ass and show what we can do. So all of a sudden the film, which is this kind of like taking pharmaceuticals that take away the lithium curve or whatever,  this sleepy kind of brain dead film suddenly comes alive and the camera angles get very dramatic and the animation gets very intense and it’s a different movie. The bear fight is what could have been the whole movie if they had not been so aggressively holding everybody down.
 
(Q) : I also what to ask you about someone who I think was also quite instrumental early on in your career a few years after “The Fox and the Hound” period, which is Steven Spielberg because you wrote two episodes of “Amazing Stories,” the much loved but short lived anthology series, and directed one, “Family Dog,” which I think probably a lot of our audience knows, and also co-wrote the screenplay for “Batteries Not Included,” which Spielberg produced. How did you sort of get onto his radar or he onto yours? How did that meeting come about?
 
(Brad Bird) : Well I mean he was on my radar because he was an amazing filmmaker that I really admired his work. I think that what happened was I wanted to do shorts, to have theatrical shorts come back to the movies, and “Family Dog” was sort of an attempt to do that. There was no way to do that back then. Movie companies would simply snip it off if you printed it on the first reel. They would just go “We can get one extra showing in if we snip this off,” something like that. So there was no real outlet and Steven knew about the idea, and he liked it but there was just no outlet for it.

And then some time went by and a friend on mine, Matthew Robbins, got offered an episode of “Amazing Stories,” and at the time I was trying to get another project off the ground, it wasn’t working out, and I just said “If you need a writer I’m sitting here.” Matthew really liked the idea of the episode but he thought it needed a new screenplay, so he had me write the screenplay and Steven really liked it. And then I went down to talk about doing more and he said “You know ‘Family Dog’” Do you think you could do a half an hour of that?” And I said “Sure,” and he said “What if you did it as an episode of ‘Amazing Stories’?” and I went “I’m there.” So that’s kind of how it happened.
 
(Q) : And primetime animation was still really in its infancy then. I mean there had been things like “The Flintstones.”
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, way back at the beginning. I mean a lot of people don’t remember that, but “Flintstones,” “Jetsons,” and “Johnny Quest” were all in primetime. But it had fallen out of favor so it was kind of radical to do some new animation. It was full animation too, it wasn’t limited like Saturday morning, and then put it on. So yeah, it was a blast, and Steven gave me my first opportunities.

(Q) : And right around that same time you kind of fell into one has become the pinnacle of primetime TV animation, “The Simpsons.” Let’s not overlook that.
 
(Brad Bird) : That was really fun. They kind of were interested in having “Family Dog” be an episodic thing but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that particular thing on a weekly schedule, but “Simpsons” was something that could absolutely be done well. I was a huge fan of Matt Groening and also a tremendous admirer of Jim Brooks’ stuff, and it was a chance to kind of do both at the same time. I just sort of got on as a team player and just wanted to participate and it was really fun.
 
(Q) : Could you possibly have imagined at that time that 25 years later we would still have “The Simpsons”? It’s so present in the pop culture it’s astonishing.
 
(Brad Bird) : No way. And at the time that we were doing the very first episodes of the half an hour version, the previous incarnations Tracey Ullman little short things, most of the people involved with it were like “13 and out, man. 13 and out. They’re never going to let us do this for too long.” Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s stunning really.
 
(Q) : So take us up to “The Iron Giant,” your first feature length film. Talk a little bit about what attracted you to this property. It’s a novel by Ted Hughes, the obviously quite well known British author, well known as the poet and husband of Sylvia Plath. It was released in 1999, so this is the same year as “Toy Story 2,” so traditional 2D animation is already kind of on the way out at that point, but this is a traditional 2D, mostly hand drawn film. Talk a little bit about how it all came together and why you wanted to do it in that style.
 
(Brad Bird) : Well it came about because I had another project at Turner. For a short time Ted Turner had an animation division, but I had a project there that was totally not what everybody else was thinking animation should do. At that time it was all about musicals, it was all about familiar sort of public domain stories put to Broadway music. That was kind of what you did if you did animation. I had a sort of a film noir action movie that took place in the future as seen from 1939. So I wanted to do that and it was an animator magnet at a time when everybody was fighting over animators. So they didn’t want to shut it down because animators were interested in it but they didn’t want to make it either because that would be counter to where are the songs? Where are the cuddly animals?
 
