Interview: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders are the writer-directors behind one of the best family films of the year, “How to Train Your Dragon.” It was a very great pleasure to talk with them about adapting the popular books and the movies they love most.

One of the great pleasures of this film is the fabulously imaginative assortment of dragons. Were they based on research into legends about dragons or did you start from scratch?

DD: The well-spring of the dragons who are in the film started in the book, of course, but really it was Nico Marlet, who also did designs for Kung Fu Panda. We have seven dragons in the movie, five of which are his designs. He has piles of drawings in his room, no kidding, about two feet thick of other dragons that he drew. It’s endless. We realized we had an opportunity in this movie to do something that had not been done before — not just multiple breeds of dragons but individual personalities.

Each new dragon turned all my thoughts on what a dragon was upside down.

DD: Each of them was based on animals we recognize in the animal kingdom. For example the gronkles, the big, fat, dump-truck-like dragon, was based on the walrus and has walrus-type behavior, lying around in packs and being lazy and grumpy. And then the nadders, the blue ones with the yellow spikes, they’re very parrot-like, and they have bird-like actions. Toothless is very feline. But he has dog in him, too. He’s based in part on the black panther, so he has mammalian qualities to him. One of the characters has two heads and is very snake-like and slithery. So every one of them had an animal reference to it, and that influenced its behavior both in personality and movement.

Did you have to think about the physics of the way they moved?

CS: There are links to the larger world that we wanted to create for this film. The believability factor was the most important thing. They have to move and breathe as if they’re really alive. It’s important that they not come across as too cartoony because then we would lose the emotional weight in the film. We wanted people to really believe in this world. Even though the designs are really fanciful, they move and breathe as though they’re really alive. They adhere to a strict set of rules. They never break or shatter that illusion.

The voice talent is terrific. But your Vikings (Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson) have Scottish accents!

DD: It’s a conceit. It’s silly and admittedly flawed, but here it is: growing up in North America, I was in Canada, I had a lot of friends whose parents sounded like they came from somewhere else. There’s always a remnant of the mother tongue in the older generation. When we came on the film, they’d already cast people with very American voices and then they had Gerard Butler. We had to cast someone to be Gerard’s best friend and the confidante to Hiccup. We thought, we’ve already got this Scottish voice in place, and we could just flesh out the rest of the older generation with Scottish accents and then the next generation could have their own assimilated accent.

CS: Gerard really loved it when we encouraged him to be himself. The only casting that we did was Craig Ferguson and he happens to be Gerard’s really good friend and they happen to have the same accent. Craig Ferguson is completely at ease in front of a microphone. It’s funny because Gerard Butler is really funny off-mic, constantly goofing around and talking about pranks, amusing himself. And then when he’s on mic, well, his character is called Stoick. He was a little jealous — “Why is Craig getting all the funny lines?” But Craig, off-mic, was the opposite. He’s so funny when you have the mic running, and then when you stop, he’s actually a serious guy.

I was also thrilled to see that you have three disabled characters. You rarely see that in movies, especially disabled characters who have full personalities and experiences and are not just there to be disabled.

DD: Definitely we brought to the mix the ending, for many reasons. We wanted to give it a little bit of weight, believability, and peril. The satisfying quality of the ending would be generic if he did not come out of it so that he and Toothless can complete each other.

How did you go about adapting the book? You made some big changes.

CS: The main reason Dean and I were asked to come into the film was to “age it up,” giving it a little more weight, more adventure, and one of the very first decisions we made was that in the book there were elements of humans and dragons being in a symbiotic relationship but also elements of humans and dragons being at war. We decided it had to be one or the other. We made the decision that they were mortal enemies, which made it possible for Hiccup to take the greatest risk possible by befriending one. It allowed us to have Hiccup live this double life in the second act. At night he’s repairing a dragon and learning to ride a dragon. By day he is learning to fight one. This is not going to last. This has to get discovered. Everything else came from that.

DD: It’s fun that by the end he gets everything he wanted but he no longer wants it. The attention he’d rather avoid by then.

What movies are your favorites?

