The Addams Family
THE DIRECTORS OF SAUSAGE PARTY REVEAL HOW THEY’VE BREATHED NEW AFTERLIFE INTO SOME OLD KOOKS FOR THE LATEST INCARNATION OF THE ADDAMS FAMILY
SPOOKY MANSION WITH A MANSARD ROOF? Check. disembodied hand scuttling across creaking floorboards? Check. finger-snapping theme? Check… or should that be snap-snap? anyway, you get the idea. for the uninitiated – and there can’t be many – the addams family are a creepy (altogether ooky), all-american household like any other… despite appearances. they’ve appeared in books, films, television – even briefly becoming the face of m&m’s. it’s 20 years since their last screen outing, but they’re back this halloween in a new 3d animated movie. Charlize theron and oscar isaac star as the loved-up ghouls morticia and Gomez.
“we’re on the final touches,” says co-director Conrad Vernon, speaking to SFX during post-production. “we’re mixing right now, doing sound effects and getting everything sounding pretty.”
Vernon began his film career at dreamworks, storyboarding on Antz. from there, he co-wrote Shrek, and was promoted to director for its sequel. most recently, he partnered with Greg tiernan to co-direct the subversive adult animation Sausage Party, and the pair have teamed up again to tackle The Addams Family.
We went to the original Charles Addams cartoons for the film’s design sensibility
as kids during the ’70s, both grew up watching reruns of the ’60s tV show on opposite sides of the atlantic: Vernon in the Us and tiernan in ireland. “The Addams Family was always on during the summer holidays on saturdays, so that was my first exposure to it,” says tiernan. “from there, i discovered the original Chas addams spot cartoons.”
while the addams family concept began on television, the characters had been around since the 1930s as a series of cartoons in the highbrow pages of The New Yorker magazine. Charles addams – he always signed his work as “Chas”, saying it looked better – was a master at the single-panel gag, the more morbid the better. his humour ranged from morbid wordplay and visual puns, to sideways swipes at modern life and social niceties. he developed a family of unnamed ghoulish characters living in a decaying Gothic home, drawn loosely from the James whale film The
Old Dark House. the very first addams family cartoon features a dead ringer for Boris karloff’s character as an early prototype for Lurch the butler.
LAND OF THE GRAVE
this latest version of The Addams Family has been a long time coming, first announced as a stop-motion project from tim Burton. according to Vernon, the Charles addams estate had struggled to find the right creatives to bring the characters back to life. “they’d been shopping it around for a number of years,” he says. “they went over to mGm, to partner with them, and that’s when i had a meeting. i’ve always loved The Addams Family, so i decided that i would help them to develop it. i wasn’t on to direct yet.”
Greg tiernan joined the project later, by which time Vernon was some way into developing the screenplay with writer matt Lieberman. “they’d come up with the idea of the addamses coming to america as an immigrant family,” tiernan says. “none of that had been done before. the original New Yorker cartoons alluded to a few things. there’s one where morticia is out on a date with a guy, before Gomez comes along. so we have a little bit of history about how Gomez and morticia came to be the couple that we know and how they met Lurch.” tiernan says that 3d animation felt like an instant fit. “it just worked really well,” he reveals. “they’re already pretty broad characters – they started as drawn cartoons. so it seemed like coming full circle.”
Both directors agree that the characters needed little adjustment to transfer from live action. “the animation here is more just a medium and a style,” tiernan explains. “disney is proving that every day. they’re making live-action characters out of every one of their animated films. animation and live action are blurring more and more. at this point, it’s really just the way that you want your film to look.”
