A Q&A with Brad Bird

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Forget the notion of a reclusive, tortured genius or a computer-nerd artist who confuses "cool" with a new mouse. When director Brad Bird took the stage at a Q&A media event on October 30 at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood, he was as energetic and outgoing as a standup comic, bringing with him a bag full of voices to entertain a crowd of approximately 70 journalists. Pete Hammond from Maxim magazine was invited to act as moderator and asked several of the first questions, but then it was thrown open to the audience.

Best known for directing "The Iron Giant" (1999) and "The Incredibles" (2004), Bird covered a wide range of topics, including his early years working on "The Simpsons" TV show, motion-capture, R-rated animation, and, of course, his newest film.

He opened with a funny, self-deprecating routine about how tough of a "sell" it could have been to convince Pixar to let him make "Ratatouille": [here comes voice number one] "It's about cooking, it's set in France, there's this rat and he gets advice and inspiration from an imaginary dead chef, and the rat does all the cooking while a human is basically his puppet. Then, let's give it a title that nobody can pronounce." But, Bird added, "At Pixar it really doesn't get any more complicated than is the idea fun, and is it something that seems like it has lots of opportunity for entertainment . . . and the decision is done. It's not any more intellectual than that, which I'm happy about because it's kind of the way movies were made 80 years ago. Nobody's saying that the heads of Hollywood studios 80 years ago were great guys, but they did have instincts, and they trusted them. They just went [voice number two goes gruff and raspy], 'It's a BOXING movie, I love it. Sold.' So it was not pie charts and focus groups. It was just what appeals to emotion."

Interviewer: This movie obviously had a different kind of pie chart [laughter from the room]. All that food and everything, I have to ask you, what kind of research did you do when you wrote this, because it's very, very real in terms of French cuisine.

Bird: Yeah, well, there was a lot of research done prior to my coming onto it, because it is such an exclusive world, and I had to kind of jump in the middle of it. But I actually found that the most useful thing for me was because Pixar is a fairly big company now, we have over 600 people, you get people who have started down a lot of different paths and then decided to go into animation. So some people were ready to be lawyers and even passed the bar and said [in a whiny voice], "I don't wanna have to do this," so there were several people who had gone to cooking schools and trained to be chefs.

One of them, Michael Warch [manager of sets and layout], worked every day on the film, and if we had any food questions we asked him. So I found the people that had worked in restaurants and in kitchens and just sat down with them and asked a lot of questions. People like [Chef] Anthony Bourdain came in and talked to the group. Thomas Keller, who runs the great French Laundry--one of the few American restaurants to get three Michelin stars--he was a consultant on the film and designed the ratatouille that Remy prepares at the end. So we got so many kitchens working, there were several trips to France that were made where we got into high-end French kitchens and asked people questions. There was a lot of research done. It's funny, because it's for a film that has a completely absurd premise, but there is a lot of research put into getting details right so this absurd stuff feels like it has a force to it. I mean, John [Lasseter] knows everything there is to know about cars and racing and is a racing enthusiast. One of the reasons he was interested in having Paul Newman, other than he's an awesome actor, is that Paul Newman knows a tremendous amount about racing, and even though this is a movie about talking cars, the racing stuff is really kind of credible and real. So that kind of detail is something we love to do. We love to plunge into these new worlds and really understand them.

Interviewer: I think it's part of the reason it's so successful, too, because a typical audience, they really see the detail.

Bird: They may not know why something feels credible, but I think they can sense it, and when you go through and do these extra little details--like we noticed that cooks have all kinds of little scars on their hands from burning themselves and cutting themselves--and they don't think anything of it. In fact, they're kind of proud. It's kinda like that scene in "Jaws" [voice number four, sounding a bit like the sea captain in "The Simpsons"]: "Remember that? That was a particularly nasty cheese . . . but it was really good," you know? So we put that in there, not that most people notice it, but some people did, and we like having that sense of detail.

Interviewer: I understand there were some changes made concerning the rats. Could you talk about that?

