MARIAYAH: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Mariayah Kaderbhai, The Head of Programmes At BAFTA and welcome to the 12th edition of BAFTA Screenwriters Lecture Series. It started in 2010 to give the opportunity to world leading film makers and screenwriters to share their craft and insights with an audience just like you. I would like to thank the founder of the series, Jeremy Brock and Lucy, from the JJ Charitable Trust for their dedication to this series.
I would like to introduce the founder of the series, Jeremy Brock to the stage, to let you know more about the lecture today. Thank you.
JEREMY: Welcome to another barn storming weekend of the Screenwriters Lecture Series.
We are delighted to welcome our next lecturer, the writer director and animator Chris Sanders. Chris’s credits, can you believe, include Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin, the Lion King. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s the writer and Director of three global box office phenomena, Lilo & Stitch, How to Train your Dragon and the Croods. His latest animation, which he also wrote and directed, is the exquisite, the Wild Robot, a superbly relevant film that speaks with extraordinary vision and heart to humanity’s relationship with generative AI, whilst also celebrating the inarticulate wells of feeling that make our human experience in the world. Honestly, if this doesn’t win the Oscar, there is no justice. Chris will lecture, followed by Q&A with the wonderful Ian Haydn Smith, author of over ten books, and then we’ll open it up to the floor for questions. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Chris Sanders.
CHRIS: Hello! Thank you for coming. This will be my first time through this so if I was to do this a second time it would probably be smoother, so bear with me. Part of this is going to be just how I got into the whole thing and what I’ve been doing as far as working in animation and how I got to where I am right now. And part of this is just a collection of things, think of like if you dropped by my house when I was about 12, I would have been like showing you the cool stuff in my room, so part of this is going to be showing you stuff that was important to me that made a difference. And it’s always been in my head as I do my work. I grew up in Colorado, which was very far away from Hollywood in many ways. I remember my grandmother would always, always, always, watch the Academy Awards and again, it was glamorous and seemed very far away.
We had four TV stations in Colorado, Channel 9, Channel 7, Channel 4 and Channel 2. And Channel 2 was the station that really didn’t have any money and they didn’t have like, you know, their own programming, so they played a lot of old movies. There was one particular one that I loved. I loved that station the best. There was one particular movie that I didn’t realise was going to be very important to me and it really stuck with me. I would recommend if you got a chance to look at the whole thing. It’s the only clip I couldn’t really get a hold of so I’ll do my best to dramatically recreate it for you. It’s a black-and-white Laurel and Hardy film I was watching one afternoon. And it’s a film called the The Air Raid Wardens and in the show it’s set during World War II and Laurel And Hardy can’t get a job in the military… because they are them! The only thing that was available to them was to work in civil defence. So, they got their equipment, they had helmets, and a gas mask, and Stan Laurel was attached to this little whistle.
As you can imagine, they didn’t do a good job. They had to walk round and make sure people had their lights out on time and you can only imagine how bad that went. They just messed everything up. It’s funny, as a kid, I found it really funny, but it frustrated me as well. Like, when Donald Duck is trying to open a beach chair and it is a 15-minute bit where he’s wrestling with the chair. I found it funny but annoying and frustrating at the same time. So I was kind of frustrated with both Laurel and Hardy because they messed everything up. It was significant, because at a certain point, there’s one guy, a handsome man and woman, and they are allies of Laurel and Hardy and they are their champions but there’s one guy that didn’t like them at all and didn’t want them in civil defence. After they mess up, he insists that they have to leave and they be drummed out of the civil defence. And, it was at that point that something really surprised me. The movie took an unexpected term narratively. At the moment that they come into a room and have to give all their stuff back, their equipment back. To my surprise, Laurel, he says something, and he just suddenly says this very thoughtful, eloquent thing about how important this whole thing was to them. I’m going to see if I can read it because it had a big effect on me…
Laurel says, or the handsome guy who is trying to go easy on him says, you have to give your stuff back, you know, you have to leave for the good of the service. And Laurel says, “do you mean they’re better without us?” and the guy says, “you have caused nothing but trouble” and goes down the list of things they did wrong. Stan says, “You know best. When we couldn’t get into the army or the Navy, Mr Maddison told us we could do this work and that made us happy. We tried hard. I guess we are not smart like other people. If we can do something for our country by not doing this work, we’ll do that too.”
My God, I started to cry, as a kid. What surprised me and stuck with me about that was that it was consistent with their characters, but it just showed a whole other dimension to them. So it was not inconsistent. But I thought it worked even better because I was so frustrated with them before he said that. I went from being frustrated with them to falling in love with them both. So that really stuck with me. To this day, a lot of stuff that I do, I can relate directly back to that film that I saw.
So, my grandmother was reading the paper, I was at the end of high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself and there was an article about how Disney studios were running out of animators in the Denver Post. There was a school with an animation programme and the whole idea was that if you went into the programme you might get a job at Disney. I idealised the idea of going to California. So it was the one and only place I applied and I got in.
I trained to be an animator. I wasn’t amazing at it but I knew how to do it and stuff. But by the time I graduated, Disney had no jobs, so I went to work at Marvel Productions on a show called the Muppet Babies and I did that for three years. It was actually really good training as far as drawing, because I was in the model department and there was a lot of drawing. I have my pencil with me always. But eventually, a friend of mine, my roommate he worked at Disney, and he said there was an opening, so I got my portfolio together and got in, not into animation, but into the development department. And that was critical because I was adjacent to a department called Story. And I came into this whole thing visually. I didn’t really want, I had no intention of writing and directing. I came in like the other side of this whole thing.
