The Incredibles Commentary

The Incredibles commentary with Director Brad Bird and Producer John Walker.
==Transcript==
*(music plays)
*BRAD BIRD: This is Brad Bird, writer and director of The Incredibles.
*JOHN WALKER: And John Walker, producer.
*BIRD: Welcome to the audio commentary and right away I would like to comment that we had different music for the first time for the opening logos, the Disney and Pixar logo, written by Michael Giacchino. And we were concerned that if we had the usual Randy Newman music coming out of Boundin', we were not changing the mood as we wanted to. And Michael, I think, hit it right on the head.
*WALKER: And how great to see such a wildly different short film in front, both coming out of the same studio.
*BIRD: Right, different sensibilities, one studio.
*WALKER: One brand name.
*Helen: Do you have a secret identity?
*Bob: Every superhero has one.
*BIRD: This opening... I wanted to begin the film with something that was unexpected. And most superhero movies begin with the big "whammo-blammo" thing. And I thought it we started in this kind of strange... You know, the film's beat up and old and we're looking at them in some kind of personal documentary sense, that would put the emphasis on them being people. So, they're superheroes but you're seeing them being decidedly un-super here. They're just sitting around talking about being super. I thought that was already subverting the audience's expectations. And the interesting thing, or the thing I was going for, anyway, was the fact that they're talking about things that they think their future will involve. So, Frozone is the ladies man, even though we later see him married. Bob is talking about settling down, although later he has a problem with it. And Helen can't imagine settling down and she turns out to make the transition very well. So, that's a little comment about what we think our future is gonna be versus what it is.
*WALKER: And at one time, we had Buddy Pine in there.
*BIRD: That's right. We cut him because it felt like it was giving away something.
*WALKER: Right.
*(music playing)
*(siren wailing)
*BIRD: So, now we are into the "whammo-blammo". The idea here was that once everybody had settled down to this documentary thing, you hit them with a left, and launch them into outer space.
*WALKER: The aspect ratio goes from 1.33 to 2.39.
*BIRD: Suddenly the image clears up and the sound gets great.
*WALKER: You don't have the sound coming out of one mono channel.
*BIRD: This was showing the golden days. So, Janet Lucroy, who directed the lighting photography on all of this stuff, we talked about, with Lou Romano, about having this be more saturated in color and golden in hue to give the idea that everything was at its best in this time. This is more comic book-y kind of staging: Bigger and everything's kind of broader. The colors are broader and the poses are bigger and everything's... the superheroes the way we're used to seeing them.
*WALKER: We certainly labored over design of the Incredi-bile which you only see in this sequence.
*BIRD: Right. They did a great job on it. The amount of cheats to convert the car are relatively few, which is sort of amazing.
*WALKER: Yeah.
*BIRD: Because the car really does kind of change shape. So, we do all this work and then... it goes by in two seconds. You just kind of go, "Can we create another five sequences where the car converts? To get our money's worth?" But I think that's the aspect of these films that is delightful, is there is enough detail in them that they can stand up to multiple viewings. Certainly Pixar is well known for going the extra mile for the amount of detail. That's right.
*WALKER: And nunace. We'd joked that it would be great to have the Incredi-bile scene later in the movie with a baby seat in the back with Jack-Jack, (LAUGHING) going to the grocery store.
*BIRD (LAUGHS): Somehow he managed to hold on to that. Yeah, yeah.
*WALKER: He had it in the back, just covered up.
*BIRD: Yeah, in fact, Teddy Newton, who did character design with Tony Fucile for the film, did a fantastic drawing in the earliest days of all the family in... Actually, they were flying.
*WALKER: Right.
*BIRD: Everyone was... In my earliest version of The Incredibles, everyone could fly except Bob.
*(WALKER LAUGHS)
*BIRD: It was kind of a sore point with him, and... Teddy did this fantastic drawing of all the family flying and then Bob, like, underneath them in a car, a station wagon.
*(ALL LAUGH)
*WALKER: With his arm out the window, with the fist up, you know? Yeah.
*BIRD: "To the rescue," it said.
*WALKER: I had that drawing pasted to my door for the entire four years of the movie. "To the rescue." I always felt like Bob in the station wagon, with everybody flying above me.
*Helen: ...survive.
*Bob: Thanks, but I don't need any help.
*Helen: Whatever happened to "ladies first"?
*Bob: Whatever happened to equal treatment?
*Mugger: Hey, look! Wait! Look, the lady got me first.
*Helen: Well, we could share, you know.
