As promised, here’s the full transcript of my discussion with Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the directors of Disney’s Tangled. The short piece I wrote on the film for the last issue of Beat can be read online here.
G: This was quite a long production, wasn’t it? It went through a few iterations, with a different people at the reins. Were you guys involved from the word ‘go’ at different levels, or were you brought onboard after the restructuring?
B: No! It hasn’t been going full force for that long. But it was on Walt’s desk on a list along with Cinderella and Peter Pan as films that they wanted to do. But it always got shoved off to the side because it’s a very small story, the original Grimm’s fairytale. It’s about a very passive young woman sitting in a room for the whole length of the story. Not very much real estate for a ninety minute film. So we really had to make her a dynamic character. We had to get her out of the tower, out into the world and make her a heroine for the 21st century. So we wanted to make her relatable, but not the noble princess that you might expect. She’s a real girl.
G: So how early were you involved with the version that became Tangled? Because Glen Keane was originally lined up to direct, right?
N: Right. What happened was we were working on Bolt and Byron was one of the directors and I was the head of story. When that movie was wrapping up John Lasseter had asked me if I wanted to direct a short for the Bolt blu-ray and of course – yes, I wanted that! That would be awesome! So I started doing that and it was John’s way of kind of taking me out for a test drive to see if I’m really director material for a feature film. So while I was doing that I started working with Byron, and Byron was helping me. I’d been at the studio – at that point I think it was 12, 13 years or something like that, and mostly I was always in the story department. There are all of these other departments. I didn’t know how they worked. So I started working with Byron. He’d just directed a film and he was showing me the ropes. He knew how the other departments worked. At the same time, Rapunzel was in development and like Byron said, it had been for a long time. Glen Keane was directing it, and it wasn’t in full force yet. Glen actually had a heart attack. And he’s doing fine now.
G: He is. I saw him speak here recently at the launch of ACMI’s Dreams Come True exhibition.
G: Is this referring to the ‘Best of Both Worlds’ seminar of his I’ve read about?
G: And that was all about blending traditional hand-drawn techniques with CG animation?
G: Was Tangled always planned as Disney’s 50th animated feature film, or did that come about due to the setbacks?
G: The article the LA Times ran on the film last month claimed it was possibly the second most expensive film ever made when the entirety of production was encompassed. How weird is it knowing that not only have you made the 50th Disney feature animation, but also the second most expensive film ever at this point in time?
B: The nice thing about this is that they don’t tell us exact numbers! And this again is part of John’s influence, but our job is making it the movie it needs to be. Nathan and I do like epic movies with a big scale to them, so we tried not to hold back. We don’t limit ourselves in the story room saying ‘Well, I don’t know if we can do this technologically, or if we can afford this.’ It’s more about ‘What’s going to make this movie great?’ And that’s what’s great for our crew. That challenges the crew. And the studio is great, because they’ll support you in any way they can. They’re expensive movies, because one animator working for an entire week will produce maybe three to five seconds of animation. It’s ridiculous. Once you do the math and figure that out for a 90 minute movie, the man hours involved are insane. When you factor in all of that, plus maybe seven years of research on the hair…
G: Seven years?!
G: Earlier this year I read you both saying you were still having doubts about the hair, even as late as March. What was the problem there?
N: The problem was, hair has never really been done like this in these films before. Whether it’s Pixar, or DreamWorks, or Sony, or whoever, if you look at any of their CG films, hair is usually to the shoulder maybe, or in a ponytail. It’s so complicated technically to get that free-flowing hair brushing against surfaces. And we were going to have seventy feet of it! They always say ‘Don’t have that hair touch anything! Don’t have characters touch hair!’ Meanwhile, we’re having her tie people up with it, and throw it up in the rafters and climb it, and use it as a bullwhip – all these crazy things. We were asking this impossible thing. And we kept having what we called ‘Bad Hair Days.’ It sounds funny now, but at the time it was the worst thing in the world! It was just going nuts in every scene. It looked like there were squirrels running through it or something. It would just randomly fly up out of nowhere, and we were watching this stuff going ‘This is a nightmare.’ We had to have a real talk – ‘Is this going to work?’
G: So how did you turn it around? It looks superb in the finished film.
