You’d assume that directing classic, unforgettable movies like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol would make it easier to get a movie made. Especially when that film is Ray Gunn, a cool blend of sci-fi and film noir featuring the voices of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits. But those assumptions would be wrong.
Director Brad Bird has been thinking about making Ray Gunn for decades. Well before he ended up winning Oscars with Pixar, Bird had an idea in his head for a hard-boiled detective story set in a world that blends the past and the future. The story kicked around Hollywood for decades, across multiple owners, until finally, over 30 years later, Netflix got involved.
Earlier this year, io9 got a chance to see the first 30 minutes of Ray Gunn, learn about its design, development, and even sit down with Bird himself. In our conversation, we discussed that long road to reality, the expectations that come with being such a prolific director, where the inspiration for the film came from, and the reason why he decided to make Disney’s Tomorrowland instead of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Here’s our chat with Brad Bird.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Germain Lussier, io9: I know Ray Gunn is something you’ve had in your head for a long time. What would you say was the most difficult thing about actually getting this film made?
Brad Bird: Financing. Easily. And that’s a maddening part of the process, but you’re asking for a lot, and you’re asking for the resources to do something that’s really complicated and big and difficult. So I understand why people are reluctant to part with the kind of money that it takes to do that. At the same time, I always felt like, “Why don’t they see [what I see]?” I actually had somebody say, “Who is this movie for?” and I couldn’t believe it. My jaw just hit the floor like, what are you talking about? It’s for people that like movies! Come on! Are you here to play, or do you want to stay by the sidelines?
io9: Yeah, in the footage we just saw, you don’t feel like you’re watching an animated movie. It’s just a normal movie that happens to be animated.
Bird: There you go. That’s what it is.
io9: So is there a balance to that? To make a story everyone can enjoy within the medium of animation?
Bird: Well I don’t know. That gets to be a complicated question, and it is strangely connected with the animation that I enjoyed the most as a kid. When I think back on it, it was animation that was a little bit adult, and yet I just thought it was cooler. And this is down to ridiculous things like Bob and Ray. Do you know who Bob and Ray are?
io9: No.
Bird: They’re comedians from the ’60s. “The Slow Talkers of America,” have you ever heard that routine?
io9: I’m sorry, I haven’t.
Bird: It’s been ripped off a thousand times, but it’s fantastic. On your phone, when you get out of here, “Bob and Ray Slow Talkers of America.”
io9: 100%. [Note: I did what I was asked, Mr. Bird.]
Bird: Okay, so they did the voice for an animated beer commercial, and it’s two guys talking, but they’re kind of interrupting each other, and it sounds very organic. It doesn’t sound like somebody reading from a script, which a lot of animation does. And that was the stuff that I really responded to.
There was this brilliant filmmaker named John Hubley who helped start UPA, which did Mr. Magoo and all that kind of stuff. Well, he did the very first Magoos, and [in] the very first Magoos he is crotchety as “blank.” He is an unbelievably crotchety old man. A difficult character. And that’s John Hubley. He left and did commercials for Maypo. He got this super spontaneous dialogue [from his son] and then animated to it, and I loved that. He did a film called “Windy Day” that is amazing, where he recorded his kids just kind of playing around and then animated to it. And so those kind of voices I responded to.
It’s like the first 10 minutes of Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Now I love the whole movie! I love the whole movie! But the first 10 minutes, which is primarily humans, points in a direction that they could have gone, and it would have been great. It was clear that Roger and Anita are a lovely couple. A real couple. And that’s the first film where you feel like they really [exist], you know what I mean?
io9: Totally.
Bird: And that’s the stuff I respond to. So these films are full of those kinds of moments that I like where people are inhabiting stuff, but animation, which is not remotely spontaneous, can feel spontaneous, and I don’t know. That’s the magic to me.
io9: I love that. So, struggling to get the money for however many decades, were you continually pitching it? Because you made a lot of other great movies in that time.
Bird: No, no. I was busy doing other stuff, but in my mind it’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where there’s all these boxes…
io9: That one I’ve seen [laughs].
Bird: Well, that’s one of the great endings.
io9: Of course.
Bird: But all these dreams are packed up and just sitting there gathering dust, and some of them are damn good dreams, you know what I mean? And that’s the case on this. I pitched it. It wandered around for a while. The company I was working for got bought by another company, and momentum was lost. So it went into the deep freeze, and I left it there thinking I’m probably not gonna get to make that one, and then the opportunity started to pop up where somebody said, “I want to make a film with you,” and I’d go, “Actually, you own a film of mine that is unmade, and I still am interested in making it.” “Oh really? What do I own?” Because management is always shifting. Nobody knows what anyone did before. So getting it back, to get it into turnaround so that I can then shop it around, that became a whole project, and it timed in with the pandemic and all kinds of crap. But finally it did get to happen, and I’m very grateful for it.
io9: How much of the film or your ideas for the film changed from the beginning to now?
Bird: The key storyline has not changed. It’s still the same. It has the same ending. It has the same characters. At one point, briefly, Vanzine, who you saw in [the first scene], was a guy, and then it became more interesting to have [the character] be a woman. At one point she died. I mean, there are things like that, but that’s kind of deck chairs. The ship itself has stayed the same.
io9: And you originally saw this as 2D in your head, right?
Bird: Yeah.
io9: Why did that change?