CS: Both of us are huge fans of a movie we referenced in this one, The Black Stallion. The scene on the beach is our homage.

DD: What really worked for us was the young protagonist. I love characters that are young and relatable in their childhood but also have adult qualities and are in over their heads in a world of fantasy, like “Escape from Witch Mountain,” “Watcher in the Woods,” and even “E.T.”

The movie is very rich, very exciting, but also exceptionally well-paced and satisfying.

CS: A lot of movies do not have much in the second act, but we really had one packed with events. But it is also important to have moments when the characters are quiet. There are three moments in the film where we let the camera and the acting and the music tell the story.

I liked the fact that he is really an engineer, a problem-solver. And he doesn’t get it right away.

DD: In the concept of the book Hiccup was much younger and they collect eggs and teach the dragons to do tricks. We kept the spirit of the runt Viking who changes the world but we had to give him a dragon who could be ferocious and at the same time cuddly. We thought he’s a nuisance, he’s the bane of the Viking community. He is made an apprentice to get him out of the way but in the shop he learns to compensate for what he doesn’t have. We combined this organic form with early mechanics.

CS: He also discovers that he has to operate it. He is only really himself when they’re together.

List: Women Directors

Posted on March 8, 2010 at 10:03 am

In honor of “The Hurt Locker’s” Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director last night, and International Women’s Day, here’s a list of pioneering women movie directors.

1. Penny Marshall, who started as an actress (“Laverne and Shirley”), went on to direct films that included “Awakenings,” “Big,” and “A League of Their Own.”

2. Amy Heckerling is the director of “Clueless” and the neglected gem “I Could Never Be Your Woman.”

3. Betty Thomas also started as an actress (“Hill Street Blues”) and went on to direct “The Brady Bunch” and “28 Days.”

4. Nora Ephron, the daughter of successful screenwriters, began as a writer and then went on to direct films like “Julie & Julia,” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

5. Gurinder Chadha directed the international hit “Bend it Like Beckham” as well as “What’s Cooking” and “Bride and Prejudice.”

6. Nancy Meyers also began as a writer and has gone on to direct some of the most successful movies of the last 10 years including “It’s Complicated,” “The Holiday,” and “Something’s Gotta Give.”

7. Penelope Speeris made a successful documentary about a topic considered very male — punk music — in “The Decline of Western Civilization.” That led to her directing the wildly successful “Wayne’s World.”

8. Kasi Lemmons is another actress turned director with “Eve’s Bayou” and “The Caveman’s Valentine,” starring Samuel L. Jackson.

9. Mabel Normand was one of the most gifted comic actors of the silent era and one of the first female film directors. She often worked with Charlie Chaplin.

10. Mira Nair directed “Monsoon Wedding” and the recent biopic “Amelia,” starring Hillary Swank.

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Interview: Laura Waters Hinson of ‘As We Forgive’

Posted on February 26, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Laura Waters Hinson is the director of “As We Forgive,” a compelling and inspiring documentary about the rebuilding of communities in Rwanda. Many of us struggle to forgive the driver who cuts us off or a family member who said something hurtful. This is the story of people who had to find a way to forgive the truly unforgivable.

In Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred in 1994, everyone who is left is either a perpetrator or a victim. There were simply too many people to jail, and so the government has released 50,000 prisoners back into the communities populated with the survivors, every one of whom lost friends and family members and must now live as neighbors with the people, sometimes the very individuals, who were responsible. As the movie’s website says,

Without the hope of full justice, Rwanda has turned to a new solution: Reconciliation. But can it be done? Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church, which failed at moral leadership during the genocide, fit into the process of reconciliation today? In “As We Forgive,” director Laura Waters Hinson and narrator Mia Farrow explore these topics through the lives of four neighbors once caught in opposite tides of a genocidal bloodbath, and their extraordinary journey from death to life through forgiveness.

I spoke to Ms. Hinson by phone while we were both snowed in at our homes in the Washington DC area.

How do you define forgiveness?