And I was asked if I could storyboard – I was in a development department and was the only person in the development department – there were two people that were vying. There was one position and I found out later that the other guy was more expensive, that is why they hired me! So I was in the development department and I was working on this movie called Rescuers Down Under and there was a sequence where these mice were going to send a signal from Australia to New York, and I was doing the development drawings that would illustrate that. This is the kind of thing I was thinking about, because I went to the library to figure out what kind of scene is it, so at 10 o’clock in the morning from the outback in Australia, what time was it in New York when the mice get the message. I was looking at the globe and I noticed there were all these places inbetween Australia and New York and I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if they bounced the message from place to place to place, making more of a meal of that bit, like they did with this clip. I did the drawings of the mice with a crashed airplane and they hotwired the radio in the jungle and there were other mice behind-the-scenes at the military base in Hawaii that they would bounce the signal as well. The producer of Rescuers Down Under came to me and said, hey would you board the rest of the sequence and I said, I can’t, no, no, no, because I had only known it from TV. And TV was different than feature animation boarding. That is what I was thinking about, no, it’s too intense. So he came back to me, and I have the story pad with me right now, but he came back to me and he said, could you just do all the drawings that come in-between the ones that you have already done and I said, oh, I can do that! So I grabbed the story pad and in something that would become formative I found a John Williams piece of music that was used in the Olympics actually and I played this piece of music and boarded to the beat of the music and followed the rhythms of the music and the vibe of the music. I finished it all up and the producer came in, I showed him the drawings and he said, this is great, could you hang them up on a storyboard so we can see them all at once and I said, I can do that! So I hung them all up. Three story boards worth, each around 70 drawings. So then he said, hey, could you take a stick and could you point at them and show the rest of the story crew and the directors what you have done. And I said, yeah, I can do that. So I played the music and I didn’t realise I was pitching my first board and I had done it, I didn’t realise it. An he said can you do the same thing to a different part of the movie and I said yeah, I can do that and I kept doing that and so now I’m in story. That was the most important thing that ever happened to me because I was with a story crew. And, it’s like, a story crew at Disney was like between five and seven story artists and I just fell in with the best of the best. I was with Joe Ranft, Brenda Chapman, Ed Gombert and nobody was better at pitching boards than Roger Allers. And the thing that I think is a bit of a lost art now, which is a shame, is that before everything was digital you actually had to stand up in front of the crew and pitch the board which means you were doing the voices, the timing. And you were also required to make these drawings incredibly clear because they were going to be seen from six or seven feet away by the whole crew.
So you had to be simple and clear and all those things. That is where this whole thing started. After that, I went on to Beauty & The Beast and that was again very formative because it was about four years start-to-finish which turned out to be the ideal amount of time. One of the things I appreciated about being in this, in the story department, nobody in the hierarchy, there was no hierarchy, the best idea would always win out. And, you could argue a point, but you couldn’t just say, I like this better or I don’t like that, you had to have a real reason. And so, I learnt the craft of being in a room and negotiating a story and watching how a story would develop and Joe Ranft in particular was impressive to me. We’d bump up against problems and I would think “what are we going to do? We’re never going to fix this” and Joe would just flow around it and choose another course and go around it. Everything was disposable in a way. I was given the assignment of Belle who trades her freedom for her incarceration. She immediately leaves, she’s like, I’m leaving. So they gave me this bit which was so exciting because she’s going to try and sneak out of the castle and everything in the castle is alive. I go, my gosh, this is going to be amazing. I worked so hard, weeks and weeks on this thing. We pitched the boards every Friday. So, I hung my sequence up, it took three story boards and they were all next to each other. So the boards are big, like seven feet, eight feet wide. About 75 drawings per board and they were all there. The first guy that came in was one of the artists Burny Mattinson and I said, can I pitch this to you and practise before everyone comes in and he said yes. So I started at the upper left and pitched the whole thing. I went all the way through it. Burny was just looking at it, and he said, do you have any notes, and he goes, I think you could cut, and he pointed at the third drawings, I think you could cut from here to… and he took a long time. He went to the whole thing and got to the last board and he said, to here and I realised none of it was necessary, it was just a cul-de-sac in the story, a complete waste of time. And so that is how disposable all these things really could be. And that was okay. That was okay. That was part of the job!
Okay, so I want to jump into another clip really quick that is significant to this narrative. This is from ET, the death scene from ET.
[clip]
There are two things going on there that stuck with me. The main one right now is how like unafraid Steven Spielberg was of letting that moment really reach it’s ultimate depth. He didn’t shy away from it, he let it really resonate fully. And that was on my mind, I was working on Beauty & The Beast and one of the things I boarded was the death and resurrection of the Beast, and Brenda Chapman and I were talking about that scene. We realised that given the rules of the movie, that if somebody loved him before the last petal of the flower fell, the curse would be broken. But there was no mention of a timeline. So I boarded that sequence and really stretched it out after she said her thing to him and he said his stuff. I just let it go for as long as I felt I could. And there was yet another time that I was boarding to music. Every single time I’ve boarded it’s always been to music. All things I could probably show you, I could replace the music with a piece of music I was listening to. In the particular case of the Beauty & The Beast scene, I was listening to piano music that was actually fairly closely replicated in the final score, which was very impressive.