*Bob: I work alone.
*Helen: Well, I think you need to be more...
*BIRD: So, right here, we're watching some, I think, extraordinarily good animation by Dave Mullins and Kureha Yokoo on Elastigirl and some wonderful stuff on Bob. Everybody pitched into the stuff, so I'll never be able to keep up.
*Bob: You just stay here. They usually pick up the garbage in an hour.
*BIRD: Beautiful ice effects by Mach Kobayashi here. Under Sandy Karpman's supervision and beautifully designed by Ralph Eggleston, the art director. And here's some fantastic animation by Carlos Baena. For some reason, the animators from Spain, we have two of them on this film, and they shared a room, they could do the most extraordinarily, fantastic physical stuff. I mean, it's nuanced, it caricatured, it feels weighty and physical and it just... Uh, I got to the point where if I had something that was really hard to do, physically, I'd go, "We must go to Spain." You know? "Go to the Spaniards."
*(music playing)
*(bomb explosion)
*BIRD: Here's our character, Bomb Voyage, who at one point was named "Bomb Perignon". But the Dom Perignon people didn't think that was too good of an idea, so we had to change it. Dominique Louis, who is a wonderful production designer here at Pixar, provided the voice for Bomb Voyage.
*WALKER: And Jason Lee is doing the voice for Buddy Pine, who also does the voice fo Syndrome. He's playing himself 15, 20 years younger.
*BIRD: Yeah, we were worried that he wouldn't be... We would have to use a kid. And we thought it would be better if we could get Jason to sound like a kid because oftentimes they sound like different people. They don't sound like the same person. So, we had to do some experimentation both with having Jason raise his voice a little bit and change the speed and the way he says things, and then also pitching it up slightly in Pro Tools. And we found this blend of the two that worked very well. There's a lot of wonderful animation here by Andrew Gordon and Travis and all kinds of people getting in the flavor of this comic book moment where everything is kind of, you know: The guys face each other and they say "Bomb Voyage" and "Monsieur" and "incoroyable." But it's all meant to be done broadly. And yet, not in a way that mocks it. It's a fine line we're trying to tread here, but we don't want to do this in a campy way. We want to say that we believe in this world, but also kind of enjoy that it's really kind of absurd.
*WALKER: Yeah.
*BIRD: So, here I have this little shot that I had in from the very first pitch. It's the kind of thing you normally don't see in a superhero film. There's a very quick shot... you'd have to go back, home viewers. Bob kind of winces before the train hits him. And it's him preparing for the fact that this is gonna hurt a little bit. It's not gonna kill him...
*WALKER: But it's a train. It's a train. It's gonna hurt.
*BIRD: It's moving fast. So, I just thought, that's the kind of moment that we tried to get in the movie a lot. Part of my original feeling for this film was that we would always have those moments where superheroes have feelings too.
*WALKER: That's right, and it hurts.
*Police officer #1: Bomb Voyage.
*Bob: Any other night, I'd go after him, but I gotta go. Don't worry.
*WALKER: Check out the lighting. Isn't this great?
*BIRD: Yeah, it's great. Janet Lucroy and company did a fantastic job.
*WALKER: There's a beautiful exterior of a church that you never see again.
*BIRD: Yeah, you gotta realize that for John and I here, this has been, like, a four-year journey and we're blasting through these four years. Because things that we had meetings over and fought over... Here's the reverend.
*WALKER: Excellently voiced by...
*BIRD: By our producer, John Walker.
*WALKER: That's right. Let's go back and listen to him again.
*BIRD: There are nuances aplenty there.
*WALKER: Unbelievable.
*BIRD: We watch these things and all of these battles and struggles that we had go by in an instant. And it's like watching your kids grow up, or something like that. Before your eyes.
*Man: I pronounce this couple husband and wife.
*(music playing)
*Helen: As long as we both shall live.
*BIRD: So, this is very sort of romantic lighting and it's kind of meant to emphasize the harshness of what's coming now, where the images are jittery and blown out and very gritty and grainy. And it's meant to be a sudden jolt. But unlike the opening, we're in full aperture ratio. So, it's like we're looking at 1.33 old Academy footage, but we've zoomed in on it so the grain is bigger and it's got that old, overcooked, you know, "dragged behind a car" feel.
*Newsreel announcer: Five days later, another suit was filed by the victims of the el train accident. Incredible...
*WALKER: And I love this use of courtroom sketches in there, as well as Teddy Newton, who's the fabulous narrator voice here.