(Q) : I think “Cats Don’t Dance” came out of that influence.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah. So then Turner got bought by Warner Brothers, and in the massive Turner empire of the MGM library and the Warner Brothers pre-1947 library and the Cartoon Network and the Atlanta Braves and all this stuff they got the caraway seed of the last three months of my contract. And they didn’t want to make "Ray Gun” so they just said “Look over all the projects we have in development and see if there’s anything that strikes your fancy.” They had something like 45 things that were development, and if you have that many things in development you basically have nothing in development because you can’t spread your energy that wide.

But there was something about that idea of a robot, a large metal man, a metal eating metal man, and a kid that really struck a chord with me. But the original book it was different. It took place in no specific time period, it took place in a seacoast town in England, Hogarth had two parents, and the latter half of the book became a contest between the Iron Giant and a giant space bat the size of Australia going back and forth into the sun.

I kind of felt like the story was really between the boy and the giant and so I pitched Warner Brothers, I said “What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun?” And based on that idea they said “Well great, what else would you do with it?” and I said “I want to set it in 1957 in the United States, I want Sputnik to be in the air, I want there to be the Cold War looming, I want there to be a Beatnik character, I want there to be a government guy and all this stuff,” and they went with me on it.

(Q) : You were born at the end of the ‘50s, but the ‘50s do seem to be an influence not just on this movie but on “The Incredibles” in terms of the architecture and some of the design elements.
 
(Brad Bird): Well “The Incredibles” is a little more ‘60s I think, but yeah, I don’t know, there’s something cool about that stuff. In terms of “The Iron Giant” you’re dealing with a big metal thing, and there were a lot of movies at the end of the ‘50s that were all about technology running rampant and monsters and the blob and all that stuff, and it seemed like we wanted to tap into that. It came from sort of twin fears; there was the fear of the atomic bomb and what that would lead to and there was a fear of the Soviet Union. And there was the fear of the Soviet Union putting a piece of metal in outer space that was looking over us and there was paranoia. And it seemed like a great environment to drop a big metal guy in the middle of, just take advantage of it.

(Q) : This was a film that received very loving and admiring reviews when it came out but it didn’t do at the box office what your other films had done.

(Brad Bird) : There was a lot of sage brush blowing through the theaters.
 
(Q) : The studio didn’t really seem to support the film very well. Now people have discovered it and it’s a classic now, but at the time it wasn’t. What was that experience like for you to have your first feature come out?
 
(Brad Bird) : It’s really odd and very unique because in some was Warner Brothers had had a very bad experience with animation with people promising them the moon and basically telling them that “Oh yeah, we can make the next ‘Lion King,’” and there was a bunch of people that kind of took advantage of Warner Brothers’ very large checkbook and did a lot of spending money to very little effect. A lot of properties were bought that were half baked and a lot of money was spent on not much. And so they were losing enthusiasm about the time I rolled in there and they were basically closing down the division as we were making it.

But there’s an advantage to that, which is that they’re not really paying attention. The great thing about it was that when we were making it they kind of left us alone as long as we stayed on budget. The terrible thing about it is when we were done they left us alone. It was kind of like having free run of the Titanic. You could get naked and run through the smoking rooms and have any drinks you want, but in a couple hours you were going to be on the ocean floor. So it was the best and worst of times.

(Q) : And in a way that’s what led you to Pixar, because as I understand you had sort of been courted by them before.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, while we were making “Iron Giant,” yeah.
 
(Q) : And so now you went there. Talk a little bit about that creative environment, Warner Brothers versus Disney when you were there, and maybe particularly a little bit about the late Steve Jobs.
 
(Brad Bird) : It was really great, I mean as you mentioned I knew John Lasseter from school and we were good friends. We shared that we both had been fired from Disney, and the weird thing was that we were kind of fired for kind of standing up for this stuff that the Disney guys trained us to stand up for. So it was a very odd experience there. But it was a wonderful place, I mean I loved the movies that they made. I flipped out when I saw “Toy Story,” and it wasn’t the technology that blew my mind. I mean that was nice, but what blew my mind was that they were creating new characters and they were done with the complete conviction of the old classic Disney movies where they believed in the characters’ reality utterly, but they were new characters.