N: We went to the crew and we said ‘Look: we have this release date in place, we have this great story. This has to work.’ Luckily, we work with incredibly smart people. They went away and they made it work. I think at first it was a little rough, but by the time we got to the end of it, they were just nailing it. I don’t know what they did, but luckily they’re smart enough to figure it out. But we were pretty tense for a while!
G: Is it too soon to discuss what you’re working on next?
G: Is that motivated by an existing tale, or, like Bolt, is it an original story?
G: Will it be CG animated?
N: Yes. Whether it’s 2D or CG, those are all storytelling tools in your toolbox. We just have such a passion for CG. We love 2D as well.
N: We both have that background, yeah. This next thing we’re doing, part of the reason we think it should be CG, is that it’s a huge action movie. We want to make it the biggest action movie anyone’s ever seen. So the things you can do with the camera in CG just feels like, for this next one, that would be the way to go. But we’re open-minded. It’s so cool to work at a studio where you have that option. I don’t know that there’s another studio that does both 2D and CG at the moment.
G: Are there any more 2D animated features on the cards at Disney?
B: Yeah. Ron [Clements] and Jon [Musker] who directed The Princess and the Frog are now directing a new 2D film. That’s one of the ones in development.
B: Again, it’s really too early. We have other stuff in the mix as well. It really is up to the director. If the choice of the story, you feel, needs to be told in 2D, they won’t argue with you. It really is up to us. We’ll look at a project or story and say ‘What do I need to tell this story? Do I need moving cameras and deep space, or is it better told in a more flat, graphic way?’
G: I think Tangled made such great use of its 3D. It’s one of the few 3D films I’ve seen which I felt genuinely justified the presentation.
N: Thank you! That’s really nice to hear. At this point, it truly feels like anyone you talk to has been to at least one 3D movie where you walk out of the movie and go ‘Why did I just pay the extra money for that? Why was that in 3D?’ Or sometimes these films go very gimmicky with the 3D. There’s just so much of it out there at the moment. So from the get-go, the studio had said, ‘It would be great if you could do this in 3D.’ And we were like, ‘Okay. If we’re going to do this in 3D, that 3D has to be there for a reason. If people are going to pay the extra money, we have to give them more bang for their buck.’ So every shot that we worked on, and every story point, we kept going back and saying ‘Okay, what will that look like in 3D?’ So there’s this extra amount of brain power that we had to put into everything. But at the end of the day, we feel it really worked out well. These movies are all about escapism and the way we’ve used 3D in this movie, you’re just more immersed in the story. But I don’t want to not sell the 2D version, because it does work that way!
G: Can you talk a little about working with Alan Menken on the music? Is that a very involved collaboration from your end?
G: Which brings me to the final thing I wanted to touch on before we finish up: the staging of the musical numbers. Clearly, you have a lot of fun with them throughout, but Mother Gothel’s number in particular…
N: We haven’t seen too many instances of characters singing in these CG movies before. So we wanted to do something that really was different. What she’s doing in that song, she’s keeping Rapunzel in the dark. And so the song itself takes place in the dark, and later on during the reprise, she’s clouding her mind, and so there’s all of this fog that comes in. That was a really fun song. You can get away with things in these songs. Logic can go out the window a little bit. We had so much fun with that – she can pop in and out, and all the visual jokes we were able to come up with. That’s the power of having songs in your film. You’re able to creatively explore areas that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
B: The film had actually been at the Disney studio since the 1940s, in one form or another.
G: Obviously you weren’t involved with it then…
B: No! It hasn’t been going full force for that long. But it was on Walt’s desk on a list along with Cinderella and Peter Pan as films that they wanted to do. But it always got shoved off to the side because it’s a very small story, the original Grimm’s fairytale. It’s about a very passive young woman sitting in a room for the whole length of the story. Not very much real estate for a ninety minute film. So we really had to make her a dynamic character. We had to get her out of the tower, out into the world and make her a heroine for the 21st century. So we wanted to make her relatable, but not the noble princess that you might expect. She’s a real girl.
G: So how early were you involved with the version that became Tangled? Because Glen Keane was originally lined up to direct, right?