Charles addams’ original designs have been faithfully reproduced, with a few playful embellishments: thing, the family’s pet hand, now wears a natty wristwatch, while woe-filled child wednesday’s schoolgirl pigtails have been styled into Goth mini-nooses. “we went to the original Charles addams cartoons for our design sensibility,” says Vernon. “we wanted to go back to that. the tV show and, especially, the movies are still kinda iconic for people, so we wanted to make sure that this could stand on its own and not be linked to anything else.”
in the flesh, oscar isaac might look more like the romantic movie Gomez of raul Julia, but his animated alter ego draws from the peter Lorre-esque gargoyle of Charles addams’ illustrations. Likewise, Charlize theron’s morticia is less the glamorous ghoul audiences might remember – she’s pencil-thin with Cruella de Vil cheekbones, as favoured by addams. his early sketches of morticia indulged a private fantasy of a wraithlike ideal based vaguely on actress Gloria swanson and his domineering first wife.
Vernon is particularly enthusiastic about the film’s vocal talents: “i’m always looking for the voice. who’s going to sound the way i hear the character in my head? Everyone in this cast
was perfect. i always had Charlize in mind for morticia, from day one. oscar was just the obvious choice, providing he was interested.”
rounding out the troupe are Kick-Ass’s Chloë Grace moretz as wednesday, Stranger
Things’ finn wolfhard as the addams son pugsley, Sausage Party’s nick kroll as Uncle fester, and Bette midler as faded witch Grandmama, putting a heavyweight talent in what has traditionally been a side-lined character. “i always wanted to work with Bette,” says Vernon. “i’m a huge fan of hers and just thought she should be in this casting. she was great in Hocus Pocus, in all her movies. i thought she’d be a great addition to this.”
Both directors were keen for the actors to define their own versions of the characters, separate from the addamses of old: “we had to invent everyone’s voices,” Vernon says. “we also invented a lot of accents. Bette came up with her own accent for Grandmama, oscar came in with a Latino accent for Gomez and we had this mid-atlantic accent for Charlize as morticia. and then, instead of an accent, nick added a speech impediment for fester, so that was pretty great.”
one unexpected piece of casting was the announcement that rapper snoop dogg would provide vocals for Cousin itt, the family’s gibberish-speaking furball relative. “i wanted him from the beginning, but that kinda got shuffled aside,” says Vernon. “then marketing said, ‘what if we stunt-cast someone for Cousin itt?’ i said, ‘well, i’ve always wanted snoop.’ so i ran that back up the flagpole and everyone thought it was a good idea. i had recorded him for another animated movie, so i just got on the phone and explained what the role was. he thought it was a pretty hilarious idea too. he’s just so personable and open and really, really funny – it was a real fun recording session. we’re going to take his voice and do all sorts of crazy stuff to it. so you might not recognise him, but it is his voice.”
DEAD FUNNY
the challenge of adapting the addams characters will always be to sustain any extended story on an essentially one-joke concept. previous films have pitted the morbid clan against gold-diggers and conmen; this story goes one better, putting the addamses at odds with an entire community when they stumble upon a picture-perfect town at the bottom of the hill their mansion stands on. “they discover it right under their noses,” explains tiernan. “they didn’t even know that it was there.”
taking the family out of their natural habitat greatly appealed to Vernon: “they have this rich style – we call it a dilapidated elegance,” he says. “it’s in their house, it’s what they feel comfortable in. we just said, ‘what’s the exact opposite of that?’ so it’s this really straight, conformist, overly bright, colourful neighbourhood. it has no personality or individuality at all, whereas the addamses reek of individuality and interest.”
Both directors are at pains to downplay any direct commentary on trump-era america, but the parallels are plain to see, with the storyline reworking the family as well-meaning immigrants vilified on social media. “the addamses come with a built-in personality – they’ve always been who they are,” suggests Vernon. “they’re always fish out of water. we don’t have the addamses owning cellphones or anything like that, but now they interact with cellphones and computers. so i think that the satire that we have here is more societal. we satirise concepts more than pop culture in this movie.”
yet for all the contemporary references and insta-mobs, much remains familiar. one scene replays a classic exchange between Gomez and morticia, ever devoted to one another: “Unhappy darling?” he asks. “yes, completely,” comes her blissful reply. raul Julia and angelica huston delivered the same lines in 1991, and Charles addams first used them to caption a New Yorker cartoon back in 1942. seventy years later, the addams joke is still going strong.
The Addams Family is released on October 25.