A lot of my friends who worked on “Iron Giant” with me were kind of mad that CG animation was the sexy new girl in the room and I was abandoning hand drawn animation to go with this new girl. And I kept trying to tell them look, it’s not the technology that’s drawing me to Pixar, it’s that they protect their stories. It’s the storytelling part that I want to be a part of. And I knew that I had a new child, a new project that I wanted to grow, and I knew that was a great protective environment.
So I think that it’s rare for any company to have one genius. I mean you’re really lucky if you happen to find one and can work with one, but Pixar was an absolute freak of nature because there were three and they managed to get together, and they were all visionary. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull are visionary just like Steve Jobs is a visionary, and for them to combine forces and make this great environment is just a rare opportunity.
 
(Q) : And “The Incredibles” was a project that you had originally conceived as as a 2D animated film.
 
(Brad Bird) : Right, and I had even pitched it to Warner Brothers and they were interested. But I was smart enough at that point to not pitch any ideas anymore. I’d done that in Hollywood, and what happens is you pitch it, and I could always get them to back an idea, but then they own the idea. And they can sit on it and they would cancel a project because something that was vaguely like it, like maybe your character has a red shirt and a guy in the new film as a red shirt and it tanked to red shirts are out.

There was a lot of that, and then they own your project and you can’t get it away from them because if you make it a hit with somebody else then they get mocked at cocktail parties for letting it go. It’s a bizarre world, so by the time of “The Incredibles” I knew enough to spend my own money to pay people. If I needed to develop artwork I would pay people myself and I would own it and so I could pitch it but I would own it and you have to commit to it before I’ll let it go. So even though I had pitched the idea there and they liked it I still owned it and I didn’t cash any checks from them. So when they didn’t support “Iron Giant” the way I would hope they would I took it to Pixar.
 
(Q) : How radical of an overhaul was it to take that idea from a 2D realm to a 3D realm? I assume you kind of had an idea of the movie in your head as a 2D movie, what it would look like, what it would move like.
 
(Brad Bird) : It actually is the same designs that I had pitched at Warner Brothers. I just took the artwork and showed it to the people at Pixar, and it’s in the “Art of The Incredibles” book. I mean that artwork that I did is in there, and it’s what they look like in the film, with the exception of Dash, who I changed a little bit. But all of the characters basically look like it’s just a drawing of them rather than a CG rendering. I think what was weird about “The Incredibles” from Pixar’s perspective is that it was a project that was designed around everything that CG did badly.

At that time you were encouraged to do things like bugs and toys that look kind of plasticity and had hard surfaces, and this was a film filled with squishy humans, which CG animation at that time didn’t do very well. And it had hair and fabric and the characters aged, and it had three times the number of sets, and we had to figure out a way to do it for the same amount of money. So it was a very challenging thing to bring to the screen because we were doing all this stuff that CG didn’t do well and we had oceans of it and we had to do it for the same price of the films they were already making.
 
(Q) : One of the things that I love about “The Incredibles” is the idea that superheroes have to have their own costume designer. It makes perfect sense but nobody ever acknowledged that before.
 
(Brad Bird) : Who does that? I don’t believe that Peter Parker designed his Spider-Man costume. Somehow that just doesn’t make sense.

(Q) : Started doing voices. Do all animators do that? Is that just something when you guys are sitting around you try to think of how a character’s going to sound?
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, and we do these temporary soundtracks where we’re just kind of getting the film up on its legs and you just want to get something that’s in the ballpark. So when we did the temp reels of “The Incredibles” I did Bob, I did Edna, I did one other character, Syndrome. So I was just doing it because it’s the quickest way to get something up and then you get somebody better to do it. But for some reason they liked that. I was cheap and available.

(Q) : It’s something you’ve been asked about before, which is that this movie has running through it the idea that Syndrome wants to create a world in which being a superhero is meaningless because anybody can be one. And at the same time the government has put these superheroes into a kind of witness relocation program to create a world with no superheroes. There’s a scene where Helen says to Dash “Everyone’s super,” and he says “Which is another way of saying that nobody is.”
 
(Brad Bird) : “Everyone’s special.”
 
(Q) : And that there’s this constant theme through the film of this kind of tension between being exceptional, being like everybody else, and people have read into this Nietzsche and the idea of the superman, Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Can you just talk a little bit about this idea, because I think it’s very much present in “Ratatouille’ as well, the idea that Remy can have this synesthesia when he eats food. He can see shapes and colors and hear music and his brother can’t really tell the difference between trash and haut cuisine.
 