So, my next gig after Beauty & The Beast was – so for me there was an intimate relationship between visual and music. You do a lot of writing in the story crew and this is something I would tell any story artist, is that you get a sequence, it’s all yours, and you have control of it and you are directing that sequence. I don’t think there is a director out there that doesn’t want you to make that as good as it can be. You are not just drawing the drawings and getting them in fast so they can fix the cameras and that stuff. You are enhancing the sequence. That is what I learnt at Disney. Nobody just drew the sequence and got out. Everybody was always making sequences better. You are not just sending it in another direction, but you are exploring the moment and enhancing it. That is what I did at Beauty & The Beast and all the other things I worked on.
From Beauty & The Beast, I went on to Lion King. Before I go into that, we have a photograph I think next. Okay. So that is one sequence from Lilo & Stitch. That’s the story pads drawn, analogue, ink on pencil and paper. That’s one sequence. As we were packing the movie up, I said these will never be seen again, let’s take a picture of one sequence, spread it out on the floor and see how big it was. It was pretty big. I sat in the middle and let them take a picture of the sequence before we packed it up. That is a sequence that got thrown out! So that is the sequence where Stitch is going to Lilo’s rescue and if you look at the drawings closely, he steals an aeroplane which after 9/11, we had to change that sequence in the nick of time before the scene came out. That is all just free hand.
So on Lion King, amongst things I was boarding, I was given the scene where the ghost comes back to talk to Simba and he does the whole, you are the one true King thing. And I boarded through it once and Roger Allers, one of the directors said, I don’t feel like it’s emotional enough. And so we went searching for the right piece of music and I found it in the title, or the title track on the CD from The Mission and it’s a beautiful piece of music. I went in and actually didn’t just draw the sequence, I actually did every scene or every drawing in pastel. I worked really, really hard, because I wanted the whole thing to go from being cold and ghostly to being something that was affirming, all the warm, glowing colours.
The second time I pitched it with the music from The Mission, Roger said, it’s great, we’ll use that. And, later on at the premier of the movie in New York City, the producer, Don said, come here, Chris. So, I went over and Hans Zimmer was leaning up against a building and smoking and he said, Hans, that’s Chris, he boarded the sequence and he said, do you know what, in the future do me a favour, choose a shittier piece of music because he said that is my favourite piece of music ever and it was difficult for me to write that little bit.
Transition to writing was on the next film on Mulan. I talked to every single artist. I became like a living repository for the story because people are changing things in the boards. So I had to visit every single person every morning and every afternoon. If Chris Williams had done something cool, I would let everyone else know what was going on. In this way, the movie was evolving. If I slipped and got amnesia, they would have had a problem because I was literally the directors would ask me what was going on, and I would report to them live what was going on in the story.
By the afternoon, the evening, the next day, it will have changed again. It was very, very fluid.
For me Mulan was one of the formative things in my career because it was a very, very difficult project to get done. It was six years start-to-finish and it was the first time I really dealt with something structurally amiss. We had big successes in Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast and Aladdin and each of those had a female character that was was dissatisfied with her position, in her situation, and was looking for ways to change it. So as you can imagine, with Mulan, who was in a society at a time where she was getting lined up to go into an arranged marriage. The version that we worked with for a really long time and nobody saw a problem including me, was that she was looking for a way to avoid that problem of this arranged marriage, and there was all these sequences with her trying to get a look at the guy that her family had, you know, set her up with and she had to go to the matchmaker etc. The film wouldn’t work and we couldn’t figure out the problem. The story, the main story, is about a girl who sacrifices everything because she puts such a premium on her father’s life. So she’s going to risk his honour, her honour and her life to save him and I realised that because she’s also worried about this arranged marriage, she wasn’t leaving for one reason, she was leaving for two. And one of those things was really convenient for her, and we didn’t want the war to be a convenience. So, I came in one morning and told the producer, I explained what I had realised, and I said, I’m going to go into the room today and any single storyline that isn’t simply she leaves to save her father’s life, I’m going to kill it now because we are wasting time on this thing and she said go do it. That was a hard day. We were talking about things and I would say no, that is out and that is out. Most of the things that were out was the idea that she was not okay with the arranged marriage. She has to be okay with it, I said. If she’s not okay with it, this movie is never going to work and it’s always going to be a convenience. That was hard to swallow. That was a really different character, especially given all the successes that we had created. But I did also realise that even though she will go into the match maker scene, and really try her best, it doesn’t mean she’s good at it. So she messes it all up and we keep her character that we really like, and the story suddenly worked. They started moving forward at that point and we never looked back.
I worked so hard on that film. It was six years. To put it into perspective, people whose children were born at the beginning of the process brought them to the premier as six-year-olds. It was hard work. I worked hard and long enough on it and it was also my introduction to Florida. One third of Lion King was done at the Florida Studio and I was out there a bit working with the artists. I was very impressed with them, young, talented, and keen to prove themselves else. Mulan was done in Florida so I relocated for that film. There is a scene where her father is talking to her after the matchmaker thing fell apart. I didn’t think that scene was accomplishing what it needed to. With a pad and pencil, I began writing and wrote new dialogue for that and it was the bit where he says the thing about, aren’t these blossoms beautiful but this one’s late, but I bet that when it blossoms it will be the most beautiful ball, trying to make her feel better but also avoiding talking about things directly.