Bird: Well, one of the things that I changed--I entered the movie a little bit late--the idea was so rich and it could go in so many directions that we were having trouble finding the core of the movie. And one of the decisions that I made was that I didn't want to recognize that people were a little bit screamish--squeamish (or screamish, if you wish)--about rats, and so they had sort of de-ratified them. They sort of made the tails shorter and put them all on two legs. And I thought that was a mistake. I felt like it's better to have them act like rats, and then show one that's choosing to walk on two legs, and using it as an emotional barometer for how ratty or human he feels at any given moment.

So once that decision was made, we really studied the way rats move--the way they lead with their noses and the noses are kind of always looking around, sensing for food. We actually had a couple of rats in a cage in Pixar and we'd let them out and they'd crawl around. I mean, they weren't creepy at all. They were actually kind of sweet and they're kind of smart. These weren't sewer rats or anything--they were well fed and clean--and it was nice to have them around because it constantly made animators focus on how they moved--that there's a certain way they move that's actually very charming--and if you mix that stuff in, and this is the thing that Disney used to do back in the old days, if you mix in that natural realistic behavior it's much like the stars mixing in with the story of a rat cooking by pulling a guy's hair. On the one hand it's absurd, on the other hand you're getting details right. If you sprinkle them in there, it increases credibility through the whole thing, and that's true of movement as well.

Interviewer: Did you have any involvement at all in the creation of the Blu-ray disc?

Bird: I did not have as much involvement in all the special materials, because of the time crunch, that I did on "The Incredibles." The stuff we have is great, but I'm saying I had to kind of turn it over a little bit more and let other people drive it, then I made notes and I looked at all the stuff. But I didn't drive it as much as I did on "The Incredibles."

But, the quality of the Blu-ray disc? The guy who was the technical director on "The Incredibles" named Rick Sayre did "The Incredibles" DVD, and I think he pushed the technology to the wall. I'm really proud of that DVD, and the image quality and all that. He's totally against edge enhancement and all the tricks that you guys know about. And I was so blown away by what he did on "The Incredibles," even though he didn't work on "Ratatouille" I asked him to come in and do the "Rat" Blu-ray. And he pushed Blu-ray to the wall. I was flabbergasted when I saw how good the picture quality was on the Blu-ray. I had a tough time telling it from our 2K $100,000 projector, you know--full-on image, it is really amazing. The richness of its detail, the color accuracy--you know, if the film is going to reside out there after its theatrical run, I can't think of a better way for it to reside. If you get a nice player and a big screen, you will have an amazing experience on this film.

Interviewer: When will we see "The Incredibles" on Blu-ray?

Bird: I don't know. I don't know that information. This is all top-secret stuff. I was told that they could tell me, but then they'd have to kill me. I said, "I prefer not to, I'll wait." I'm sure it's coming, but they plan this stuff very carefully, and people smarter than I am about this aspect have all these things in mind. We're happy to have two out ["Cars" and "Ratatouille"] on the same day.

Interviewer: When you know that a film is destined for a High Definition medium like Blu-ray, does it change the way you do things?

Bird: Well, it actually doesn't, and it's because I've always been kind of a--a foul word comes to mind, but I won't say it--really hard guy when it comes to quality. I really stay after it. When I was working in television, we were sending our stuff overseas, and the guy overseas particularly in the first season, they were doing animation by the pound. They didn't know the difference between "The Simpsons" and "The Muppet Babies." They were just, Get it out, get it out, get it out. So I would sometimes assign tricky shots, and they wouldn't do them right because it would take them longer to do them right. So they did it kind of a quickie way, and they'd go, "I could fix it, but you won't make your airdate." And I'd say, "Okay, we'll put the bad version on the air, but you're gonna fix it anyway, because when we go into reruns, that shot's gonna be fixed." So I'm famous--and not in a good way, people are going, "Oh God, here comes this guy again"--for actually hanging with shots.

When we did "Iron Giant," there were about 10 shots that had flaws in them and I made them fix them, so that when it got to home video those shots were fixed. I did the same thing with "The Incredibles," I did the same thing with "Ratatouille"--the home version actually has improvements that the movie didn't have--so I am already there in terms of making it as good as it can possibly be, and I want that to continue all the way through to home video.

Interviewer: Could you talk about what you did to "Ratatouille"?