N: Right. What happened was we were working on Bolt and Byron was one of the directors and I was the head of story. When that movie was wrapping up John Lasseter had asked me if I wanted to direct a short for the Bolt blu-ray and of course – yes, I wanted that! That would be awesome! So I started doing that and it was John’s way of kind of taking me out for a test drive to see if I’m really director material for a feature film. So while I was doing that I started working with Byron, and Byron was helping me. I’d been at the studio – at that point I think it was 12, 13 years or something like that, and mostly I was always in the story department. There are all of these other departments. I didn’t know how they worked. So I started working with Byron. He’d just directed a film and he was showing me the ropes. He knew how the other departments worked. At the same time, Rapunzel was in development and like Byron said, it had been for a long time. Glen Keane was directing it, and it wasn’t in full force yet. Glen actually had a heart attack. And he’s doing fine now.
G: He is. I saw him speak here recently at the launch of ACMI’s Dreams Come True exhibition.
N: Yeah, cool! So anyway, there was a project that had a release date in two years that didn’t have any directors on it. They had asked me to go onto that movie when Glen was on it to help out on the story department. So with what was going on with the short and what I was doing in the story department there, Lasseter saw that and I think he thought I’d be a good fit for the movie. So he asked if I’d like to direct it. And I said, ‘Yes, of course!’ And then I asked for Byron, ‘cause he said, ‘Would you like to work with somebody else, ‘cause you have two years to make a movie where you’d usually have four.’ And John was like ‘You don’t have to answer right now, I’m just throwing it out there…’ And I’m like ‘No, no, no! I really want to work with Byron!’ So that’s how that all came together. And Glen eventually, he took some time, recovered, and then he worked with us on the film. Really, Glen’s involvement is why the animation is just so incredible.
G: Is this referring to the ‘Best of Both Worlds’ seminar of his I’ve read about?
N: It is, it is.
G: And that was all about blending traditional hand-drawn techniques with CG animation?
B: You’re exactly right. The fact we had Glen, who’s been the heart and soul of Disney hand-drawn animation for the last three decades… He’s an amazing teacher and mentor. He’s got this great passion for what he does. He loves art and he loves animation. He wants to bring young people into this industry, and really mentor them. What’s great, the CG animators we have on the film are all very young – most of them are in their early 20s and they’re very hungry to learn. They have that boundless energy. And Glen loves that. It’s this masterclass situation for them, working on the film. But Glen’s is this fluid, natural, very physical drawing style. Nathan and I would be in the room with the animators and we would get up in the front of the room and act out what we thought Flynn and Rapunzel should be doing. He’d be Flynn, I’d be Rapunzel, then we’d switch. Or he’d be the horse and I’d be Pascal. And other animators would get up too. But Glen would be there with an electronic tablet with the animator’s scene that they had started displayed on it. And he’d be watching us and he’d be watching our expressions, then he’d be drawing on it – he’d draw and draw and draw. He’s like this instant camera with a pencil. And then there’d you be you—as Rapunzel, or as Flynn—making the perfect expression and the perfect pose. Then the animator has this as a reference to take back to their desk. Even the poses on the poster are influenced by what Glen did. It really does bring something that’s really unique. And the end result is that the animation in the film is, we think, really beyond anything that’s been done – human-wise, especially.
G: Was Tangled always planned as Disney’s 50th animated feature film, or did that come about due to the setbacks?
N: It wasn’t planned! But it’s so great the way it worked out, because Snow White was a Brothers Grimm story and so is this. It’s such a cool book-end. And we didn’t even know! We were six months into the movie when someone finally did the math and said ‘Hey, by the way, this is the 50th animated feature!’ And there was already so much pressure! It’s so hard to make one of these movies. It’s so hard to tell a really compelling story that people are hopefully going to want to see over and over again – that’s the goal. And on top of it, working with John Lasseter—and I mean this in the best way—is difficult. John wants the best. He will not settle for anything less than the best. If you want that John Lasseter seal of approval, you have to work extremely hard to get it. And we wanted that seal of approval! So then when they said ‘And it’s also the 50th animated feature!’ Okay! That’s enough pressure! Don’t put anything else on us! We can’t take any more!
G: The article the LA Times ran on the film last month claimed it was possibly the second most expensive film ever made when the entirety of production was encompassed. How weird is it knowing that not only have you made the 50th Disney feature animation, but also the second most expensive film ever at this point in time?
