Click here to read the full article.
On a balmy April afternoon at Abbey Road Studios in London, a 74-piece orchestra comprised of violinists, cellists, flautists and even an organ-payer, is packed into Studio One. The iconic room, which has hosted musical
legends from Edward Elgar to Harry Styles, is painted “Toy Story” blue, a fitting color given the reason everyone is here today is to record the score for “Ray Gunn,” a new feature animation from Pixar legend Brad Bird, the brains behind “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.”
The film, which has been gestating inside Bird’s mind for three decades, is not a Pixar or Disney project, however (more on which later), but a Skydance Animation production which will hit Netflix on Dec. 18 (it premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10).
Directing the orchestra at Abbey Road is Bird’s longtime collaborator, composer Michael Giacchino. “Ray Gunn” is the duo’s sixth project together since first teaming up for “The Incredibles” in 2004 and it’s one Giacchino (who won an Oscar for Pixar’s “Up” in 2010) has had more than two decades to prepare for. “We talked about this movie during ‘The Incredibles,’” the composer reveals, when we speak a few months later. “I’ve known about this for a very long time.”
Fittingly, given the key role of music in the film, Bird first conceived the idea for “Ray Gunn” – a noir detective caper set in a “Jetsons”-style retro future – after hearing The B-52s’ song “Planet Claire.” To Bird, the tune sounded like a mash-up between the theme song to 1960s detective series “Peter Gunn” and “a ’50s monster sci-fi movie,” Bird says in an interview a day before the film’s premiere. “I went, ‘This is not “Peter Gunn.” What is this?’ And then I went, ‘It’s Ray-Gun.’ And then I went, ‘Ray Gunn: It’s a guy’s name. He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.’”
But the idea got shelved as other projects got in the way: there was his sophomore Pixar project “Ratatouille” followed by “The Incredibles 2” and, in between, live action fare “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “Tomorrowland” as well as an abandoned attempt to adapt Will Eisner’s comic “The Spirit.” Bird, who describes his mind as a “big shop floor,” would come back and “tinker” with “Ray Gunn” every now and again, biding his time until he could bring it to life (the film fell through at other studios including Warner Bros.)
It was “Mission: Impossible” that finally paved the way for what had effectively become Bird’s real-life mission: impossible. “It was [Skydance’s] second film and everybody was happy with how it turned out,” Bird says of his turn at the helm of the Tom Cruise franchise. So when the opportunity arose to pitch the studio on another idea, “Ray Gunn” was the obvious choice. (The move also reunited Bird with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, now the head of Skydance Animation.)
“I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly,” Bird explains, referring to the studio’s reputation for catering to younger audiences than the one he’s aiming at with “Ray Gunn.” “If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, ‘Oh well, it’s meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,’ and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.’”
Bird expands on the theme, pointing out there are “10 billion animated films” for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, despite them comprising the majority of the movie-going audience. Making animated films for them “shouldn’t be a controversial decision,” Bird says, “and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation [at Pixar].” (He is returning to Pixar for his next project, a third “Incredibles” movie.)
Skydance had a different take. “My thought when [they] got involved was that that they’ll go with me on this slightly different audience tangent,” Bird says. “And here it is.” Skydance CEO David Ellison is a producer on “Ray Gunn”: was that in name only or was he fairly hands-on? “Well, he was more involved in the earlier days,” Bird says. “But he got — you know, his plate became very full.” The director is obliquely referring to Ellison’s recent battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Bird won’t be drawn on whether he thinks Ellison will stick to his promise, made as part of his bid, that Skydance will produce at least 30 theatrical films a year. “All that stuff is beyond my pay grade,” he says, sidestepping the question.
While Skydance may have become the latest lightning rod in an increasingly polarised and under pressure Hollywood, Bird is a pragmatist. Later in our conversation, he notes that after making “The Iron Giant” he took his nascent idea for “The Incredibles” to Pixar. “The crew from ‘Iron Giant,’ a lot of them were mad at me initially because they felt like I was leaving hand-drawn [animation] and going to the sexy new CG,” Bird recalls. “And I said I don’t really care about the technology part. I’m going up to Pixar because they protect storytelling.”
As it happens, protecting — versus exploiting — art is one of the themes of “Ray Gunn,” which follows the eponymous private detective (voiced by Sam Rockwell) as he uncovers a dastardly plot involving Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a superstar singer with a huge secret.
For Giacchino, the trick to scoring a film filled with so much intrigue is keeping the viewer guessing. “Probably the second toughest thing was just making sure everything was always in alignment thematically, so that I didn’t give the audience something that they shouldn’t be thinking about,” he notes. (The actual toughest, he says, was an intimate scene between Gunn and Nova when they’re first opening up to each other. “It needed to really hit every single emotional beat in this perfect way,” he explains.)
Bird may have written “Ray Gunn” almost three decades ago but it’s themes of art, technology and corporate greed resonate now as much as they did in the late 1990s. He says the screenplay changed “less than you’d think” between that first draft and the finished movie.
“A lot of the things that people are saying that [the film] is dealing with that are contemporary right now in the headlines were in there 30 years ago,” Bird notes. “People are people and greed is greed and the flaws of people make good subject material for films. If that’s what’s driving the story, then the story’s not going to age because it’s about eternal things rather than things that were in the news last week.”