Bird: Well, Hollywood being what it is, it’s like if you do a film where a character is wearing a red shirt and it makes money, somehow the red shirt starts to be associated with making money, right? They make patterns out of things that shouldn’t be made patterns out of, and you just go, “Really?” And one thing is, people associate stodgy ideas with hand-drawn animation because animation mainly does fairy-tale-like things. And when you want to do something outside of that, people don’t think of hand-drawn. They think of CG, and that to me is perception. It’s not reality. So I think that you can make a great and very profitable movie that’s hand-drawn. I think you can make a great and very profitable movie out of stop-motion. I think you can make a very profitable movie out of CG.
io9: If the movie is great, the movie is great.
Bird: There you go. Tell the story.
io9: The trailer for the film uses your filmography to say, like, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s doing.” Do you worry that mentioning movies like Ratatouille, The Incredibles, or The Iron Giant sets up a certain set of expectations?
Bird: No, because I don’t think of things that way. All those films had their own rough road. All were difficult in different ways. And, you know, Iron Giant was not a success initially, for reasons some beyond control. But I don’t think of it that way. I just think of it as, “Hey, here’s a cool thing that maybe you’ll be interested in.”
io9: The film is also coming after Netflix released arguably one of the biggest animated films ever with KPop Demon Hunters. Does following something with that level of success at a studio change anything? Have you had conversations about re-shifting the expectations or aiming to be the next KPop Demon Hunters?
Bird: Maybe some people think like that, but I’m just trying to [make a good movie]. I like a certain story idea, and I just want to get it out there in the best way I can. It’s kind of isolated that way.
io9: Let’s talk guns. I am a collector of sci-fi weaponry, like the guns from Aliens and Terminator 2, so I was super excited to see the cool sci-fi weaponry in the footage we saw from the film. How much design work went into making Ray’s main gun [which can suck matter in and spit it back out]?
Bird: We had a guy who has designed futuristic weapons for a lot of different movies—Eddie Del Rio—and we got him on this. And we put a lot of thought into that particular gun because it’s a strange gun. The idea of it opening like a colander to receive… It’s like a boomerang effect. I don’t even know how to describe it. It took a lot of effort to get it right, but yeah, that was a fun assignment.
io9: Is there any chance I’ll get to own that? Do you know if there’s any merch coming?
Bird: I don’t know. If it were me and I had control of the universe, I would assign it to some toy maker in Japan because they always make the greatest, most perfectly detailed things. I would make it a high-end thing for collectors, and it would be great. I would certainly support that. That would be cool.
Peter Jackson had all this amazing collection of talent to do the Lord of the Rings movies, and sometimes they would have lag time between assignments. And instead of taking that time, he assigned them to design a series of very quirky ray guns and sold them off as collector pieces, and he had like five or six different designs, and they’re really cool. I have like four of them.
io9: Yes, I’ve seen those. Those are amazing. Now, forgive me, but I want to ask something a little older that I’m sure you’ve talked about, but I wanted to ask myself. Exactly how close were you to actually making a Star Wars movie back when that was all happening?
Bird: It was strange. I had already committed to Tomorrowland, and we were scouting when I got offered that. I had a very bizarre experience, and it absolutely is real, but if you put it in any kind of movie, people would say that it’s not real.
I was actually talking about possibly doing [Star Wars] while I was in Florida scouting for Tomorrowland and on the TV while I was talking was an episode of South Park and Cartman was there facing Space Mountain, and a lightsaber came in the foreground. So I had Star Wars in the foreground, Cartman, and on the other side was Tomorrowland. And I’m sitting there having this conversation.
io9: You were the guy at that moment.
Bird: Yeah, I was Cartman. And it was just completely surreal, but I felt like that movie was going to get made and be a very big success regardless of who did it. And I felt like Tomorrowland, and people can laugh about what an idiot I was or however they want to color it, but I felt like if I dropped out of Tomorrowland, it might not happen, and it deserved to happen. And again, I fully acknowledge that the film didn’t work the way we wanted it to work, but I felt like it’s a valid idea and it needs to exist under the sun, and it felt like if I didn’t do it at that moment, the project would lose momentum and die. I thought it was valid.
io9: That makes sense. And you could always try to do a South Park movie.
Bird: There you go. But you can’t do it better than those guys.
io9: No, that movie is perfect. I wish they’d do another one. Last thing, Ray Gunn is something that’s lived in your head for all these years. What is it specifically that made you keep coming back to try to make it?
Bird: Well, I think I could easily give the misimpression that this is the only movie that I feel that about. I actually have four or five more ideas, and I can tell you the titles and the act structure and all this stuff that I really want to make as badly as I wanted to make Ray Gunn. What is weird about Ray Gunn is that I felt like investors, studio people, saw it as a strange outlier film, and I see it as something that is mainstream. Like if you sit down and have a nice box of popcorn and a drink, you’re gonna have a good time watching this movie. And the fact that I had such trouble communicating that effectively? I don’t know why. I guess it’s that it deviates from what people expect of animation. It’s largely humans, and they’re doing things that they could easily do in a live-action movie, but I never saw it as live-action. At one point, someone said “Would you be interested in doing it in live-action because it would work in live-action?” But I just went, “Yeah, but it wouldn’t be Ray Gunn.” This is the way I see it. So I’m really happy that we finally got to make it and that it exists now.
Ray Gunn will be released in select theaters on December 4, and comes to Netflix on December 18.
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