B: The nice thing about this is that they don’t tell us exact numbers! And this again is part of John’s influence, but our job is making it the movie it needs to be. Nathan and I do like epic movies with a big scale to them, so we tried not to hold back. We don’t limit ourselves in the story room saying ‘Well, I don’t know if we can do this technologically, or if we can afford this.’ It’s more about ‘What’s going to make this movie great?’ And that’s what’s great for our crew. That challenges the crew. And the studio is great, because they’ll support you in any way they can. They’re expensive movies, because one animator working for an entire week will produce maybe three to five seconds of animation. It’s ridiculous. Once you do the math and figure that out for a 90 minute movie, the man hours involved are insane. When you factor in all of that, plus maybe seven years of research on the hair…
G: Seven years?!
B: Seven years! And when you think about all that, and the advertising… It does get pricey. But the thing is, these things last forever. People will watch these films over and over. And you’ll raise your kids on them, and you’ll see these things far beyond when we’re around, I think. That’s what we’re always thinking about. We want to make something that’s lasting. So we take extraordinary pains to make sure it’s going to last a long time.
G: Earlier this year I read you both saying you were still having doubts about the hair, even as late as March. What was the problem there?
N: The problem was, hair has never really been done like this in these films before. Whether it’s Pixar, or DreamWorks, or Sony, or whoever, if you look at any of their CG films, hair is usually to the shoulder maybe, or in a ponytail. It’s so complicated technically to get that free-flowing hair brushing against surfaces. And we were going to have seventy feet of it! They always say ‘Don’t have that hair touch anything! Don’t have characters touch hair!’ Meanwhile, we’re having her tie people up with it, and throw it up in the rafters and climb it, and use it as a bullwhip – all these crazy things. We were asking this impossible thing. And we kept having what we called ‘Bad Hair Days.’ It sounds funny now, but at the time it was the worst thing in the world! It was just going nuts in every scene. It looked like there were squirrels running through it or something. It would just randomly fly up out of nowhere, and we were watching this stuff going ‘This is a nightmare.’ We had to have a real talk – ‘Is this going to work?’
G: So how did you turn it around? It looks superb in the finished film.
N: We went to the crew and we said ‘Look: we have this release date in place, we have this great story. This has to work.’ Luckily, we work with incredibly smart people. They went away and they made it work. I think at first it was a little rough, but by the time we got to the end of it, they were just nailing it. I don’t know what they did, but luckily they’re smart enough to figure it out. But we were pretty tense for a while!
G: Is it too soon to discuss what you’re working on next?
B: No, we know. Nathan and I pitched our next film for John Lasseter about eight months ago, while we were still finishing Tangled. People were like ‘You guys want to take a break, right?’ And we do. And we are. But at the same time, there’s this strange feeling. It’s almost like a post-traumatic stress syndrome that happens after you finish one of these things, because you’re working in such a focused way for so long. So psychologically, it’s good for us to have something the future. It’s too early to talk about plot and characters—it’s such a broad idea right now—but the thing we always say about this is that it will have everything that people love about Tangled. It’ll have great characters, lots of emotion, it’s got a great scale—an epic scope to it—but a completely different type of movie.
G: Is that motivated by an existing tale, or, like Bolt, is it an original story?
B: No, it’s an original. Nathan and I are huge fans of movies in general, so we’ll go see The Social Network, or we’ll see Inception, or we’ll see a great old film that someone tells us about, and we’re kind of sponges, so we absorb all this stuff. And hopefully we put this into a great new package.
G: Will it be CG animated?
N: Yes. Whether it’s 2D or CG, those are all storytelling tools in your toolbox. We just have such a passion for CG. We love 2D as well.
G: You both have quite a lot of experience in traditional animation…
N: We both have that background, yeah. This next thing we’re doing, part of the reason we think it should be CG, is that it’s a huge action movie. We want to make it the biggest action movie anyone’s ever seen. So the things you can do with the camera in CG just feels like, for this next one, that would be the way to go. But we’re open-minded. It’s so cool to work at a studio where you have that option. I don’t know that there’s another studio that does both 2D and CG at the moment.
G: Are there any more 2D animated features on the cards at Disney?
B: Yeah. Ron [Clements] and Jon [Musker] who directed The Princess and the Frog are now directing a new 2D film. That’s one of the ones in development.