*BIRD: Oh, yeah. Our character designer and overall crazy genius.
*WALKER: That's right.
*BIRD: Teddy Newton does the narrator. For some reason, he has a knack for doing these old movie voice guys.
*WALKER: Sort of industrial film-esque.
*BIRD: Yeah, kind of "news on the march" guy. The courtroom sketches were done by Peter Sohn, who's an excellent guy that worked with us, as did Teddy, on The Iron Giant.
*WALKER: And a shot that drove us crazy, with all of these miscellaneous humans.
*BIRD: And the thing is you won't even know because if you do them right, nobody nieces them.
*WALKER: It was just hard to do them so that no one would notice them.
*Mrs. Hogenson: I don't understand. I have full coverage.
*Bob: I'm sorry, but our liability...
*BIRD: Here we cut to Bob's current life. And I wanted to take a very different approach on the way this stuff was presented. I talked with Lou and Janet about desaturating all the color here. So, it's almost like we've dialed down all the color that we saw in the prologue. It's kind of lost a lot of its life. It's kind of governed by Bob's feelings. The home has a little more color than the Insuricare stuff. And the other interesting thing that we did here that I think worked out well, is I actually pushed the camera back in 3D space and zoomed in on this stuff so that it was flat. If you pull the camera back in space and then zoom in on things the dimension gets lost and everything compresses and feels claustrophobic. So, all of these shots are compressed and they make the world feet tighter and flatter and the idea is to not move the camera very much when you get into Insuricare. And have everything feel compressed and claustrophobic.
*Bob: ...but there's nothing I can do. Shh!
*Mrs. Hogenson: Thank you.
*Bob: I'm sorry, ma'am. I know...
*WALKER: And Jean Sincere was playing Mrs. Hogenson.
*(Mrs. Hogenson sobbing)
*WALKER: Here's Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph.
*BIRD: Yeah, kind of a strange thing on the movie was the very first voices that we recored were all writers. Wallace Shawn is a playwright, a really great playwright. Sarah Vowell is a wonderful author and essayist. They did our first voices.
*WALKER: Right.
*Woman on PA: Morning break is over. Morning break is over.
*(pencil falls)
*(door opening)
*BIRD: Bernie, Dash's teacher, is voiced by Lou Romano who is our production designer. This was a sequence that was kind of in and out.
*WALKER: In and out, in and out, 'cause the movie was 107 minutes, the longest movie Pixar has ever made. This was a sequence that we really talked about just not doing to get the time down and to save money, essentially. But we decided in the end that it was...
*BIRD: It never played as well without it. It was important to see everybody's normal life before you started getting outrageous with it. And seeing that it caused problems.
*WALKER: It became too much of a story about Bob and at the beginning of the movie you didn't see the rest of the family enough if you cut this sequence and the one following it, which is Violet's introduction.
*BIRD: Right.
*WALKER: That was a note from John Lasseter, our executive producer. He said leave them in.
*BIRD: John is very good about making decisions based on what works. Even though we were running a little bit long, he saw the value of keeping the sequence. He came to the defense of it. And I thought that was good.
*WALKER: Absolutely. It just meant a little more work. I was glad to see it back.
*BIRD: Yeah.
*Bernie: ...do anything. No!
*(car whirring)
*Helen: Dash, this is the third time this year you've been sent to the office.
*BIRD: This is a very subdued sort of scene, setting up that there's problems in the family that go with having these powers and never being able to use them. And the goal on this stuff was to show that Helen's trying to be a good mom and sticking to the rule book. But she, herself, doesn't really believe the stuff that she's saying. These kind of scenes are challenging in their own way for an animator because they're not particularly physical. They're confined scenes and it's all about expressions and timing, and keeping things animated but not making them too big.
*Dash: ...same one.
*(people cheering)
*(school bell ringing)
*BIRD: Here's our heartthrob.
*WALKER: Tony Rydinger, who's been through a few designs. Tony almost made it into the film in a different incarnation. But at the last moment we decided he wasn't heartthrobby enough, and he got a last minute redesign.
*BIRD: Yeah, I think the problem was these characters are very hard to build. They take a lot of time. They're like instruments that the animators are going to play. So, they have to be capable. It's like building a car for a race driver. Or a Stradivarius for a musician. And it takes a long time to build. So, we put all our juice on our main characters and there was kind of a gulf between our main characters and our secondary characters. We kind of had to just bite our lip and be okay with it. I was ready to be okay with it. And fortunately, again, our executive producer, John Lasseter, pulled the little... Stopped the train brake very late in the film, almost at the last minute, and said, "We gotta make these better." Everybody was really happy that he did because if John says fix it, then everybody can just go, "He says fix it." Of course, we all wanted to fix it, but we were running out of time and money and it was wonderful that John made the choice to get that picked up. It makes a huge difference and makes it feel like one world.
