BRAD BIRD’S INCREDIBLE WORLD
Writer-director on how life changed between filming of hit movies
Brad Bird sighs a little when I ask him if he’s tired yet of everybody asking “What took you so long?” to make Incredibles 2. It’s been 14 years since his terrific family ’toon The Incredibles made Pixar a player in the superhero sweepstakes, winning the 2004 Oscar for Best Animated Feature along with a slew of other awards. That’s not just a lifetime in Hollywood terms, but more like three lifetimes. “I guess what bothers me about it is that people presume that I’ve just been sitting in a room trying to think of something for
Incredibles 2,” writer/director Bird, 60, replies during a recent Toronto visit. “There are actually a lot of other things to life. I made other films, I worked on things that I have yet to do, and yeah. It’s a biz.” It is indeed, especially for the Montana-born Californian, whose “other films,” by the way, include Pixar’s Ratatouille, which won the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. There were also forays into live-action drama, resulting in the monster hit Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011) and the epic fail of Tomorrowland (2015). But the blond and bespectacled Bird happily shoulders the “What took you so long?” question like humble superhero Mr. Incredible, aka family man Bob Parr, whom he closely resembles. He realizes it means people are eager for more adventure of the crime-busting and planet-saving Incredibles family. “That’s good,” he says. “I’ll never look a gift ‘want’ in the mouth!” In fact, what the public perceives as a delay for Incredibles 2 became a “panic” for Bird and his team, since the film, originally slated for a 2019 release, was moved up by a year, opening this weekend. And that wasn’t the only commotion happening at Disney/Pixar.
John Lasseter, the Pixar creative chief and Incredibles 2 executive director, has left the firm following allegations of sexual misconduct. Did this cause any disruption or delay to your film?
No, not at all. In fact, there was a year taken off our schedule. We were supposed to come out after Toy Story 4, and then Toy
Story 4 had some story challenges that it had not solved. The feeling at the time was that we were a little further along than Toy Story 4, so we moved into their slot, which suddenly made us have to race. So it was kind of like (making) Ratatouille, where you’re just running in front of a moving train.
But you managed to roll with that train. Did it compromise your work at all?
There are advantages. You can’t overthink stuff. Ratatouille had the same sort of panic. I don’t think I would seek that out, but I’m not afraid of it. It just means you have to be incredibly focused. What we basically took out is the time it takes to reassure everybody! There’s a certain amount of that that you do when you make a movie. You stop everything and you make versions and you spend time putting in temporary music and all this stuff to try to get people to see what you have in mind, so that they don’t give you terrible notes that make you ruin what you have in mind. So you’re always somewhat on the defensive, because you’re trying to explain the movie to people who maybe aren’t the most imaginative people, (telling them) why their money is not misspent.
You had to do this even though The Incredibles was a hit?
Because it’s a hit, now they care about it even more. You’re never free of that. And clarifying stuff to people who aren’t working on the film takes resources. You do these versions of the film that are obsolete almost the second that they’re done because you’ve already moved past them. But it takes time and hours and so that’s kind of thing that we didn’t do (for Incredibles 2). Now you can’t throw a rock without hitting a superhero! So many stories have been told and the powers have been used in so many ways. Not only in all the kazillion films that have happened, but there were TV series like Heroes where they had 20 different superheroes who all had story arcs every week, and so they burn through a lot of things that you can do. And I can’t keep up with it all. I would ask people occasionally, if an idea seemed like it was really good, ‘Have you guys seen this anywhere?’ Because I can’t keep up with all that stuff. I don’t watch it. I watch a few things ... So we just had to kind of go forward, and the strength of our thing is the take on the family. We told ourselves there’s plenty more to do with that, that’s our wheelhouse.
Incredibles 2 has Holly Hunter’s Elastigirl/Helen Parr playing the lead role as the heroic mom, and there’s also more screen time for Sarah Vowell’s daughter character Violet. It’s fortuitously in tune with the #MeToo and #TimesUp eras, but how deliberate was that on your part?
It’s better to be with the zeitgeist than against it! Some people think that I was calibrating it to the #MeToo movement, but a) animation doesn’t move that fast; b) I had this idea almost 15 years ago; and c) I’m not really making stuff to connect with today’s headlines, because they will go out of style very quickly. I’m more thinking, what will be a good story 100 years from now? And I hope this will be that. I was more interested in that on a character level. I wasn’t trying to necessarily make a big social statement.
Can we talk about one of your rare failures? Your sci-fi fantasy Tomorrowland, based on the Disneyland theme park attraction and made with co-writer/ co-producer Damon Lindelof, didn’t connect with critics or the public. What went wrong?
I have no idea, but I have my crackpot theories. One of my crackpot theories is that people misunderstood it as Damon and I saying “We hate apocalyptic films,” but Damon and I both love apocalyptic films. Blade
Runner is a film we like, Inception is kind of an apocalyptic thing, the Mad Max films, Terminator — we like that stuff. It’s just that we started seeing it as the only way the future was being presented, and we thought that could be an interesting sort of fable. I think the other thing, too, is that because it was called
Tomorrowland, people thought that we were going to go there and spend the entire movie there. But (for us) it was just going to be amazing and fun to look at, and it was really more of a road film. I think some of all that maybe had something to do with (the flop), but I don’t think you know why a film fails (or) succeeds.
You certainly have a fan in Steven Spielberg. He included a nice hat tip to your 1999 feature directing debut The Iron Giant in his recent movie
Ready Player One, even though most of his film’s references are to 1980s culture.
Yes, that was really a nice surprise, absolutely.