G: Are you able to shed any light on that one yet?
B: Again, it’s really too early. We have other stuff in the mix as well. It really is up to the director. If the choice of the story, you feel, needs to be told in 2D, they won’t argue with you. It really is up to us. We’ll look at a project or story and say ‘What do I need to tell this story? Do I need moving cameras and deep space, or is it better told in a more flat, graphic way?’
G: I think Tangled made such great use of its 3D. It’s one of the few 3D films I’ve seen which I felt genuinely justified the presentation.
N: Thank you! That’s really nice to hear. At this point, it truly feels like anyone you talk to has been to at least one 3D movie where you walk out of the movie and go ‘Why did I just pay the extra money for that? Why was that in 3D?’ Or sometimes these films go very gimmicky with the 3D. There’s just so much of it out there at the moment. So from the get-go, the studio had said, ‘It would be great if you could do this in 3D.’ And we were like, ‘Okay. If we’re going to do this in 3D, that 3D has to be there for a reason. If people are going to pay the extra money, we have to give them more bang for their buck.’ So every shot that we worked on, and every story point, we kept going back and saying ‘Okay, what will that look like in 3D?’ So there’s this extra amount of brain power that we had to put into everything. But at the end of the day, we feel it really worked out well. These movies are all about escapism and the way we’ve used 3D in this movie, you’re just more immersed in the story. But I don’t want to not sell the 2D version, because it does work that way!
G: Can you talk a little about working with Alan Menken on the music? Is that a very involved collaboration from your end?
B: Definitely. Alan was in there right from the start, and one of the great things that happened when he came in, he said, ‘I’ve done Disney films with music before. Let’s not repeat ourselves. Let’s not do the same thing.’ And that was exactly in line with what Nathan and I wanted to do. We had looked at older Disney films like Jungle Book and Pinocchio and Cinderella. And those films have songs in them, but they’re not necessarily a Broadway musical. We thought that that felt very good for this film. The story kind of tells you how much music it can hold. Alan said, ‘Great, let’s do that.’ And so the songs are in there and they propel the story. There’s no gratuitous songs. They’re always there for a reason. And Alan said ‘Well, instead of just having random, Broadway sounding music, or music typical of recent Disney films, why don’t we make Rapunzel’s music sound more like Joni Mitchell wrote them, or Cat Stevens?’ He kept playing ‘Chelsea Morning’ for us, which was a great Joni Mitchell song with open tuning. Very singer/songwriter. We thought that was a great match for Rapunzel, because this girl has been locked away in her room. You can just picture her sitting on her bed with a guitar, composing these songs. It felt more handmade. Contrast that to Gothel’s song, which was a more traditional stage musical number. It’s got a lot of stage presence and a lot of charisma and a lot of… Well, not over-acting, but Gothel is very flamboyant, whereas Rapunzel is more true. It’s a great contrast. And it does a lot for the story.
G: Which brings me to the final thing I wanted to touch on before we finish up: the staging of the musical numbers. Clearly, you have a lot of fun with them throughout, but Mother Gothel’s number in particular…
N: We haven’t seen too many instances of characters singing in these CG movies before. So we wanted to do something that really was different. What she’s doing in that song, she’s keeping Rapunzel in the dark. And so the song itself takes place in the dark, and later on during the reprise, she’s clouding her mind, and so there’s all of this fog that comes in. That was a really fun song. You can get away with things in these songs. Logic can go out the window a little bit. We had so much fun with that – she can pop in and out, and all the visual jokes we were able to come up with. That’s the power of having songs in your film. You’re able to creatively explore areas that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
Tangled releases on January 6th.
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2 comments:
Eeeeeeeeexcellent. You're the interview machine. And is it me or do directors of animated films hardly ever get interviewed?
Depends what you're reading, I guess. But they certainly tend to be less visible figures than their counterparts who work in live-action. Comes down to the highly collaborative nature of most animated features, perhaps - especially something released under, say, the Disney or DreamWorks banners, where the authorial voice/sensibility being marketed is typically that of the studio and not necessarily the individual filmmaker(s).
But regarding Tangled and the local media, Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi (who voice the film's leads) were also in town, and I guess with them being the known quantities, it's inevitable that they should wind up swallowing most of the focus.
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