Bird: There are little things like, you know, there's a shot of Linguini on a motorcycle and Remy's hanging from his hair but the top tuft of the tail wasn't reacting to the wind, so I said "TOP TUFT!" and they said, "We won't make it for this film," and I said, "Okay, we'll save it for the Blu-ray." So there are lots of little things like that. John Lasseter came up with a great idea: [Remy] should put on a little chef's hat like he does in the posters. And I thought, that's perfect. At the end of the movie, they will give him a chef's hat, and that's the little thing that said he's earned it. We couldn't get it done in time for the movie, but it is on Blu-ray. On the last scene when he has his own bistro, he puts on a little chef's cap. But a lot of little things like that.

And sometimes, you know, you're just supposed to use the home theater mix to spend a day to make sure that the experience you design for a big room sounds the same way in a small room. I always slip in a few extra notes that I didn't get. If they give me any kind of crack in the door to make a film better, I always abuse the privilege. So no, I don't ever let these things go until they pull them away from me.

Interviewer: Patton Oswalt is quite the food fan, and he does this whole routine about food. At what point did you bring him in?

Bird: We don't really think of stuff like that. We don't think of how appropriate someone's work on their own is for what we want. We just hear the voice and think, "That would be perfect for this rat." I didn't respond to . . . Patton [Oswalt] does, for those who don't know Patton, some pretty adult material in his comedy. Really funny, but definitely adult. For me, it was all about the feeling of the character. We don't cast voices for how famous or not famous somebody is, like other studios--well, you know, it's not just the one you think I'm mentioning. It's also a lot of the others. There is a belief that people go to animated films to hear celebrities, which I think is really crazy, but we won't go into that. With Patton for me, it was the fact that he has a passion about what he likes and what he doesn't like, and you can hear it in his comedy. If he ever goes off on what he thinks is wrong with the world and why it's wrong, he goes fully into it, and when he thinks things are great he goes fully into it. And he also has a voice that sounds small. It sounds like it's coming from a smaller person, physically, but it's a big personality. So that seems really perfect for Remy. All I had to do was hear him doing his comedy routine he did about a steakhouse where he's talking about steak, and it's all about food, and it was so right-on and funny I brought him in, and John loved him, and we went with him, and he did a beautiful job.

Interviewer: And Peter O'Toole did a beautiful job.

Bird: Thank you. He was the first voice that I heard in my mind when I was writing the character, and I hoped to God he would say "yes," and it was one of the happiest movie-moments in my life when he agreed to do it, because he's one of my all-time heroes.

Interviewer: With something like Blu-ray, are you more conscious of shooting even the bonus features in High Definition? I'm wondering early in the process you might be thinking about bonus features.

Bird: We're ahead of the game on it. I go back and forth a little bit on how much the audience should know. Guys like Spielberg don't even do commentaries, and sometimes I think that's right. I haven't done that yet [laughs], I've always done commentaries. On "The Incredibles" we started really early filming a lot of our meetings, and there's a lot of boring stuff that we don't have on there--but we also caught some unscripted moments that show that making movies is hard.

There's a tendency, when people make these materials, to just have everybody slap on a happy face, usually after the movie is done, and they tell people to [lapses into another voice] "Group around this desk that we've set up to make it look like you're working on it, and act like you're working on a piece that was done seven months ago. And SMILE when you're working, so it looks like you're a happy worker!" Well, these films are hard, a lot of times people fight because there's a lot of creative people who all have different opinions, they all want the movie to be as good as it can possibly be, and it's CONFLICT, you know? It's war! It's a good war, but it's war. So we brought cameras early on "The Incredibles" to follow that process and I think had some really great special features. And every film that we're doing at Pixar after that is sort of adding to that . . . covering the whole content and trying to show the uniqueness of the beast and how many different aspects to it that there are. So people are aware of it, we're using Hi-Def now for all this stuff, and I think John is bursting at the seems about all the capabilities of Blu-ray, and how many different ways you can approach a film. He looks at it as film school in a box. If you're really into it, as we both were as kids, you may not even need to go to school. You can just slap on a disc and learn every aspect of making the movie.

Interviewer: Can you talk briefly about "1906" [Bird's film-in-progress]?

Bird: It's live-action. There is a tendency for the entertainment press to believe that once you move out of animation into the world of [slips into a pretentious voice] "respectable filmmaking, REAL filmmaking," the way some people call it . . . "Uh, when are you going to do a REAL film?"