(Brad Bird) : Politically I sort of mystify people because “Iron Giant” was supposed to be a liberal screed, and one guy even said “He’s saying that we shouldn’t defend ourselves against the Soviet Union!” and it’s like what? I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m just telling a story, dude. So I was a left leaning radical with “Iron Giant,” and then I became a right hawkish crazy Ayn Rand freak on “Incredibles,” and I think they gave up on “Ratatouille.” They just were like “He’s pro cooking rodents. I don’t know.”
 
(Q) : I guess maybe the question really is it’s not a bad thing in any way, it’s just that it cuts against in some way the Horatio Alger myth, which is so prominent in American fiction that anyone can be what they want to be if they work hard enough at it.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, but I think you want to be open to that sort of thought, but I think everything in moderation. What was funny was my wife and I, some of our arguments actually appeared in “Incredibles,” because I would just watch this thing where your kids, we have three boys and they would go out and play sports. And there would be some kid that kills himself and practices every day and at a game will risk his body in order to get one small advantage for his team, and then there’s some kid that just doesn’t want to be here and “Why do I have to come to practice?” and doesn’t show up.

And at the end of the season everybody has to have a trophy, and it’s basically because you know that 15 years ago the kid that killed himself got a trophy and the other guys felt slighted.” So then it became everybody has to get a trophy just for breathing you get a trophy. So there are these closets full of these useless trophies that are awarded for basically showing up, and you see it at any market. If they serve you there’s a tip jar. Now I’m giving you a tip because you’re serving me?

You’re taking my money; that’s tip worthy? The idea of a tip used to be that it was something unusual worth noticing and you give them a little honorarium for special service, and now it’s because they exist. It’s just anything that’s pushed to those absurd ends to me is worth a poke in a film I think.

(Q) : It’s always the perspective of the critic to find these through lines through somebody’s work, and “The Incredibles” is very overtly a movie about the tension between career and family, but in a way so is “Ratatouille.” In a way Remy’s whole complex is whether he should become a chef or he should just go back with the herd in the sewers and all that. And in a way “Mission: Impossible” even touches on this concept.
 
(Brad Bird) : I can’t wait for you to connect these two.
 
(Q) : But Ethan Hunt’s marriage does become a central story point in “Mission: Impossible,” and what he’s had to do in order to have a marriage and be situated.
 
(Brad Bird) : Well yeah, I guess in that sense yeah.
 
(Q) : I mean is that something you’re aware of being attracted to as a theme?
 
(Brad Bird) : I think that would have been in the movie whether I got involved or not. But sure, there’s a tension between finding meaningful work that’s not just drudgery and living the other aspects of your life. I certainly was going through that at the time that we were doing “Incredibles,” because we had a new family and it was demanding my attention and at the same time my career was not where I wanted it to be and I knew that if I ever got an opportunity to make a film I wanted to give it my all so that hopefully it wasn’t my only opportunity.

But I didn’t want to short my family, so it was this constant dynamic of there are two things that I love that are vitally important to me and I don’t want to fail at either, I want to be present for both. So I think that that is a struggle that everyone deals with of finding something they can do that means something to them and caring about the people that they love and giving them their do. I think that that’s always a wrestling match.
 
(Q) : “Ratatouille,” which you did after “The Incredibles,” was not a project that you initiated, it was a movie that had already been in development for several years with another filmmaker and then you sort of came on to it midstream.
 
(Brad Bird) : Not midstream, like fourth quarter.
 
(Q) : So talk a little about that and how it changed. Because in the end you have the sole screenplay credit and it feels top to bottom like a Brad Bird movie in every respect.

(Brad Bird) : Well the film was being developed the whole time that I was making “The Incredibles,” and when I arrived to do “Incredibles” that movie was already being developed. So when I finished “Incredibles” and that movie was up it was not in the condition that it needed to be to go into production and it was a point where John and Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull said “Will you help us?” So the characters were designed, the style was visually well underway, but they couldn’t move beyond a certain point because they didn’t have a story that worked.

They had a premise and they had character types, but they didn’t have characters. So it was a really challenging project to fix. At first I had the idea that I’ve got to use all the artwork that’s been developed in the story reels, and then I realized that it was too difficult to try to figure out how to reuse the stuff in different ways. I just said scrap it all, and I kept two lines of dialog and two shots from the previous two complete versions of the film that had been done.

