Animation guru Brad Bird discussed finally bringing out his long-envisioned film Ray Gunn, which has been three decades in the making, and his Oscar- and BAFTA-winning career at large, during a Screen Talk at the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF).
His on-stage appearance in London’s Soho, which drew a jam-packed room at a Curzon cinema, took place Thursday, ahead of the Saturday world premiere of the animated caper.
Throughout the session, Bird emphasized the importance of storytelling and character-driven narratives. Asked when he first discovered creativity as his superpower, his “spider bite moment” as the moderator called it, borrowing from Spider-Man, he shared: “This is the first time I’ve ever been asked about a spider bite moment. I started drawing at age three, and there’s nothing special about those drawings. The only thing that was unusual was that they were sequential. They were meant to be seen in a certain order, and I would tell the story while I was showing the pictures. I didn’t figure it out until much later, but I think I was trying to make movies.”
So, “I started super early, and I liked animated films,” he continued. “Our family was a filmgoing family, but when I saw The Jungle Book, maybe that was my spider bite moment.”
Bird shared his take today on the classic Disney movie. “Well, it was by no means the greatest Disney movie or anything like that, but it is probably the best Disney movie in terms of just pure character animation,” he offered. “There are so many good, very distinct characters in that movie, and no two move remotely alike.”
“Bird made his first film when he was 14, which impressed executives at Disney so much they offered him an informal apprenticeship,” a preview of the LFF Screen Talk highlighted. “Following his studies at CalArts he worked on a variety of projects for Disney, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin and was an executive consultant, as well as occasional writer and director, on the first eight [seasons] of The Simpsons. During this time, he directed his first feature film, the beloved The Iron Giant.”
Why did he ever leave Disney? “I was trained by the old guys or mentored by them. Those are the guys that I was amazed by when I got to Disney,” Bird recalled. “The guys that were in charge after those guys left were the guys who basically had been there for 20 years, but they were not good enough to rise to the top. So suddenly these guys were in charge, and you had young people that didn’t have a long period of training, but they had amazing ability, and I went to school with a lot of them.”
Disney made only one film every three years back in the day. And he pushed for more mature, mote complex storytelling, only to be at odds with the studio’s more traditional focus at the time. Disney “was a tiny, tiny raft in an ocean of animation that was dead, and when I got there, it became political, which I was very unhappy to learn,” he concluded. “And I essentially got fired for sticking up for the stuff the old guys taught me to value.”
How was working for Spielberg? Bird shared that he has worked well with big visionaries. “Spielberg was an 800-pound gorilla,” he said. “Jim Brooks, who [does] The Simpsons, was an 800-pound gorilla [when I worked there]. And you could do wonderful things if they could keep the doubters at bay. And there are 20,000 doubters for every believer in Hollywood. … And so you cling to the people that are basically believers and somehow survive in the shark tank. And Spielberg swims with the sharks all the time, and he’s still here.”
Speaking of unique characters, Bird shared how he designed the look of Simpsons character Sideshow Bob. “He doesn’t make any sense as a character. That’s why I love it,” he said. After the moderator mentioned how the character steps on a whole row of rakes that hit him in the head, the director quipped: “There are politicians that that could represent.”
Bird’s big hits of the Pixar days, of course, were in focus on Thursday as well. He also made a splash by writing and directing the Academy Award-winning The Incredibles, in which he additionally voiced the character of Edna Mode, and continued his Oscar success with his subsequent animated feature Ratatouille.
About how he ended up voicing Mode, Bird shared on Thursday how Lily Tomlin was approached for the voice role. When the director used a scratchy voice to demonstrate what he was hoping for, the actress encouraged him. “I was doing the whole thing, and she kept saying, ‘Can you do that again?’” he recalled. “And she finally said, ‘Look, I have a tape recorder. Do you want to just do all the scenes?’ And so she gives me the recorder and kind of wanders off into her workspace.”
Bird shared that when he first started working with Pixar, some industry folks thought he was attracted to CGI animation. But he recalled explaining to them: “I’m going because they protect stories. And the story will have a nice development process up there. It won’t be jerked around in all these dumb directions. And so I was able to bring about 15 people from The Iron Giant to Pixar to work on The Incredibles.”
One of them was Pete Sohn, who is directing The Incredibles 3. “So, it’s very much like the home team,” Bird suggested. “I’m writing and producing [the film] with others, but it’s Pete’s own. He knows the DNA.”
During his career, Bird famously pivoted to live-action filmmaking, teaming up with Tom Cruise to direct Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol before making the sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland. But he originated the story for Ray Gunn more than 30 years ago.
On stage on Thursday with Anna Higgs, TV and film producer and managing director at U.K. production firm Character 7 (The Night Manager), Bird recalled how the late former Apple and Pixar boss Steve Jobs bemoaned his move into live-action before asking if he wouldn’t rather make the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. “He just wanted me closer to the Disney wheelhouse,” Bird concluded and shared what he told Jobs about his interest in making the Mission: Impossible movie: “I love spy films, and this is a spy film with Tom Cruise. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?!”
Now that he finally got to make Ray Gunn, Bird was asked if that took “super heroic levels of dedication,” to which he replied to much audience laughter: “Or insanity.” And he shared: “I’m happiest that it is on the screen.”
Asked about his advice to young creatives considering a career as directors, Bird kept it simple: “Don’t freak out!” And he sent home the crowd with more laughter when he wrapped up with one more anecdote: “A line from The Simpsons that my family has employed against me is [from] Homer Simpson. I’ll come home and I’ll have had a day where it’s ‘Oh God, you just want to open a vein.’ And they would come back to me and do the Homer voice: ‘Stupid dream job!’”