I want to do a lot of different kinds of projects. I have animated films that I still want to make, I have live-action films that I want to make, I have films that blend . . . you know, I like Westerns, I like musicals, I like horror films, I like political comedies. You know? I just like a whole bunch of different kinds of films, and I hope I get to make a lot of them before I kick the bucket.

Interviewer: If we could go back to "Ratatouille," Patton Oswalt is a real foodie.

Bird: I didn't know that, either! I hired him, he was working on the film, and then I found out he was a foodie and I thought, bang, dead-on! He comes into a town and it's like he's got some S.W.A.T. surveillance thing, where he hunts down the greatest restaurants--the up-and-coming ones, the ones off by the wayside, the ones that have the best ribs or whatever--and he knows it going in. He got to the point where he was like sending me emails with menus and circling, "This is the one we had, this is AWESOME , you have to go to this restaurant." So I didn't know that about him. He was working on the film before we found that out, and then our jaws dropped, because he was just perfect for the character. He has really strong opinions about what's good and what's not good, so you should talk to him about it.

Interviewer: I was wondering how much improvisation you allowed Patton Oswalt to do on "Ratatouille."

Bird: It was pretty strict. These films are kind of precision-tooled because animation is an extensive process. You have to know exactly where you're going. You can't do like some live-action filmmakers that won't be mentioned, where they just shoot every scene from a thousand different angles and then throw a ton of footage to a team of editors who do a cut every two seconds, regardless of the nature of the scene--I'm kidding; don't get me off on this track [laughter]--but everything has to be very carefully planned.

There were opportunities, though, where I encouraged them to improvise, and their improvisations were hilarious. The only thing is, you have to pick one, so you'll pick one, and then there'll be these three other really funny ones that you can't use. On "Simpsons" we used to try to look for opportunities when I was there, like we'd have Albert Brooks come in and do a voice. And the writers knew Albert Brooks was a writer himself, so they would kind of say "Here's the shape of the story, but as long as you cover this base it'll fly, you can do it any way you want." And he would rip like 10 different ways, and the nine other ones were just as hilarious as the one that they used. It was just like an embarrassment of riches. He just would go off! So I think that you can do that. In this particular one, there wasn't a ton of opportunities for improv. But when there were opportunities, Patton was perfect to take care of it.

Interviewer: What about "Ratatouille" and the amount of detail? Did you do anything differently knowing it would be on HD than you would with DVD?

Bird: Well, it's the same thing. I'd like to tell you something exotic, but that's exactly what it is on HD as well. I think anybody who's seen "Ratatouille" in a decent theater knows how much detail there is in the movie. And unlike a live-action film, we don't get any of that free. We can't buy an old antique dish and bring it in. With a live-action film, often times set guys go out in the world and they find things or things they have in storage, and they choose them very carefully. But they might be real, they have a history to them. In animation and CG we have to build all that stuff, and we have to put in all those little scratches and those little breaks. People have to design them and paint them, so every single thing is put there, and every single thing is a decision. All those little dents in a copper pot we put in there, so we have a TREMENDOUS amount of detail in these things. And we put that detail to be viewed on a really big screen, and we are assuming that people will have the best projection and the best sound. Unhappily, a lot of theaters don't. They have not the greatest. They have loose gates so that their films have less chance of breaking. But what happens when you loosen a gate is, yeah, your film doesn't break as much, but you also never get perfect focus. It's a lot of little things like that that exhibitors do--not the good exhibitors, the best theaters don't do it--but they do that to be able to not really have to watch their films and look after them much.

The thing about Blu-ray is that it's a perfect copy of the film--the color balance is exactly what we intend it to be. If your monitor is calibrated, you're gonna see it the way we made it. And with Blu-ray, in particular, if you blow up the image--I mean, it'll look great on a Hi-Def monitor, but if you have a projector and you want to blow it up a bit, it looks really good because . . . you know what it's like when you make things larger. You see more problems. And this is just jaw-dropping. I expected it to be good. I just didn't expect it to be that good. It's really great. So you are gonna see all of the details that we put in. All of them.

Interviewer: And you have to do all of that on schedule. Are you happy with the way it turned out?