It is complicated but forgiveness is in your heart, when looking at a wrong that has been done against you, it is saying to the person who has done that or just to yourself, “I no longer seek retribution or justice for what you have done to me. I’m letting that go. My right to be angry, my right to seek justice, I’m allowing that to go so that I can heal and move on with my life and be lifted of that burden.” You can do it therapeutically, you can do it alone, in your heart. You don’t even have to tell anybody that you’ve done it.

I would distinguish that from reconciliation, which is the next huge step where you say, “Not only have I forgiven you, but I want to work with you to rebuild to some degree my relationship with you.” That is much more difficult, much more rare.

In some cases it shouldn’t be done; if someone has traumatized you in a horrible way. But in Rwanda, these people are forced to be together. All these killers returning from prison are your neighbors. You see them everywhere you go. So what do you do? Do you reconcile, do you just forgive, or do you live isolated in your home?

I do not want to sound disrespectful to the victims of these unspeakable tragedies, but the perpetrators were victims in a way, too because they did not have freedom of choice either.

How did you find the two people who are the focus of the film and how did you get them to talk to you?

That was my chief concern going over there. This all-white American film crew — how would we gain the trust of the people? We needed a great ambassador, a translator, somebody who could get the vision of what were were trying to accomplish through a wild set of circumstances involving a recommendation on a church listserv that my roommate’s mother was on. I literally cried because he was so perfect. He himself was a survivor; he was hidden for three months protected by a Hutu friend. He went to all the people in the film and told them about what we were doing. He could relate to them and invariably they would say yes, they wanted to be a part of the film. I wrote out questions but he was the one who really interviewed them. All of the interviews ended with lots of hugs and we are still in close to those people today.

I think if you have the power to forgive, it makes you more open to people. If you can forgive, there’s really nothing they can do to hurt you.

That’s so true.

And in America, I think we find it easier to believe that something as horrific as genocide can occur than to believe that people can forgive and reach out to each other with generosity and humanity. How do you tell that story?

I watched other films on this issue and a lot of them focused on telling you many many stories of victims almost to the point where you were overwhelmed with suffering and then this rosy ending was added on. I wanted to focus on two main stories. And I wanted to give time to the perpetrators as well. I wanted people to envision themselves being those people. This was a journey I was going through personally when I was meeting those victims and then meeting the killers themselves. I was shocked that I identified with even the killers, too. Just normal people.

They just seemed like normal people who had done abnormal things.

You had hundreds of thousands of normal people who were involved in the genocide. They were farmers, they were dads, they were friends of the people in the movie. They were just normal people.

I asked a lot, “What made you do all these killings?” It’s a complicated answer. On one hand you had the mob mentality. On another level you had a corrupted government who had taken over the radio waves and the military and people were “educated” to hate their neighbors, to think of them as not actually human beings, that they were animals — the word “cockroach” was used a lot. There was physical pressure, too. The militia came to your village and said, “Hey, you, come over and help us kill these people.” If you didn’t, you would be killed, too. Many moderate Hutus were killed. And these were poor people. They were told that if they killed their neighbors, they could have their cow or their farm.

The idea of forgiveness is to see the normality in everyone, even people who do unthinkable things, the other end of the scale from thinking of them as non-human.

It was a humbling experience for me. I thought they were monsters or I would be afraid of them. But they were broken people, very mild-mannered, very ashamed. Not everyone, but many. It was very significant for them that they were trying to help, that the hands that had killed were now being used to build something for someone they had harmed. There is very little they can do, but it is something. It is important for survivors and the perpetrators. One of the survivors participates in a physical act of reconciliation to help one of the killers.

Many of these people would say to me, “I believe I have been forgiven by God. And so I will extend that forgiveness to these people even though they don’t deserve it.” That was central to those who seemed most authentically forgiving. That comes from their faith. On another level, you have the fact that the president has asked the whole country to reconcile. To forgive is not to forget. They remember the genocide and go over it and over it again to make sure no one forgets.

I’ve been given so much hope from this story. I went into it skeptically. I just couldn’t believe it. And I was so humbled, so struck by these people’s faith and their ability to act on what they believe. I was struck that they could enter into a relationship with the person who slaughtered their family. There are so many levels. It just changed me.