And one of the lines of dialog is “Where is the soup?” and the other one was “You are fired! F-I-R-E-D fired!” I kept those two, but everything else I ripped it down to the studs and had to kind of look under the hood and figure out why it wasn’t jelling. And there were a lot of interesting, I mean just on a pure mechanical level story mechanics of things that I learned having to kind of do this emergency job, and it was a very intense experience. In many ways it prepared me for this film, because it was really difficult and there wasn’t a lot of time.

(Q) : Was it always a film about the creative process? Because it does seem to me in the end that’s really one of the beautiful things about the film.
 
(Brad Bird) : It was, but there were a lot of things that were different. I mean it would take a whole night like this to discuss it, but just a couple of examples was the Gusteau character was alive in all the previous versions and he was kind of moping around the kitchen having lost his mojo. And then the epiphany moment at the end of the film where he tastes the ratatouille was Gusteau’s moment and it was Gusteau kind of reconnecting with why he loved to cook.

But it didn’t mean anything coming from Gusteau. He’s kind of this leaden thing that stopped every scene and took all the juice out of the movie, and so one of the first things I did was kill him off. The other thing I did was I separated the family and Remy. In the previous versions they were both there from the moment he arrived in Paris, and he had to kind of run to them and he was living this double life.

But it never allowed him any time to connect with the Linguini character. So I separated them so that he had a piece of screen time where he was on his own and he had to forge this new relationship. This scene down by the Seine where Linguini has to kill Remy and he can’t bring himself to do it and they sort of forge this very uneasy reliance, that was never in any previous version and that’s one of the most important scenes in the film.

So there are a lot of choices like that. The other thing that happened was, so I killed of Gusteau and Remy’s alone and I’ve established that he can’t speak. He speaks to rats but he can’t speak to humans. So that meant that he had to be silent for 20 minutes in the movie. So then I thought well what if I make Gusteau in Remy’s imagination. He’s kind of like an Obi Wan Kenobi slight pixie.
 
(Q) : Obi Wan Kenobi of haut cuisine.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah. Haut-bi Wan Kenobi. Yeah I know. Sorry. Jetlag. So then it became making Gusteau kind of this figure in Remy’s imagination. And when I pitched that idea to John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton they both kind of went like this and then they realized that this could be great. This could be really weird, because it’s not Gusteau, it’s what Remy thinks Gusteau would say. And so his point of view is limited. He can’t really offer any advice that Remy doesn’t already know. So he would say “Well how do you know that?” and he’d go “I don’t know. I’m a figment of your imagination.” He’s very open about the fact that he’s not real, and yet to Remy he is, he’s the thing that kind of keeps him going.
 
(Q) : We’re going to look at a scene, which is the scene we were just talking about backstage because it’s a scene that I think really endeared itself to critics far and wide because of what the Ego character has to say in it. But it’s also a scene that was talked about a lot for Proustian moment of involuntary memory that happens when Ego tastes the ratatouille. And I just would call attention to the wonderful look of the food in this scene, because you did have as a consultant on this film the great Thomas Keller, one of the major figures in American cuisine. And I just feel like you rarely see this level of attention to detail in any kind of film, whether it’s live action or animated.

(Q) : I just have to really thank you for that scene. I think it’s actually just as filmmaking absolutely extraordinary the way we move through all these different spaces with the voiceover. It’s so elegant.
 
(Brad Bird) : It was really weird to pitch that as the ending to a big summer movie. It’s like that’s usually the point in the film where you crank it up and get the adrenaline really going or get the comedy rolling, and when I got to that part of the film it just seemed to be asking to just suddenly become quiet and slow. Hey guys, guess what? This big summer movie is going to have a review read while we look at people staring into space. But once they saw it, particularly when we got Peter O’Toole’s voice in there and Michael Giacchino’s music people saw that it could be something. Again, props to Pixar for allowing me to do that. That’s a weird choice and the embraced it, and that’s why they’re Pixar.
 
(Q) : Well now you have a big summer movie that does end with the adrenaline ratcheted up to maximum levels, especially in IMAX. You said “Ratatouille” was good preparation for doing it. Originally you had another live action project, which you still have, which I’ll ask you about in a little bit. But talk a little bit about just how you came into the world of “Mission: Impossible,” which “The Incredibles” would also seem to have been good homework for it in many ways.
 