At the end of the process, they actually gave me a writing credit and I had not been hired as a writer. And that is how hard I think I worked on it! And all the long nights paid off.
So I actually got my first writing credit on that. I will also take responsibility for the big dance party at the end. That was me! Also on Mulan is, at the end of the movie, you can like, come in for a landing and still crash in the last couple of seconds. You can still ruin everything. I imagined at the end of the movie she’ll come to her dad and it will pan up to the tree full of blossoms and bloom and the music will make it beautiful and it really didn’t work. It was just kind of like urgh, for a movie that was so powerful, it was going out on a whimper. And so I made a very unpopular suggestion that, you know, when she goes back into the temple, it’s like, just have a dance party, turn the music up and it will be happy. I thought to myself if there’s only one person in the audience, the movie will support itself. I turned to music as the salvation and it totally worked.
I did such a good job on that particular movie and stuck with it through thick and thin, Tom Schumacher, The Future President of Animation asked me if there was anything I would like to perhaps direct after that. I thought of a character that I came up with a long time ago and it was for a children’s book that I never made and that became Lilo & Stitch.
And, it was a really unusual project because he said, I will make this movie on one condition, that it looks like you drew it. To pitch the movie, I actually created a little book and drew every single page and at that point it became a question of, can we translate my style on to the screen. That was my first official writing gig and I did it with my co-director, Dean Deblois, and we wrote together for the first time on Lilo & Stitch. That is what the sequence was from there. I want to show you another clip if I can. This is once again from Star Trek II Wrath of Khan and one thing that stuck with me on this was again, how important the music is as an element in this bit. All right, let’s take a look.
[clip]
The thing I learnt from that and there’s a clip that I didn’t bring because we couldn’t get it but it’s very, very similar. I worked so hard as a screenwriter, director, somebody who does boards, I work so hard to make sure the audience is always on the edge of their seat and learning things. But once in a while, it’s okay to be ahead. And in this moment, the audience was ahead and they knew he was about to do something really cool. And the thrill and the anticipation of that is pure movie stuff. There’s a moment – I don’t know if you have seen it – where the character is riding on the train and he’s boasting about all of his abilities and things like this. On the same train is a prodigy, as far as being a pitcher, and at some point, they get into it, and they challenge Robert Redford to see if he can strike him out. And they stop the train at the next stop and they have the scene where he’s pitching three pitches and he pitches two and he misses them. Everything slows down then the music comes in, this magical music and you realise, he’s going to do it, you absolutely know he’s about to strike him out. And again, you get ahead of things. Once in a while, it’s a magical thing that you can do. There’s really and truly nothing better.
So I’m writing and directing with Dean Deblois on Lilo & Stitch and among its surprises that I discovered, it was kind of by accident, I was actually on an aeroplane trying to write a scene. For some time I’m incredibly productive on aeroplanes, if I need to get a movie done, put me on a plane, and I’ll get it done. I can’t sleep. So I just needed to get a lot done very quickly. And the thing came to me and I thought, I don’t know if this is going to work. I need to turn this movie around because the whole idea is that Stitch is a villain and he becomes a hero. The first time Disney ever did that. It was a redemption story. The moment he goes from bad to good, he needs to get things moving very, very quickly. And it came to me while I was writing this, listening to music, it made me laugh, I thought, what if he just says two words and in those words he’s transmitted something complex to Jumba and I go with it. He spoke gobbledegook, I voiced the character of this, by the way, so he says some gobbledegook and you see what happens and yes, he says, you expect him to help you just like that and he goes ugh and he goes, fine. He has a lot of this. Let’s take a look at it.
So I try it. Everybody laughed when I pitched it. It made me laugh on the plane when I wrote it. It worked well with the audience. It broke all the different rules. You set up all the rules in the movie and that broke them in a lot of ways. And it worked. And the cool thing was, I felt like I’d identified something that, in the beginning of the third act, if the audiences are with you, you now have licence to start making some big leaps if you need to. It doesn’t always work, but it does quite often, I have noticed. People respond so beautifully to it. So there’s this almost like a very small window that you can do these things and it’s actually what happened in ET, after he came back, he can’t stop talking and then it goes into something that’s funny and silly. He can’t stop talking, you know, Elliott has to zip the thing up. As a kid, I was really afraid he killed him. He shut the lid on him and you are like ugh. But there is a beautiful miniature fun and games moment that you can take advantage of and it work so beautifully. I’ve looked for that ever since. I saw a possibility of it again in the first movie I was working on, actually the second, I came into dream works after Lilo & Stitch and worked on the Croods and we were in development and I was asked to replace the director on How to Train Your Dragon. They wanted to go in a different direction so I switched to How to Train Your Dragon – wait – wait How to Train Your Dragon is the part or is it changing around, yes. Yes, it is!