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Interview: Norton Virgien of ‘Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!’

Posted on February 23, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Curious George and his friend, the Man in the Yellow Hat, have a new adventure in a straight-to-DVD feature-length movie, Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey, available on March 2. I got to talk to director Norton Virgien about what has kept the little monkey so popular for nearly seventy years and what it was like to (try to) direct Jerry Lewis.

What has kept Curious George so endearing to children over four generations?

We all love the characters because when you see something in the characters that you recognize in your family and friends, that makes an instant connection, doesn’t it?

I think children identify with his curiosity and get a kick out of his getting into trouble. And they like the way he is protected by the Man in the Yellow Hat.

Thinking about all the generations of families that have passed that book from parent to kid, it’s daunting. I would be very disappointed if we did something with an iconic character that people thought was off tone. Even though there was an earlier Curious George movie, we went back to the books and reread them all and noticed right away that the character was a little more mischief-prone and rambunctious than he was in the movie, were he was very very young. His curiosity was like a very little child seeing things for the first time. In our version, we let him grow up just a little bit and get a little closer in spirit to the character in the books. He thinks he’s at home in the world and knows his way around the city and that he’s pretty sharp. But we instantly find out that he still has a lot to learn. And that’s the spirit of the books. He’s one step back closer to that original character, which I’m proud of.

How do you direct Jerry Lewis? People have tried for decades and I don’t think anyone has ever succeeded!

We tailored the character to him. When we had the opportunity to work with him, we fond a part that was just the right spice in the middle of our story, when we needed to pick up the energy, and so he is this curmudgeonly character. Except for encouraging him to be his comedic self and let the Jerry Lewis persona come through, we sat back and enjoyed his performance. I wasn’t going to say to him, “Mr. Lewis, let’s revert to our childhood self.”

I think he’s already there!

He was so fun, though! And we got to travel to Las Vegas, which his where he lives.
The other legendary person we got to work with was Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. It was stunning for me as someone who grew up with that music, that he was excited about Curious George and wanted to do a song for us.

What did you tell him you were hoping for from the music?

I had a song I’d loved as a child called California Sun in mind for the moment when Curious George decides to go to California. It just fit that moment perfectly. Most people thought of that as a Beach Boys song. But it’s by the Rivieras. Somewhere along the line someone in our brain trust thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to get a Beach Boy to sing that song?” And Brian actually added a new melodic break in the middle and it was really fun to see him at work. If there’s one person who really understands California music, it’s Brian. He understood what we wanted better than we could have told him. But he was extremely engaging and friendly and wanted to know each of our favorite Beach Boys songs. A very sweet man!

And Matt Lauer is in the movie, playing a newscaster!

Matt was great. Matt plays Matt Lauer perfectly and was such a good sport about it.

And another of my favorites, Tim Curry is in the film.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with him on several projects. Animators look to the voice actors for inspiration and energy. He is such a high energy performer and so unabashed in pushing the part in whatever direction he needs to go that he pushes the animators too. His animation is among the most expressive which has a lot to do with Tim.

What did you do to keep the film consistent with the illustrations from the books?

The animators in the first movie really did a good job with their interpretation of the original art, the purity and sense of color and it added filmic treatment to give it depth. We took that as a wonderful starting point and built on that.

What age range to you try to appeal to?

The richest way to enjoy family entertainment is with the whole family. We want to make a movie that has a lot for parents and kids to laugh at together.

What inspires you?

What inspires me about doing family entertainment is the thought that each of these films we are doing will be the first movie someone falls in love with. Our audience is so open and available to us. If we put meaning and heart and fun into the film, we’re going to touch that fresh audience in a special way. That’s an honor and a responsibility and not to be taken lightly either.

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Interview: Scott Cooper of ‘Crazy Heart’

Posted on January 11, 2010 at 3:57 pm

I spoke to writer/director Scott Cooper, whose first film, Crazy Heart has been acclaimed for its authenticity, its captivating music, and a performance by Jeff Bridges that many people believe will bring him his long-deserved Oscar.