*Dash: You're making weird faces again.
*Helen: No, I'm not.
*Bob: You make weird faces, honey.
*Helen: Do you have to read at the table?
*Bob: Yeah.
*Helen: Smarter...
*BIRD: So, here's the family life and Lou and Janet and I talked about warming things up a little bit because even though it's in Bob's more claustrophobic part of the movie, home is not a bad place, it's a nice place. And he's just really not engaging as much as he needs to.
*Helen: ...attack on teacher's chair, Jerry.
*BIRD: This had got a lot of wonderful opportunities for character stuff. And it reminds me of a million dinners that I was in when I was sort of Dash's age. And we used to have these very sort of crazy dinners dinners with my family. Now that I'm a father, you know... Dinner is still the place where you collect all the characters in the house and let them bounce off each other around the little square. And so, it's a wonderful opportunity to set up the family part of this film.
*Helen: It is leftover night. We have steak, pasta... What are you hungry for?
*Dash: Tony Rydinger.
*Violet: Shut up.
*Dash: Well, you are.
*Violet: I said, shut up, you little insect.
*Dash: She is.
*Helen: Do not shout at the table.
*WALKER: One of the hardest things to do in this scene was keeping track of all the stuff on the table.
*BIRD: On my table.
*WALKER: It was a nightmare, you know.
*BIRD: And you know have these meetings, where they're going, like, "The broccoli has moved. The broccoli, there's no continuity on the broccoli." Or "The gravy..." Yeah, it was this thing that Nigel said at one point. Where everybody's at each other's throats, everybody's sick of dealing with digital food, you know. People are starting to yell a little bit at each other. Nigel raises his voice and says, "Can we get back to the issue of the gravy?"
*(BOTH LAUGH)
*BIRD: So, I kept coming back to him with that one. "Please, can we get back to the issue of the gravy?" But there was meat juice and gravy and "What about the peas?" and "Where's the broccoli? It's moving."
*WALKER: "It's gone, it was there. Where did it go?"
*BIRD: "Clearly, the broccoli is next to Dad in this angle and..."
*WALKER: Finally, it's just, forget it.
*BIRD: Nobody's gonna care. Throw it around, it doesn't matter. We worked somewhat to get it. We got it to the point where you shouldn't notice if you're a normal human being.
*WALKER: Right.
*BIRD: Um...
*WALKER: If you want to, you can probably find some inconsistencies.
*BIRD: You can find food continuity problems in this film.
*(WALKER LAUGHS)
*Frozone: Will do. Good night, Helen. Good night, kids.
*(door closes)
*Helen: Don't think you've avoided talking about the principal's office.
*BIRD: You know, I would love to just stop at every instance and give each animator who did these scenes their proper due. In the first stuff that we did, and this is among the first stuff that we did, the film was broken up a little more, to give everybody something to do. So, it's changing from animator to animator somewhat quickly. Eli Fucile also did the voice of Jack-Jack right there, did this laugh, and we loved it so much, I wanted it to be in the movie. He's the son of one of our supervisors, supervising animator Tony Fucile.
*Frozone: What does Baron Von Ruthless do?
*Bob: He starts monologuing.
*Frozone: He starts monologuing.
*BIRD: Anyway, I would love to stop at every instance and point out... Right here is wonderful animation by Mike Venturini and Mike Wu.
*WALKER: "Wu-Dog."
*BIRD: Mike Venturini did Frozone and Wu-Dog did Bob in this scene. And this is a very atypical scene for animation. You don't get too many times, a scene of two guys sitting in a car talking. If I were an animator, I would love to animate these. I tried to write something that would be interesting to animate. I think this is wonderfully contained animation. I think they hit it out of the park. I love this stuff. And beautiful lighting, too. People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, "The animation genre." It's not a genre. A Western is a genre. Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids' fairy tale. But it doesn't do one thing. And, next time I hear, "What's it like working in the animation genre?" I'm going to punch that person.
*(WALKER LAUGHS)
*(music playing)
*WALKER: You're using depth of field, which you use all through the movie, moving, you know, foreground characters out of focus...