So, this is a little miniature part on this clip, a mini fun and games thing on How to Train Your Dragon, and it’s after Hiccup gets airborne, Astrid is in trouble and needs to get airborne. I threw extra shots at it. I never stopped boarding, I’ve always boarded, I boarded sequences on How to Train Your Dragon, the Croods, Lilo & Stitch, and also on the Wild Robot. When I was boarding this, I added extra drawings because I knew I was in that zone and it was okay to start stretching things out a bit. I added a couple of shots after they added Astrid. There was I had the shot of Toothless upside down staring and we cut back to Astrid and then back to him and the shots played ever so well. Let’s take a look.
[clip]
That could have been one shot but I made it four because I was in the zone. The next one, when I knew I was in the zone was the Croods and if you don’t know the story, this is a caveman who keeps his family in a cave day and night because he thinks that’s the best way to keep them alive and the whole idea is eventually they are forced out of the cave, they go on a journey and he begins to understand that that is not living, that risk is a part of life okay. We pick up with him. One of the reasons, actually every time, I start at the end and back up and do the opposite of the beginning of the film. A guy who kept his family locked in a cave, he throws them into a fog bank at a rift at the edge of the world because there’s a possibility they’ll be safe on the other side. If they stay where they are they are guaranteed to die so he throws the family members – because she’s so strong – so instead of using that strength to keep them locked in the cave, he’s going to use the strength to throw them into the unknown, as a hail Mary to see if they can survive. But he can’t throw himself across so he’s stuck on the wrong side and he’s probably going to die. There is a character that has been after him through most of the film and I named the character Chunky to irritate people – and it did – and this is a giant tiger I designed with a huge head. These animals can’t understand language and they certainly won’t cooperate, but I knew that I was back in that zone where I could make leaps and it would be good for the narrative. So, this is Grug hearing a distress call from where he threw his family. So at this moment he knows they are alive but he thinks they are in trouble and he has to figure out a way to get across. The whole thing is, the idea is that the Ryan Reynolds character is like a modern man, his name is Guy and he has all sorts of ideas and Grug is frustrated and embarrassed because he’s never had an idea. At this moment he needs an idea. I start making leaps between him and Chunky. I’m breaking the rules, but like, because I knew that it would work at this point.
[Clip]
That is the sequence I boarded. Sometimes I can’t figure things out unless I sit down and draw. I spend a lot of time in editorial and animation. People wonder what goes on in editorial, you have to do things to length because it’s quite expensive. But editorials is where a tonne of the story happens. The editor in this case was Mary Blee on the Wild Robot and our head of story Heidi-Jo Gilbert. And we would just sit in editorial and sometimes I would like spend an afternoon just myself and Mary with a pad of paper trying to work on this stuff. I would always get frustrated and think, this is all wrong, this doesn’t work, because, as you board, you are confronted, you are confronted with the reality of moving the characters around. If you think writing is hard, think about that drawing or that photo of me sitting on the drawings, it’s hard to board stuff but writing can be difficult and unfun sometimes but boarding is a lot of work. So I would always be boarding these things. What was my point?! I just forgot. Er, but, story boarding, boarding… yes, so the boarding process is really, really critical to me. We went to the recording session. This is the most important last point I want to make. The relationship between what I do and music is like permanent. Because I came into this visually and began writing as a consequence of boarding and getting into that space, I think of things mostly visually all the time. At the recording session for the score, and there was this beautiful, beautiful music and the theme hit and began to expand and just at that moment, I could hear and Dean could hear the orchestra coming down. Here is the line of dialogue and it’s ruling that piece of music and the thing worked and we ducked under it with the orchestra. I made a promise to myself that I would never let that happen again. On How to Train Your Dragon, Dean and I worked on that, there were several sequences and we’d build houses from music inside the movie. Places where it was like a no-dialogue zone so the situation would never, ever occur.
In How to Train Your Dragon, there is a memorable sequence, Hiccup and Toothless in the cove and have to work things out. The Forbidden Friendship sequence, very much inspired by the scene in the Black Stallion with the boy and the horse. And I’ve done that ever since. That zone, the dialogue stops, the music takes over, and John Pal understood this from the beginning. He avoided that because he was nervous about it. There is a critical piece, one last thing from ET, where the music was given the lead. So John Williams was told just write the music and the visuals will be worked out afterwards, because Spielberg did not want to do what I did on Lilo & Stitch all that time ago so. Take a look at this scene.
[clip]
So I’ll wrap this up by going to a scene from the Wild Robot. Now, that whole thing, that giant, giant amount of respect and admiration I have for what music can do as a story-telling element of. I’ve come to believe and understand that it’s one of the heaviest lifting things you have as far as story-telling in a movie. Kris Bowers who wrote the music for the Wild Robot understood from the beginning that as far as houses for music being built inside of a movie, Wild Robot had a few. We had 50% of the dialogue that a film like this would normally have. Part of that was very deliberate. I didn’t want the story to feel like it was being pushed on a schedule because it’s very much about a robot lost on an island and she’s not under any pressure. Getting ready to fly by fall comes, it’s not a ticking hawk on the edge of your seat thing, it was going to be there, but I if I tried to artificially push it, it wasn’t going to work. It was there as a goal. If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t worry, this is the middle of it. The mid-point, it had this beautiful moment where the challenge was to top it by the end of the film. Very much like what was going on here, when I was working with Kris Bowers and listening to the music as he was creating it, as he was developing this particular moment, I finally started fearing that he was having to manoeuvre around things again, even though it was a wide-open zone, I eventually said, you know what, stop looking at the picture, I want you to just write the music, just write the music, make it like, let it grow full-scale and mature it and I’ll come in and reboard it and do whatever it takes to match to it. It’s one of the reasons I think the music came out so great, was that it just never had any parameter, it didn’t have to go to a certain scale, it never had to avoid anything.
