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Interview With Disney's BIG HERO 6 Directors Don Hall & Chris Williams
On Blu-ray and DVD February 24th...
By David Yeh
Behind Disney’s latest animated hit Big Hero 6 are its directors Don Hall and Chris Williams. While this is Don and Chris’ first collaboration together as directors, neither are strangers to Disney animation having both entered the field in the mid '90s. Chris Williams worked on Mulan, Lilo & Stitch, The Emperor’s New Groove, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen, but also directed Bolt in 2008 with Byron Howard. Don Hall worked on Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Princess and the Frog, as well as directing the highly underrated gem, Winnie the Pooh in 2011.
We got to sit in with the directors at a round table discussion to talk about their latest film Big Hero 6 arriving on Blu-ray and DVD this Tuesday, February 24th. Many reporters contributed questions and we present the dialogue here, edited for brevity and clarity. And as a warning, spoilers abound if you have not seen the movie!
Figures: Are you guys really excited on Oscar nominations morning? It seemed really obvious but you never know with the Academy.
Don: Oh, it didn’t seem obvious to us at all! We were in two different places though. Our producer Roy Conli and I were in Korea because we were rolling out the movie there and for us it was 10:30 at night. After a nice long day of working and stuff like that, we were with our Japanese colleagues in the Korean Disney office and... we did some celebrating, and had a really rough flight to London the next morning. It was absolutely thrilling though. It was so cool.
Chris: I had a very different experience. I was home here in LA and I got the news, obviously very exciting, and I was thrilled for about three minutes and then my kids barges into the room and they wanted dad to make them breakfast and play with them. They didn’t care. Brought me right back down to earth, you know. Kids are good for that.
Figures: Academy Award nomination, almost half a billion dollars world wide, you guys made more than Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph domestically so let’s get it on the table right now. Sequels? TV Series? What’s going on?
Don: I know it sounds like we’re making stuff up or being cagey, but I am being honest. We had not one discussion about it. Most of it is because we just been so busy finishing the film. I mean we finished it for the Tokyo Film Festival I think October 23. We were done on the 11th so we pushed it as far as you could push a film and since then we’ve been doing so much traveling promoting the movie. We literally not had any discussions about it and we’re going to take a long vacation and we’ll see after that.
Figures: Are there ideas?
Chris: No, we haven’t really talked about it all.
Don: There’s no room. There’s no room up there (points at head).
Chris: It’s such a huge undertaking to make one of these movies and this was a challenging, very complex story. So you invest everything you have into this one thing and you’re not afforded the opportunities to talk about a sequel. The movie is finished and you’re flying, promoting the movie and we’re still kind of in that phase. And when that’s done I think it’s important to really take a break and slow down and read and find out what you’re excited about, rather than racing into the next thing. The nice thing at Disney Animation is, and what John Lasseter says is true, is that they won’t make a sequel unless the directors have a story they really want to tell. So no one is going to impose or force a story on us, which is nice because we know we’re not going to make something that isn’t worth making. The last thing you want to do is make a sub-par sequel that reflects on the original. That’s the only way it’ll happen is if there’s something we’re really excited about. We spend years with these characters, get real intimate, we know them, we love them, and they’re real to us. Releasing these movies is like being a proud parent watching your kids go off to college and so the thought of working with them again has an appeal but there are no plans.
Don: And I’m a little superstitious about that kind of stuff. You gotta put everything you got into telling the one story and then if the fates align and people love your movie then that’s a different story. But to have a sit down and think like you’re going to create a trilogy, I think that’s really dangerous thinking. You really need to put all your effort into that first film. Marvel is different because they don’t make sequels. They’re telling the saga of Marvel and they’ve got it all worked out. To me that’s different.
Figures.com: Did Stan Lee know that you were going to use him as a cameo?
Don: He knew about the painting because we had to get that cleared. I assume. I know it got cleared. I don’t know if he has a vast network of underlings or if it got to Stan himself but that one got cleared. But the tag came pretty late after we saw Guardians of the Galaxy.
Chris: Him being part of the painting was always part of the movie, we had that forever. And we talked about wanting to put a tag at the end. The last thing we wanted is for people to wait through the credits and find nothing. And especially when Don and I saw Guardians of the Galaxy and saw the audience not budge, we thought that there was a chance that some people might stay hoping to find a button there. And Frozen had a little one too.
Don: Winnie the Pooh had one too.