Bird: You know, fear is a good motivation. I described it to the crew at the time as . . . . You know that Wallace & Gromit thing, "The Wrong Trousers," where he's putting down track in front of the moving train? That's what it was like, and it was really scary and really exhilarating. It was scary because it was a lot of responsibility and not very much time. It was exhilarating because I had the best crew in the world who, if I could tell them what I wanted, it was there. Once the story was figured out and everyone knew we're goin' there, I can't tell you how good that feeling is. I mean, everybody, the enthusiasm level and the dedication was just astonishing. Like I said, if I was clear about what I wanted, it was mine. So that was the exhilarating part.

You know, we didn't really know what we were making when we made it. We were just trying to make it as good as we possibly could before the clock ran down. It was funny because Mike Giacchino, who also did the music on "The Incredibles," at the end of the music session on the last day, and he's kind of listening to it--it's a unique score, too, I'm actually very happy with that score, I hope he gets some recognition for it--but on the last day we were there he goes [imitating Giacchino], "I don't know what the hell we just did, but I think I like it." You know? And I looked at him and it's like, that, in a sense, sums up my whole experience too.

You know, it's weird. He imagines this ghost of a fat chef, and if you stop to think about it, it's weird. And yet, it just kind of came out, and it came out like, "Uhh-huh, this'd be cool," and it wasn't any more intellectual than that. So yeah, we're really happy with it. I don't know how it happened. I hope it happens again.

Interviewer: Now that you're considered one of the premier animated directors, is there any other animators working outside of Pixar that you admire?

Bird: Living or dead? [laughter]. Miyazaki is amazing, you know. I think he's fantastic. I like Nick Park's work. Any time Henry Selick chooses to make a film, I'm there on opening day. I think John Musker and Ron Clements work really well together, and I'm really happy that they're doing a new hand-drawn feature over at Disney working with John Lasseter. Yeah, there are quite a few of them out there. My sons were into "SpongeBob" there in the early years and I saw a lot of those early episodes and really liked them. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in animation.

I'm hoping that more different kinds of films get made in animation. I'm looking forward to seeing "Persepolis." I haven't seen it--in fact, I haven't seen most movies, I hate to say--but I'm looking forward to seeing that because it's an unusual subject matter, the approach doing it in black-and-white is unusual, and I hope that the world opens up to using all kinds of media, whether it's hand-drawn, or CG, or puppet, or clay. So, yeah, film is great. For the ones that are no longer with us, I love John Hubley, I love Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones was a huge influence on me. Chuck Jones working with Michael Maltese, some of those films are the funniest little jewels and animated films ever made. So yeah, there's quite a few of them I admire.

Bird: What do you think of movies like the upcoming "Beowulf" motion-capture that some people, even the Academy I hear, are having a hard time defining if it's animation or if it's live-action.

Interviewer: Well, I think that mo-cap is a wonderful tool, and certainly just look at how Peter Jackson has used it to see how effective it can be. I think the dirty little secret of most mo-cap is that the really, really good stuff that you like has been massaged a lot by animators. Gollum, Andy Serkis did a magnificent job physicalizing that character for "Lord of the Rings," and I think that's brilliant. But I also know that those scenes were massaged a lot to look the way they do by animators after the raw mo-cap.

The most emotional scenes of Gollum were actually all C-frames. The animators looked at Andy Serkis's performance, but they didn't use the mo-cap. They C-framed it. The scene that impressed me was where he says, "Smiegel?" And he starts to remember parts of himself that he's forgotten, and you can see it in his eyes and it's magnificent. And I found out that that was entirely animated. It was not mo-cap. And that's what people don't talk about, and I think that does a tremendous disservice to animators. There's nothing wrong with animation. Animators are not technicians. They're artists, they think about performance, and I would implore actors to view animators as brethren. We use different techniques, but we are as much about how does somebody stand, are they hesitant, what are they thinking, are they hiding their thoughts--you know, how is that descriptive in the eyes--and so I feel like if you don't muck with mo-cap, you don't get the nuance of real actors and you don't get the selective caricatures of animation.

