One of the advantages of animation that you really benefited from is going wild with the sets for the big show your characters create. That must have been fun.
That’s the thing! You can go wild with everything. The music—you could have animals singing, yaks dancing! Let’s do spaceships and planets and go go go!
The thing with the first movie is there’s such humble beginnings for these characters. With their little houses and the apartment garage. Some of them don’t even have a place to stay. And even the set at the end is the ruins of the theater. It’s not even a proper stage. During the sequel, we were like, “Right, let’s go to town and really try to put on the biggest show we can.” What a dream job. And then also just to be able to then fold artists into the process. We got to work with this great choreographer called Sherrie Silver on all the choreography in the movie. And then Rodarte, these fashion designers who create just gorgeous, brilliant clothes—they designed all the outfits. So we really were putting on a show. It’s just wonderful.
Were any of the actors in the same room with each other when they were recording their lines?
No, it was like we are right now [on Zoom]. I’m on one side being all the other characters. And they’re where you are, and they’re doing their thing. And so, what I’ve got to do is have the whole scene in my head. I’m trying to just get everyone’s rhythms and energies to feel like they’re part of the same thing. Plus, some of it may be partially recorded already, so there are all of these different pieces from different recording sessions to put together. In fact, we have a clip of it somewhere. I don’t know if it’s been shared yet, where you could see how separate these things are. Some of Matthew McConaughey’s lines were recorded two years apart. We just cut them in half. There are whole scenes of characters chatting by a bus that were recorded over a two-year or nearly three-year gap. It took three years to get all the pieces. It’s incredible how fragmented the entire process is. How it coalesced at the end is a magic trick. You’re getting a voice here, a voice there. You’re adding an animated character here and then you don’t get the fur until later, you don’t get their clothes because they are animated separately. And only as you reach the end does this whole thing fall together.
And honestly, I find it profoundly moving when I see finished work. Because it’s not just the movie. It’s all this work, and this passion in so many pieces and then suddenly you have Clay Calloway walking down the corridor. And it’s like, wow. It’s really something. As someone who’s come from outside the animation world as you know, I still to this day find it dazzling.
As long as you mentioned Clay Calloway, let’s talk about the man who plays that character: Bono!
Oh, that guy. [Laughs] The good news is he didn’t at any point shoot at us with a paint gun or shock us with an electrical fence. This man is so generous and spirited, and kind and enthusiastic. It wasn’t my idea for him to write a song at the end, for instance; that was his idea. He was like, “Oh, I’ve written a song.” And it was perfect. It was a perfect distillation of everything we were trying to do with that character, and how much it meant to Bono himself as an artist. So, although it wasn’t a Clay Calloway-style fight to get him, it was equal in terms of its scale of the proposition. He is an icon for us too. This is somebody who I have on the highest pedestal you can have for a rock musician. And so, I couldn’t believe it when he was interested. He’d really enjoyed the first film, it turned out. He was like, “Oh, you guys have music.” He enjoyed the passion the characters have for singing. And then he could see how a lion that was steeped in grief would be healed by hearing his songs sung back to him by his audience. And that love would bring him out. If it was just like, “Oh, you’re going to be this cool lion, and there’s going to be some fun songs,” I don’t think he would have been at all interested. It worked emotionally and he found his way into it.
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