I remember the other story that I forgot before so I won’t bore you with that. This is Wild Robot a movie about a robot that accidentally wakes up on the shore of an uninhabited island with no people, only animals, and the robot doesn’t even know she’s lost, she’s just doing what she’s programmed to do, which is to find whoever it was that bought her and complete a task. A robot is always about completing tasks. She’s being chased by a bear and runs across a goose’s nest, destroying it, and the only thing that survives is one single egg. It happens to be the egg of a Gosling that was never supposed to survive. Brightbill grows up and he’s identified as being a runt and he was chosen by nature to not make it. So Roz’s task is extra difficult. The main thing she has to do is get him to eat, swim, fly, by a certain date so he can join migration and leave the island and if he stays he will not make it. This is the migration sequence, built to Chris Bower’s amazing music and I followed with all my boards after the fact.
Cool. Thank you for listening to all of that. Thank you so much. Thank you. I have a mic on. That’s right!
Q&A
IAN: Mental note of future guests, please ask them not to have two emotionally traumatised things. Got me! Right, I want to come back to a comment that you have made a couple of times over the course of the last hour, and thinking back to previous films, and this is not just talking about animated films, but if Bambi taught us anything about screen writing, it’s to be daring, something you say, breaking the rules, it’s this idea, don’t be constrained, you know, you have created the universe, you can do anything within it. Do you take on a story and say there are parameters, but these we need to cross?
CHRIS: That is such a good question. I think you have to feel your way through it. I am a big believer in creating roles in the Croods for example, I knew that we were going to deal with cavemen and when I started the process, my co-director and I, Dean, we made a list of all the things, like if you went to a caveman movie, what would you be disappointed not to see. So I wrote down, lava, a pit, a volcano, and animals, so all these things. One most important thing was because the cavemen were going to be big, tough and robust and we were going to have fun with them, being chase and stuff, I didn’t want people to think they were indestructible. I wrote a bit in the opening of the film where you hear about how the Croods are all alone because they used to have neighbours, better they are all killed in cartoonish ways. They get killed one by one. So the audience would absolutely understand the rules. So I think for the most part, I stay inside the boundaries, but push it as hard as possible. The sequence we saw, I would just, like, get a lot of my ideas when I sit on my bike. I had a piece of music that was temporary before Kris wrote this and I played it over and over hundreds of times and ran the scene again and again and again and pushed and pushed a little further, a little further, shouldn’t end yet, so it’s about going all the way, like if it was a playground, getting all the way to the fence line and once in a while you will feel a weakness in the fence that you can push it a bit extra. But that all comes through the boarding process. One of the nice things about animation, we spend a long time in the story board phase, all the way through, we’ll be boarding until the last scene goes into production, so there’s such a congratulate latitude to make adjustments and mistakes. And so I think you find the weaknesses in the fence as you sit and spend time with the film.
IAN: You mentioned a little earlier the phrase cul-de-sac, and just thinking about the sequences we have seen, but your body of work as a whole, are you looking at say, your average action film, and sometimes it amazes me that the big set piece sequence end up being a cul-de-sac in the film, it’s there to show off what can be done, and it strikes me watching your films that action is emotion and action does not exist for the sheer spectacle, it’s everything is constantly being driven forward.
CHRIS: Yes. I think that I love fairytales, I’ve worked on a few and I enjoy them very much. I’m always on guard for the narrative to end before the movie does, meaning if you have a hero and villain in the articles, that would be an action sequence, you kind of know how that is going to work out, so there’s not necessarily a lot of mysteries, and that is going to happen and the movie at that point begins to cool down. I work very, very hard to make sure the narrative runs to the last moment. It does that in Lilo & Stitch because even though he saves the day, there’s still the question of what will become of him, will he have to go back or not? Mulan saves the day and has to confront the Emperor and come home and face her father and the dragon has to confront the ancestor who is ‘re unhappy with him. So he has a lot to answer for, so the narrative keeps going. I am always on guard for action that’s just going to be filling time. I always want there to be something revealed and story to be going on within that.
IAN: Is it true with Lilo & Stitch that the original end was going to be a little earlier and you were approach and told, here is some more money?!
CHRIS: Yes! I really believe the budget is your friend, it’s your ally, and on Lilo & Stitch, there was a lot of interesting things going on. One of them was that the films that Disney had were becoming more complex and advanced. I noticed they were getting heavier, as far as the weight of expectation that was on them. I would be in the story meetings and you could tell that there was suspense as far as, was this going to be successful, and there was a lot riding on them. I felt like it was making people feel less relaxed in the narrative. Most things that were connected with Lilo & Stitch was the idea that we’d make a less expensive film. We rolled that back to a Beauty & The Beast budget and we’d buy freedom by lowering the budget. So any time we got close to crossing the line, we have an opening scene where Lilo runs down the beach, I boarded it and there were all the people on the beach say and they brought me in and said, we can’t do it, too many characters, can’t afford it. So I reboarded it. Only two of the characters are moving. One throws a frisbee, I very quickly cut close to Lilo and she’s running through people’s legs. So I got the moment on the crowded beach, we stayed on target with the money. At the very end of the film, the head of feature animation, Tom Schumacher called me up and said what would you do with the movie if you had one more minute and I said add a piece to the end to see what their life became after he stayed and he said, you are on target, you have saved $2 million so go and do the ending. We put two minutes on the end of the film. I can’t imagine the film without that end bit where he’s getting a lunch ready for Lilo and sending her off to school, it’s Christmas and Halloween and all these things. It’s so affirming. And we were only able to do that because we were very responsible with the production.