The best mo-cap that I've seen has all been messed-with by animation, in much the same way as the best rotoscope done in Disney's time was really mucked with. The stuff that doesn't look so good, like the prince in "Snow White" where's he's going [goofy voice] "One SONG" you know that shot? That's where they just kind of took what the live-action guys did and they just kind of traced over it. But if you look at Cruella de Vil, which they shot live-action for, but then the animators looked at the live-action and they said, Okay, I get it, I get how she moves in, that was kinda good, I'll use that, and I'll use that little gesture she did there . . . otherwise, I'm changing everything, you know? And Cruella is gone over by an animator. There was a live-action base, but it's only about 20 percent of what you see.

That's where I stand. I'm not against mo-cap, but I think that it has limitations if you don't mess with it. "Kong" is also great animation, Peter Jackson's film, and that has a live-action base--again, Andy Serkis.

Interviewer: Have you ever considered making an R-rated animated film?

Bird: Sure. But it's baby steps for Hollywood, because somebody has to pay for this stuff. The studios, they're full of really smart individuals, but overall they're not so swift in their chance-taking. They're kinda, you know [yep, another voice] "Can't we do this thing we did last year and slap another number on it?" This summer was a great example. I mean, that's what Hollywood wants to do. We ["Ratatouille"] are the only big original movie this summer. People were saying, "Well wait a minute, there's 'Transformers' and there's 'The Simpsons,'" but I'm sorry, "Transformers" was a TV show and so is "The Simpsons" . . . and it's still on the air. You know? They might be very enjoyable films, but they're not original. They're continuations, or reiterations.

I think that there absolutely could be [an R-rated animated film]. Unfortunately, only R-rated animated film that's been made has been made with a sort of teenager's view of what "adult" means--which means a lot of boobs, and a lot of swearing, and a lot of blood. It doesn't mean a weightier subject matter, or something that's more sophisticated, and that's the unfortunate aspect of it. Years and years and years ago, Ralph Bakshi kind of knocked at the door and suggested possibilities for what animation could be, particularly with "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic," which I thought had some really interesting things in them. But they were done very cheaply, there was a lot of, you know, where you're defining "adult" by a 14 year old's view of what "adult" is. And I would like to see somebody do something on the level of the most sophisticated live-action films using the medium of animation, which is caricature, to bring about a different light.

Again, I haven't seen the movie, but something like "Persepolis" is interesting to me, and a lot of the Japanese films are interesting. What I would love to see is Disney-level craftsmanship applied to something in that arena. Anyway, we'll see. It's always changing.

Interviewer: Do you consider yourself an auteur, and if so, do you think of someone like Max Fleischer as an influence?

Bird: Uhhhhh, I really like "Popeye." I can't say that it's influenced the way I make films. Probably the Superman films are more . . . I love the staging of the films and their economy, that they could tell fairly complicated stories in seven minutes. I thought that was pretty impressive. I think those films are kind of underrated, you know. The only example in "The Incredibles" of people really setting production values on animated superhero films was basically the first superhero film, which was Max Fleischer's "Superman." In between that and "Incredibles," superhero animation was always done at a lower budget, and so I was happy to have a big budget for animation going into it, and Fleischer's film was certainly an influence there.

Auteur? I don't know. It's always sounded like a pretentious word for me. I think of myself as a filmmaker, and I encourage them being looked at as films first, and an interesting side bit of trivia is that they're animated. That's the way I'd like to see it looked at, rather than all us animators sit over here alone at a table and we don't intermingle with a Hitchcock or a Howard Hawkes, or Kubrick or Coppola, you know? I would hope that we could all be considered filmmakers who have used different tools.

Interviewer: How influential were the years that you spent working on "The Simpsons" in respects to the way you now approach character? And what did you bring to the show?

Bird: Well, I was originally brought on "The Simpsons" because they liked "Family Dog." I knew Jim Brooks' work, and I was a huge admirer, and I knew Matt Groening's work through "Life in Hell," which was one of my favorite comics. He also comes from the Northwest, which is where I come from, so his sense of humor is really familiar to me. I really feel comfortable with it, and it cracks me up. So when they asked me to join the project I was very happy about it. I originally was supposed to write a script, when I got there, along with consulting the way I did--helping them go from those Tracey Ullman one-minutes, which were very simply staged, not a lot of camera movement. And they knew that it was going to have to be more cinematic as a TV show, because the scripts were way more complicated.

