By Gill Pringle
What took so long?
I think there’s a tendency nowadays to not even get the soda pop, you just want a direct syrup, you want just like “SYRUP NOW!!”. For me it was not intentional. I just don’t think it’s maybe the greatest idea creatively to follow up a successful film with its sequel. I think you want to take time, you want to think about it, you want to enjoy the process, and for me, I was always thinking about it in the back of my mind but I had other things that were at the forefront and so the more I kind of chewed on it, the more I thought “yeah, yeah, that’d be cool” and then suddenly, it was like 15 years later or something and I went “Holy crap, I better get going on something”. So it’s not intentional and it’s not calculated in any way, it probably would have been smarter if it were a cash grab to do it a lot sooner but I was mulling on it and it finally seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t want to wait any longer though because it was clearly too long.
How easy was it for you to get back into those characters?
Easy as pie. It seems like outwardly it’s a really commercial movie but it’s actually strangely personal to me, so it has a lot of the things that I loved at the age of ten, which a lot of them I still love, I hate to admit, and combined with the family I grew up in and the family I have with my wife and sons. So, it’s kind of all the stuff I love combined with both families that I’ve had in my life and so for me, even though it seems like a bright coloured pop confection, it’s actually really personal. I like those characters, they’re comfortable to me and I have fun hearing them talk and what’s fun after you’ve made the first one is that you have your ideal voice cast and when you write, you’re actually imagining Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sam Jackson, Sarah Vowell’s voices. So, it’s even easier to write in terms of dialogue; in terms of story, it’s not easy at all, it’s really hard. The character part is fun, the plot part is painful.
Was it an easy decision to pick up where the first movie left off?
I had half a thought about aging them up a little bit but the minute you do, you lose a lot of the iconic power of the idea. We’re not limited to linear aging the way live action films are, where if an actor is 10 years older, you better write a line in there where they talk about being 10 years older or the audience is not going to go for it. We are not limited in that way, as long as your voice hasn’t changed much, we can pick it up where the last movie left off. So, for me the boldest thing, a movie that’s taken 14 years to happen can do is pick up right where the last movie left off, who else can do that? No one! So we did it!
Was there anything technologically that you couldn’t do on the first one that you could do on this?
Pixar kind of invented the feature computer animation thing and for a while, with every film, there was this giant easy to talk about breakthrough. First, it was just doing it, and then it became more complex shapes, or blue fur, or underwater, etc. With us it was the first film that featured all humans. Now, the medium is past its infancy and you can talk about the stuff but it tends to be smaller stuff. It means a lot to us when we make it but it’s not as easy to talk about in terms of something different that you see. The audience hopefully can’t tell any difference, but the characters look more like our original designs than they did in the first film. We got close, but we didn’t get them bang on in the first film. On the first film we had three times as many sets as any Pixar film before, we had everything that CG animation was bad, we did, bad at humans, bad at hair, bad at fire, bad at water and we just had a whole film that was filled with what CG couldn’t do well at that point so it really almost broke the studio in terms of the absolute cutting edge of what could be done on the first film. In this film, it still was a real challenge but the medium has improved so much that you can do good fire now, you can do good water, you can do good hair and so it was just, again, the amount of it, we had a lot.
When the first movie was released, there were not so many superhero franchises as nowadays. How does this affect the story development of Incredibles 2?
When we did the first film, there were only two active big franchises: one was Spider-Man and the other one was X-Men. Batman had gone dark after the nipple-Batman and I think that was a good move on their part and Chris Nolan had not done his films yet, he was on the brink of doing them. And Superman had gone away for a while and Marvel was not kicked into high gear with Iron Man and all that stuff. Now, it’s like every six inches there’s a superhero, if you throw a rock there’s a superhero who will punch you in return. So I think that it’s much harder to do a unique story now, not only are there scads of superhero films, but there’s television shows like Heroes where they have maybe 20 superheroes, each of whom has a storyline every week, so they’re chowing through potential spins on the genre at an ungodly rate.
If we thought about this as a superhero movie, we probably would have been stymied, but we didn’t. We always felt like what makes our film unique is that it’s about a family and their roles. Their superpowers were based on iconic roles of men and women and children in the family, you know, the dad is always expected to be strong, the mom is always stretched in a million directions, teenagers are defensive and insecure so she has force fields and invisibility, 10 year olds are energy ball that just, you know, can’t not be on 11 or off, that’s what they are, and babies are unknowns, they could have no powers at all or they could be the next leader of the free world or whatever.
So, where they were in the family was how we chose their powers and that was a unique approach because it was more about stages of your life, and I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful is that everyone connects with at least two of the characters and that’s because we’ve all been teenagers, we’ve all been children, many of us have kids and so we’ve dealt with little babies which are really challenging to keep up with and teenagers which are also a handful in a completely different way so and we’ve had parents that seem kind of clueless at moments and the dad that maybe speaks before he really knows what he’s talking about and you know, the mom manages everything. So that’s where our strength lies and that’s what makes us different. And if we thought about it in those terms, it became al lot easier to make our film.
Pixar movies are famous for making people feel very emotional. What do you expect people to feel when they see Incredibles 2?
I am a lover of all kinds of emotions connected with movies. I think that movies are an emotional medium, they’re a dream language and they’re less intellectual. I think we have emotional moments here and there but I hope people just consume huge amounts of popcorn and soda and have a really great time, that’s what this is meant to be. Hopefully it’s smart and there’s some stuff in there that you can chew on later but the main goal is just to entertain the crap out of people.
We haven’t talked about your character in the movie…
Uh oh, what’s my character?
Well, Edna ‘E’ Mode! What can audiences expect from her in this sequel and how easy is it for you to find that voice?
It’s not hard at all. It’s strange that a half German, half Japanese, bossy midget is something that feels very natural to me. But I think that at my most confident moments, I’m sort of like E, she exists in that most confident moment all the time so that is something I wish that I could do. But it always cracked me up that she’s this tiny little person with no superpowers at all that can cow superheroes, and make them feel inadequate somehow, or like they can’t keep up. I’ve known some people like that, who just emit this confidence that just does not take in anything that is humbling, or they just operate on that level. So, she’s a lot of fun to write and hopefully there are some surprises there.
Since you’re the director, when you’re being E, who directs you?
I’m also schizophrenic so I can direct myself without any trouble. You’d be surprised at how often I find myself inadequate and incompetent, but I can’t really fire myself so…
The Incredibles 2 is in cinemas June 14, 2018