IAN: You talk about fairytales and the idea of the hero villain, the monetary and narrative, and to look at your films, you obviously have your main protagonists, but whether it’s the Croods, Wild Robot, you have such a richly drawn group of characters and whether it’s in one of your films a small community, a collective or a family, there’s something about moving away from a simple thing of, this person is good, this person is bad, they are going to fight it out, to give us something richer?
CHRIS: Yes, I gravitate towards the thing where the characters have lots of grey zones, no pure villain or no purely good character, and Stitch is maybe the ultimate version of that. I always said like, if a bunch of happy, good Disney characters had a party, they would not invite him. If a bunch of villains had a party, they wouldn’t either. Because he exists in the middle zone. And I like those things because there’s a believability in that. I like big fanciful imaginative characters and big worlds with nutty stuff going on. The stuff that goes inside it is all very, very believable, as far as the emotional interactions.
IAN: In your process of writing, I know you have talked a lot about writing and working with different people and story boarding. Has the Genesis process, the very early stages of writing changed over the course of your career?
CHRIS: I would say my experience on Mulan and How to Train Your Dragon in particular, because both had structural issues that had to be confronted and repaired. One thing I’ve learnt is to discipline myself not to get into the more fun bits because in animation, like, all the artists and animators are so incredibly good at what they do. You can start in a direction and something can go off in that direction and become really entertaining and it will disguise itself as being necessary to the story because it’s so entertaining, and you may never realise it or you may have to go through a hard moment where you have to snap that off and get rid of it later.
I discipline myself to be as structural as possible before I get into the fun bits and that is something that I’ve definitely learnt hard lessons on, and I always have to discipline myself to try to stay out of all of the more poetic things as much as possible. All the things might be weigh points that I’m trying to get points. When I read the Wild Robot, I saw the migration sequence and that was a landmark that I worked towards. I went to fish kill for a long weekend with the directors and some of the key story people and we were hashing out the overall story beats for Lilo & Stitch, and at one point, I looked at one of the people involved in it and asked where do you put the songs and he said, that is easy, because they are not a cul-de-sac or off ramp, each one is a turn that goes on, think about the sea witch, you know, they go in there and the sea witch sings her song and she goes in, with legs and she leaves with fins, the other way around, so there’s a great story in there. There are some that are worked around.
IAN: The less is more element with your work – you mentioned the beautiful sequence, the blossom conversation between Mulan and her father, and how you play into the sub text there. We just saw in the Wild Robot, the line I could use a boost, which is basically emotional sucker punch but makes me want to laugh at the audacity of how much that line says about the relationship of the two characters. Is that something that you approach every project with now, how can I do it, and then how can I do it simpler?
CHRIS: Yes. Absolutely. I think that is one of the wonderful things that came out of where I came from. I come from boarding. So I see everything visually. When I work from somebody’s pages, I’ll get frustrated and go, these don’t work, none of this works and I have to make changes because there’ll be logistical issues, like a character would be here and then appear there and I have to fix all the stuff. I always say, someday when I write a script, I won’t have this problem. I sat down for my first very first board with my pages and I was like, none of this works, I’ll have to fix all this! So I think that is one of the wonderful things about the advantages I have in boarding my own stuff, that that is when it hits you in the face, if something is wasteful or it’s off track and you have to draw all that stuff. You want to not have to draw that and knowing again that, it’s not about the drawing, not lazy or anything, it’s just like, I know this is going to be thrown away and will a waste of time. If I know that, I get rid of that. That is the benefit of boarding so much of my own material.
IAN: Another element with the Wild Robot, the joy of the emotional under currents in there, but again pushing the boundaries, breaking the rules, having central characters who have a face that doesn’t – I mean anyone can go back to 2001 and see the whole 9,000 Red Lamp 2 and you feel a range of emotions with that. Was that the challenge that attracted you to this?
CHRIS: I believed it was going to work without a mouth in. Peter Brown’s novel, he has a mouth indicated on the illustrations on Roz, and I said I wanted to illuminate that, Pixar had the two amazing shorts, Red’s Dream and Lexar Jr. And they don’t have a face whatsoever and you get every bit of emotion, maybe even more so. I was really interested in the idea that in the absence of facial ash articulation, I thought it would allow the audience to project their emotions on to Roz in a very personal way and in a really effective way. I spoke to someone once who said they didn’t realise Roz didn’t have a mouth until later on because she feel so right so. That was a limitation I knew would allow the animals – the animals! The animators, kind of like animals! That would allow the animators to excel and to push in the zone so. We put so much of this on the vocal and acting abouts and the rest was on the animators. I knew they would thrive with this. Let’s open the floor to questions. If we can bring up the lights, please. Roving mics if there is any questions. One person there and then someone behind.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Chris, I’m Chris too. Learning about your influences, thank you so much. What I wanted to ask was, from your transition between 2D and 3D animation, what restrictions did you find between the mediums and how did that affect your boarding and directing process?