I was originally supposed to write a script, but when I got there the writing was so amazing, I though, Geez, man, I'm just going to sit here and learn. But visually, I knew I could help them out, because the scripts were sophisticated, and a lot of the jokes were actually difficult to pull off visually. A writer can write something and you get how it's supposed to be, but there are really tricking staging issues that if you don't do it just right, the joke's going to fall apart. And at that particular moment in animation, all of the people who were working on "The Simpsons" were coming from the world of TV animation. And TV animation was done a certain way. You know? You always begin with an establishing shot, when somebody is talking you cut to a close-up of whoever is talking, and if somebody is moving you capture a medium shot, and it's all about at eye-level. So, high angles, low angles, wide angles, flattened telephoto angles--all that stuff was gone. Also, don't have a lot of fast cuts, because each time you do there's a new background that's generated--we don't want to create more work. So there are all these rules that can be strict or complicated. They said, look we really can't do complicated movement because these things have to be done on-schedule and we have to send it overseas, but we can use sophisticated filmmakers. So I urged the storyboard guys to look at Kubrick and look at Orson Welles and all these filmmakers, and if the joke required it, go ahead and bring it on, you know? If we're imitating "The Shining" in a Halloween episode, let's imitate Kubrick's use of wide-angle lenses, and let's draw it in there so it's a wide-angle lens, he uses symmetrical composition, and let's do that!

The animators were originally drawing things kind of flat and I said, "No, man, really push the perspective." At first they were confused by it, then they got lit on fire and they were like, [stoner voice] "YEAH, MAN, we're filmmakers. We just have to make films REALLY FAST." It was exciting, and Jim Brooks created an atmosphere that would indulge you. So if we're doing a lampoon of a Schwarzenegger movie like "McBain" and there's a scene a milk truck but it explodes like it's filled with gasoline, well, once I saw that I realized you've got to shoot it like Joel Silver, right? You've got to have 400 cameras and make that thing blow up again and again so that one explosion lasts like two minutes. So, I said, "Okay, you gotta have a million different shots," and they hated me in the production company because every new shot needed a new background. "Are you CRAZY?" And I'm like, "Come on, man, that's the joke!"

So that's what I brought to it, was just kind of get the language of film in there and get everybody excited about that, kind of direct the director. And what did I learn? I learned everything. I learned a tremendous amount about writing from these guys, because they're brilliant writers. Brooks is an amazing writer, Sam Simon is an amazing writer. There were a whole bunch of amazing writers there, and the best thing that I learned there was how to see trouble coming, and to not linger over decisions. There's a sense in movies of fretting constantly and worrying everything to death. In TV you don't have time for that, because if you have 24 episodes to do . . . .

It's like that episode of "I Love Lucy" where she's got to pull the bon-bons off the conveyor belt. She tries lingering over the bon-bons and pretty soon the bon-bons are piling up and she's like holding them back, and pretty soon she's overwhelmed by bon-bons. That's what it's like. If you linger over one episode, the other episodes start piling up. So I saw episodes that were screwed up . . . I mean, they were in the last bits of production and they were going to be on the air in two weeks, and the first act ran horribly. And I saw Sam Simon go, "What if we begin with the end of the episode where everybody is chasing Homer and Bart with torches and ready to kill them, and instead of killing them they say, "STOP, let me tell you how it began" and then go back to the beginning. Now, it's all the same material-it's just reorganized so that the audiences immediately knows, they're just completely confused, The entire town is trying to kill Homer--and then it went back to the beginning. Now that one simple change and that one bit of new dialogue that we COULD animate in the couple of days we had made the whole episode work. And it was screwed-up before that. So I saw really creative problem-solving, and that saved my butt on "Iron Giant" because we had half the time and a third of the money of all the other animated features at the time. It saved my butt on "Incredibles" even though I had Pixar and tremendous financial resources-we were making a movie that was three times bigger than anything they made. We did have more money, but that was about planning everything in advance and really being economical about it. And on this one, it again saved me because it was time again. I had great resources, but I had this much time. So TV, I learned everything from "The Simpsons." It was a really great school.

(Edited from a tape recording by James Plath, with a few of the inaudible interviewer questions reconstructed; Bird had a microphone and came across loud and clear.)

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