Chris: We knew we needed a real good one and so Don and I got together, talked about the idea, I storyboarded something, and WE liked it but the trick was our producer. Do we have the resources; the money, the bodies, can we do this thing? Fortunately our producer Roy [Conli] walked in just as I was pitching to Don the beat where he “I wear 'em front, I wear 'em back” and Roy bust up laughing. And so I was all “We got the money guy! He’s on our side!” So we knew we got to do this, and at that point we made a decision to keep it from our crew.
Don: That’s our biggest achievement I think on this film. All said and done, the fact that we were able to keep that end credit sequence secret until the wrap party. We had about twenty people that had to know, it obviously had to get animated and all that kind of stuff. But we had a skeleton crew of 20, 25 people and we had code names, it was on a different server because people snoop around a lot. We managed to keep it secret. And that moment was AWESOME.
Chris: And we got to meet Stan Lee.
Don: Oh, and there’s that.
Figures: How was this experience of Big Hero 6 different for each of you? You come off of Pooh, you come off of Bolt, neither were the global phenomenon that this has turned out to be. How do you two cope with this kind of explosion?
Don: Well, you know, we bought Lamborghinis. [laughs] We try not to take anything for granted obviously because we worked on really good movies that maybe didn’t find an audience for various reasons. But this one we’re just trying to enjoy it and nothing can compare to going to the theater and watching it with other people. Hear the laughs, hear the gasps. It’s awesome.
Chris: This I can compare with Bolt because that’s the first film we made with John Lasseter and it wasn’t long before that there was a danger that Disney Animation was going to shut down. That’s hard for us to fathom because we grew and love Disney films, it’s why we got into animation, so that film felt like the beginning of something. We were getting to know John and how he worked and he was getting to know us and we were getting to really know what it was like to work in a collaborative environment. And now we feel like we had this run of success critically and at the box office, proud of every movie we’ve made, and it’s because there’s this community of artists that really support each other. And what I see now is a consistency and a confidence; a maturity. And we’ve tried different stories and we had success, that confidence is being balanced by humility. The danger is if it goes to your head. Right now we’re in a great sweet spot where confidence is balanced by humility. We both feel like we’re on the beginning of something and Big Hero 6 feels like we’ve achieved a sense of stability.
Don: No matter what story will kick your butt and keep you humble.
Figures: What’s in the Blu-ray that you’re most excited about people seeing?
Don: For me it’s the animation blooper. They’re so funny and I’m so gullible. We’d sit in dailies and our schedule is punishing. I don’t know when they had time to do these things but inevitably, we’d sit in dailies and an animator would say "So, I know this is your second time seeing the shot but I had a different idea the other day and wanted to go for it and show ya." "Oh okay, let’s see it!" and then they would show me something super silly and I fell for it every time. Every time. So it’s cool for people see the weirdness of what the computer does.
Chris: Yeah, there’s times where, for whatever reason, the computer would just make someone’s legs disappear or their hair explode, or something. And we would have some of the biggest technical minds and they would come and try to figure out what was going wrong and they would just say, "I don’t know, computers are weird." So there’s great bloopers and some deleted scenes. And the documentary gives you some real insight into the making of the film.
Figures: Was Professor Callahan always the mystery villain?
Don: Oh very, very early on. Yeah there were different versions of the villains. At one point the villain was going to be a really old guy. Like a REALLY old guy and his henchman was this huge scary dude with a kabuki mask. Eventually the old guy went away but we kept the idea of the kabuki mask. At one point there was a team of villains; that will be one of the deleted scenes.
Chris: We tried different versions of everything. There were times where Callahan’s goal was trying to retrieve his daughter from the portal and there were versions where he was more redeemable or sometimes less redeemable, we tried just about everything before we arrived at the current version. There’s a nice moment in the movie, one of the moments I’m most proud of where Hiro almost makes that really terrible mistake pursuing vengeance. You see that Callahan serves as a warning of what you could become if vengeance overwhelmes you. I’m really proud of that there is a parallel between them.
Don: I am too and that is a dark theme. When you talk about a movie for kids, and we never think of this as a movie for kids, it’s a movie for everyone, that is painting with a dark tone. And we are very lucky to have a boss like John Lasseter who is a real champion of that moment and pushed us because he felt like the story can go there.
Figures: Where do you see the future of animation going?
Chris: One thing I hope remains the same: I hope it remains director driven that is born out of the passion of the filmmakers. This wasn’t an assignment that Don was given. It wasn’t something that Disney and Marvel got together and wanted to make money, no, it came from Don’s passion and I hope that stays the same because that’s where the best Disney films come from.
Big Hero 6 releases on Blu-ray and DVD February 24, 2015.
By David Yeh
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