CHRIS: 3D came along, it was so amazing. The ability to move the camera dimensionally was one of the best things. To do the push and move things dimensionally was way different to having a simple zoom. In the traditional days, it was a zoom and a pan and if you moved something dimensionally, we had one shot where we pushed the camera dimensionally and we started working on that early, it took almost a year to get that one shot done. Another thing, when I was boarding my sequences, there was a little coffee cup on the shirt and they came back and said, we can’t clean that up. They actually did calculations on a film like Aladdin, I sat in the department to understand what their job was, and I sat next to an artist who they were standing next to her with a stop watch and she’d paint a Jasmine and they would time it and she’d paint Jasmine for a few days until she was very facile at it and they would need a camera.
And they said it would take three weeks too long to get her painted so they had to remove three colours from her then they retimed it. So that coffee cup was unsupportable. That was the kind of stuff you couldn’t have in 2D animation. But again, we also lost touch with all those analogue things that brought so much warmth to our movies, and I think the wonderful thing about Wild Robot is, we got all the gifts with CG but found a way to paint dimensionally and we had painters that could paint a tree, like live in dimension, it didn’t have any framework underneath it so it had this quality that we had lost touch with so long ago that we got it back on the Wild Robot. Now I feel like we have everything that we ever dreamed of now.
IAN: Someone behind there. Talking about detail, the first clip from Roz that we saw of the Enterprise coming out, I wondered if the writer sat down and said, if you are in space, what is the dullest job you could possibly have. It’s a guy directing the traffic.
CHRIS: I love that guy! I always thought he was doing something else and he was just having fun.
IAN: Yes?
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, thanks for coming, I love the loose trilogy, How to Train Your Dragon and Alien and Goose. Fantastic. But I’m interested in how they relate to the roles of specialism and mastery in your career and being able to draw on a well of previous experience and like, are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg of Chris Sanders, do you have a horror or rom-com in your drawers?
CHRIS: Yes. I would love to try things like that, actually. I would like to try another original at some point because Lilo & Stitch was 100% from nothing, all original and I like original stuff and adaptations. But yes, I would like to try somebody maybe a bit different at some point. I was so, so grateful to be able to work on How to Train Your Dragon and the Wild Robot. I finished my last project and dropped into Dreamworks to see what was in development and among its things they laid out on the table was this book and the very barest descriptions of it, like told me that that is the one I wanted to work on. Because of the emotional things, again. No matter what it would be, hopefully it would be something that I would be able to apply the sort of like very intricate emotional things to that thing, no matter where it was as far as the story.
IAN: Time for two more questions. Someone down the front here. And then to the very back. Yes.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you so much. Love your films. You have talked about the importance of music and you have worked with a range of different composer. Can you talk about how you decide who to work with in terms of composers?
CHRIS: Yes. Golly. Just like we have a casting director for our actors and voice cast, in this particular case we have our universal music team, Mike and Natalie, and they approached us with the idea of having Kris Bowers be our composer. Also with John and Allen. But Chris was new and this is why they do what they do, they just understood the nature of what I was working on. I felt like Kris would be an amazing match to that. So full credit to them. I’m so busied with my thing, I don’t have time to know other things, like knowing all the newest things in music is not something I have time to do. So I have relied so much on different departments and producers that are the unsung heroes that really helped shape all these things behind-the-scenes.
IAN: To the very back.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, Chris, my name is Emma. Loved your talk. You are amazing. We saw the Lilo & Stitch clip. How do you balance humour and emotion when you are crafting a story?
CHRIS: That is I think where editorial really comes in. There are so many little things I try that I’m so absolutely sure it’s going to work and then you watch it and it’s like, oh, no! It doesn’t work at all! And in the privacy of the editorial suite, you can take risks, try things, and work them out. Sometimes it’s just flowing, like at the end with Lilo & Stitch at the end, I really felt very, very confident that that was working, I don’t know why. I guess I was in the zone that day as I was writing that down, I was so convinced of it. But it’s a lot of trial-and-error in editorial, and just the skills and the expertise and the artistry of our editors, because Mary will assemble all the stuff while I’m off doing something else and she’ll then call me in and show it to me. She’s inventive and a voice in the narrative just as much as I am or any of the story artists or the animators, and she’ll, well a lot of the time, she gets rid of stuff that is unnecessary because I overdo it a lot of the times and she’ll show me a sequence and I’ll say it’s great and she will tell me she threw something out and she’ll pull out the Titanic and I’m like whoa. So I think that’s the beauty and the wonder of the schedule that we have and having a really great head of story and editor.
IAN: I’m afraid we are out of time. However, as was said at the beginning, there are some drinks on the floor, so continue the conversation downstairs. We have three events left as part of this screen writing series. One this afternoon and two tomorrow. If you have missed any of the lectures at all, in the coming weeks you will be able to see them on the BAFTA social channels and if you are not a member of BAFTA and you want to find out what events are coming up and what is going on, do sign up for the newsletter.
Thank you to BAFTA, to Jeremy and the JJ Charitable Trust, but most of all, please join me in thanking Chris Sanders.
CHRIS: Thank you. Thank you.
[Concluded]