(Brad Bird) : I think anybody that’s seen “The Incredibles” kind of gets sort of the spy vibe from it. There’s sort of a feeling of the look of spy films, so there’s a fondness that you can detect that I already had for the genre. I had known J.J. Abrams, who’s one of the producers and directed the previous “Mission: Impossible” for years and we’d been looking for an opportunity to work together and the timing never was read. And then I had met Tom Cruise right after “The Incredibles” and we had this great two or three hour discussion about what we loved about movies and what we hoped to do and the things that we looked for, and we got along really well, and here was an opportunity to work with both of them.

I had been working on another live action film that was really difficult to coral the story into shape, and suddenly I looked up and it was a couple years later and I was still banging my head against the wall. I wanted to make a film, not just prepare to make a film. So I looked around and the timing just happened to work out.

(Q) : In a way it really feels like a throwback spy movie. It’s shot at exotic international locals in Moscow and Mumbai and Dubai, with one incredible sequence in and out of the world’s tallest building, and other in a blinding sandstorm, all of this shot in IMAX. Talk a little bit about the decision to actually shoot in IMAX rather than just having an IMAX version of the film that was blown up.

(Brad Bird) : Well there is sort of a push towards 3D these days, and one of the pushes, which is not unlike 50 years ago when television was considered a threat to the movies. Now it’s all these alternate forms of entertainment. The end of the movies keeps sort of being proclaimed and yet movies live on. So there’s this feeling of we want to give the audience an experience they can’t have at home, and 3D was supposed to be that answer, but 3, 2, 1, they can get that experience at home. From my point of view there are two things that movies offer that you will never be able to get at home, never be able to replicate, and one is a really, really big screen with a bright, sharp image. And the other one is an audience.

Those two things together it’s magical when it’s done right, and very few people remember or realize that even in the 20s, if you saw a silent movie in a movie palace the screens were like three or four stories tall. We have a theater in San Francisco called The Castro that is from the silent era, and they have the organ still intact. And when you hit bass chords in that organ it shakes the theater. I mean it’s like an early version of Dolby stereo. So if you saw a silent movie in one of those theaters you saw a big, sharp image, because they were struck from the original negative, and they were arc lights lighting them up so the image was bright, and the organs would shake the theater.

There was power in that, and I think people are forgetting the enormous power of a really big, sharp image, and that’s what IMAX is. It’s kind of the last bastion of that kind of presentation. The multiplexing of movies has kind of diminished what they can be at their best. The auditorium sizes are smaller, the screens are smaller, there are no curtains anymore, there are ads on the screen.
 
(Q) : My biggest pet peeve.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, it’s kind of like taking a leak on the screen right before you get a story up there. “Hey, this is just like your living room. Everything you hate about watching TV, only it’s big!” What’s left? Having the toilet flushing sound and being able to pause it? I mean what’s next? So to me IMAX is big screens, really bright, sharp images, and if you go through the trouble of actually shooting a film in IMAX the amount of detail is staggering. And on a really big screen there’s no grain and it’s kind of an unreal experience. To me it is the rollercoaster that they keep saying 3D is.
 
(Q) : Well it won’t be as big on this screen, and this isn’t the scene that was shot in IMAX anyway, but this is a scene in the film where Ethan Hunt and the other members of his team, we can see them on the poster there, Jeremy Renner of course, and Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, are in the world’s tallest building in Dubai trying to intercept the meeting of an international terrorist mastermind.
 
(Brad Bird) : I have to explain a tiny bit about this because it’s a complex idea. I mean you’ll get it if you see the film but if you’re just seeing this it needs a little bit of a setup. There are nuclear codes that are being sold, and they realize that if they can get there and kind of create two rooms out of one and be both halves of the meet, that each side will think that the exchange has taken place without realizing. So there are two rooms and they’ve actually changed the numbers on the floors and have controls of the elevators. There are two rooms where simultaneously half of the exchange is taking place. So it’s kind of a weird idea.
 
(Q) : Is that boom down through the floor of the room a digital or practical effect?
 
(Brad Bird) : A little of both. We had one floor but we shot the A side of the move and then repeated it, and changed some things in the room and then used it as a wipe against itself. We went through the floor of the set and then we went to the roof in the second shot. So it looks like it’s over, but it’s not.
 
(Q) : Well having talked about how the animated films prepared you to make this live action film, were there any surprises? What was the biggest challenge in doing the live action film for you?
 