You must be thrilled with the reaction your film is getting.

Oh, Nell, for a first time writer/director who has never been to film school or directed a commercial or a rock video — I am over the moon. Not just the critical response, but the reaction from my colleagues who have sought me out and who really loved the film. It just means the world to me.

And it must be a special joy to see the response to the performance of Jeff Bridges as the lead character, country singer “Bad” Blake.

I wrote the role for Jeff, and once I finished the film and sent the script to Robert Duvall, I told him that there are two people I need to make this film happen. One is Jeff Bridges and the other is T. Bone Burnett. In my estimation, both Jeff and Duvall are America’s two finest screen actors and I was able fortunately to get those guys. But I don’t want to overlook Maggie fine work and Colin Farrell.

I’m glad you mentioned Farrell, because I thought he was extraordinary as Tommy Sweet, the big country star Bridges’ character had mentored on the way up.

When I cast the movie, Colin Farrell is not the obvious choice. He looks like a movie star but he is really a character actor. He is a very humble guy. I felt like he’s the kind of guy who would support Jeff Bridges and Robert Duvall. And in such a short time on screen he gives such a nuanced, masterful performance, and he has a beautiful singing voice. It just was inspired all the way around. I wanted to design it so that you were set up to dislike his character and then he is humble and gracious and owes everything to this elder statesman and it all comes through.

One thing I respected about the film is what you left out — a lot of people would have put in a rehab montage and the usual scenes to make us feel we see all the details but you suggested them and then left it alone.

I think it is important that we realize this man is on a road to redemption. We all see redemption. We all are flawed individuals. The themes of hope and regret and loss, all of those course through this movie and course through our daily lives and course through the great country songs. So all humans who see this and suffer through the human condition will understand this.

So you’re a fan of country music?

Oh, I am! I literally cut my teeth in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia going to really great blue grass festivals in Virginia with my parents and then I segued to my father’s LP collection — Waylon and Cash and Haggard and Kristofferson. I loved that these guys wrote about their life experiences. So I was very well steeped in these songs and it was very personal to me. I hope that country music listeners will enjoy the picture and find a little bit of themselves in these characters and relate to it.

I wanted the pacing of the film, the look of the film, everything to have the feeling of an old George Jones song, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” You have to really listen closely and let the song develop. It has a third less cuts than most films, a more languid pace.

So if you didn’t go to film school, did you watch a lot of movies and study them on your own?

I watched a lot of films from the 1970’s, my favorite decade of American film, and I would watch with the sound off, so I could see how they would move the camera, how they would tell the story through performance and lens selection. I would watch the greats like Terrence Malick, with “Days of Heaven” or “Badlands” or Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Coppola, all those guys. And film-makers of today, Sean Penn, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Billy Bob Thornton, guys who are complete film-makers, actors and writers and directors.

You said you could not do the movie without T. Bone Burnett. What does he bring to the movie?

He really is peerless in his Americana roots genre. He understands behavior, he understands characterization, he understands the un-obvious and he understood the alternate universe I wanted to create, one part Willie, one part Waylon and Kris, some Merele and Townes Van Zandt, Billy Joe Shaver. He could do that and bring it into this fictional character. He’s just a master at what he does. I told him we have to have a narrative thread through the course of this movie that him write a song over the course of this movie that helps him rediscover his artistry and helps him rediscover who he is as a person. Then we had Ryan Bingham, a young man who in my opinion is the heir apparent to Hank Williams, and he came in with “The Weary Kind” because that’s who Bad Blake is, he is a weary individual. It captures all the themes that I wanted and it’s a stunning, stunning song. It’s a part of the fabric of the film.

What inspires you?

My two beautiful girls inspire me every day. Great art. Music, gospel, classical, jazz. It’s part of my life. Mostly by people who aren’t afraid to take risks intheir lives, who live their lives as if every day was their last. People who have strong convictions.

What did you learn from your first film?

The most important lesson I learned was to always trust your instincts, never stop learning — and steal from the best, because I surely did.