(Brad Bird) : I think it was just the physical size of the production. It was a really big film, it’s the biggest “Mission: Impossible” film, but we had a tight schedule. We actually had fewer shooting days than the last “Mission: Impossible,” even though the film is bigger. So it was just kind of surviving the process that was the biggest challenge, because it was rough, challenging.
 
(Q) : And talk a little bit about Tom Cruise. You mentioned your initial meeting with him, but I had the chance to interview him and profile him a few years ago and every time I see him on screen I’m always just struck by the level of intensity, the way he commits himself. You can think it’s a good performance or a bad performance, but there is just so much intensity to him on screen, and then when you see the physical side of the performance, what he does stunt-wise in the film it’s really quite remarkable.
 
(Brad Bird) : Yeah, I think that it’s easy to single him out for the physical stuff. Can you name any other star that would actually swing around on a wire on the tallest building in the world? I can’t name anybody. But he’s actually brilliant at small things too, and I don’t think he’s given enough credit for that stuff. I mean there was one part of the movie in that section, again, it’s kind of out of context, you’re going to think it’s bizarre, but I swear to god it makes sense when you see it in the movie.

But he essentially, there’s a female assassin, played by Lea Seydoux, and she is getting suspicious of the Jeremy Renner character. Tom’s character is sitting there and I said “I want you to do this. Like look at me, but do it without moving.” And he does this little tiny thing with his head and it absolutely reads as “Don’t look at Jeremy Renner; look at me.” It reads on film but it’s tiny, and that’s the kind of stuff he can do too, and everything in between. So he’s really a terrific actor and I think it’s easy to forget that he can do that small stuff when he does big things like swinging off buildings.
 
(Q) : We’re going to look at another short scene that Jeremy Renner is in with Simon Pegg, and Simon Pegg brings such terrific comic relief to this movie. I mean Jeremy Renner as a fairly spectacular stunt later in the film where he’s being guided through this sort of computer exhaust system.
 
(Brad Bird) : Again, it sounds absolutely insane.
 
(Q) : Wearing a magnetized suit.
 
(Brad Bird) : I swear to god; it makes sense.
 
(Q) : I came out of this movie wanting to wear that magnetized suit.
 
(Brad Bird) : Good, because Jeremy didn’t want to get near it.
 
(Q) : That looked like a lot of fun. But anyway, this is the introduction of the magnetized suit.

(Brad Bird) : And because of the way it was lit we were able to shoot both sides of it and have it be well lit. And they did that in one take and all I did was just cut back and forth. That’s the kind of thing that can happen in live action that can’t happen in animation.
 
(Q) : Well Brad, we’re just about out of time but I did want to just sort of get a status update from you on “1906,” which is the other live action project that we mentioned earlier. A very ambitious film about San Francisco in the year of the great earthquake based on the wonderful historical novel about that time period and political corruption, various other factors that sort of caused much more extensive damage than would have ordinarily happened. Where are you at with that and do you think it will be your next project?

(Brad Bird) : I don’t know. We have a wonderful writer who is working on it while I was, continuing to work on it I should say, because I worked on it for a couple years, while I was doing “Mission,” and we’ll kind of get a chance to hopefully when all this craziness and the holidays is over I’ll be able to focus on that and see about it. It’s just an amazing period of time, and that particular place at that moment straddling the two centuries is just fascinating in about 400 different ways, which has partially been the problem with it is that you could make a great miniseries out of it.

But I want to make it was a movie that can be enjoyed in one viewing, so getting all of the interesting aspects to work in a condensed form has been really challenging. But I think it would be an amazing movie if we can crack it. But it might be that, it might be something else, but I would certainly love it if it were that.
 
(Q) : I have one more surprise for the audience, which is that after we leave the stage we’re going to run in its entirety “Family Dog” from “Amazing Stories” for those who care to stay and see it, which you should. I believe you had working with you on this Tim Burton when he was just getting started in movies.
 
(Brad Bird) : Well actually he had done the designs before he had made even his first movie, and it was one of those things that was again, a long gestation. But when Steven finally figured out a way to get it made as part of “Amazing Stories” I asked Tim to do some new designs for it and he very graciously joined even though he had started to get some big success in live action. So there are kind of three chapters that are all in that one episode. There are like three different shorts of varying lengths, and it was really fun to make.
 
(Q) : I want to thank everybody at Paramount, and especially Brad Bird for making this evening possible, and I hope that we’ll have you back very soon.
 
(Brad Bird) : I’d love to come back. It’s been a pleasure.

 

End.