*BIRD: Yeah, you know, a lot of people, when they do CG, want to take advantage of the fact that there's no light issues in CG, in terms of depth of field. You can make everything deep focus, like Citizen Kane. A lot of people go, "You can have infinite depth of field, why would you want it otherwise?" Well, I could see that for certain projects. Certainly, it works fantastically well in Citizen Kane. But in this film, I wanted to use the focal length to focus you on what to look at. Other Pixar films have varied the focal length, too. So, it's not like I'm saying that we're inventing it on this. I'm just saying that oftentimes it makes things a little trickier to do, because you're having to constantly pull the focus around, like an action-filled live action film. But to me, when you're dealing out this much information and the film has got a lot of fast-moving scenes in it, it's one more tool you can use to direct the audience's eye. And so, I wanted it in a lot of scenes.
*WALKER: And you used it a lot. We did a lot.
*BIRD: I did. And it was a pain in the butt. Because, you were having to send scenes back, to get the focal length right. Here is one, you know?
*WALKER: Yeah, sure.
*BIRD: We pulled the focal length on Frozone there.
*Police officer: Now, I want you to do?
*Frozone: I know, I know.
*WALKER: That's a great effect on there.
*(crashing)
*BIRD: Yeah. Mark Andrews supervised all the storyboarding of the film. This was an idea that they had, that they kind of had to sell me on. You know, I was like, "Come on. A bullet's not gonna freeze in space. Come on, the amount of..." They were like, "It'll be cool." And they saw that I was kind of, you know, there was a crack definitely open in the door, and I folded.
*WALKER: So you made the copsicle.
*BIRD: Yeah, the copsicle. Yes. (LAUGHS) No, no, I had the idea of freezing the cop. I just didn't have the idea of the bullet frozen in space. And that was the one they had to sell me on.
*(door closing)
*(Bob humming)
*WALKER: I love that he hums his own theme music here, as he comes in.
*BIRD: Craig did a great job on that, too. This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
*WALKER: Mine too.
*BIRD: I think that Holly and Craig did a great job on the voices. I think that it's extraordinarily well animated. It starts out as Ron Zorman. Um, eating the cake. And then, it turns into Dave Mullins, for Helen busting Bob. Then it's Andy Schmidt, when they start to really argue. And then it's John Kahrs. Each one of them were given pretty long runs, once the argument starts, so they could control both characters, throughout the scene.
*WALKER: That's a great scene.
*BIRD: And this was a little bit, in the early days, a tough sell to Pixar, because this was one of the first scenes we did in storyboarding. And I think Pixar thought that, you know, we were intending to make an hour and a half long Bergman movie, showing marital conflict. But to everyone's credit, when they saw how it fit in with everything else, they came right around and went with this scene. This was an interesting scene to write, because when people argue, what they're fighting about is not what they say they're fighting about. To communicate one thing while saying another is a challenge.
*Helen: ...anymore.
*Bob: It's psychotic. But keep...
*BIRD: I-I just think that it's really wonderful stuff. It is animated, it doesn't feel like it's simply reproducing live action. But it feels real, believable.
*WALKER: She didn't stretch for a long time, at the end of the fight. He was too threatening to her.
*BIRD: Yeah, people were uncomfortable with that moment. And then, when she says, "This is not about you," because Bob is bigger than Elastigirl. And it felt almost like, you know, spousal abuse or something like that. And I thought, well, wait a minute. I don't have to change the scene. I just have to make Mom... Mom is his equal. And so, if she just uses her stretching to become physically, you know, to kind of say, "I will stand up to you," then...
*WALKER: And can tower over you, should I choose to.
*BIRD: Right, once I did that, everyone was okay with the scene, and I didn't have to change a word.
*WALKER: It really is an excellent... Because Mom doesn't like to use her powers, and she does it there for great effect.
*(dog barking)
*Computer on PA: Request claim on claim numbers 158183 you.
*Mr. Huph on PA: Haven't you got him yet? Where is he?
*Computer on PA: Mr. Huph would like to talk to you in his office.
*Bob: Hmm. Now.
*(BIRD LAUGHS)
*WALKER: Poor Bob.
*BIRD: Yeah.
*WALKER: He's the only guy whose cube is filled with a giant pillar.
*BIRD: Yeah, right.
*WALKER: He can't fit through the door.
*BIRD: That was an early idea that somebody came up with. It might have been Ted Blackman, somebody. I don't know whether it was Lou or... But the idea was that his cube is the only one with a support structure on it, to make it even more confining.
*Mr. Huph: I'm not happy, Bob. Not happy.
*BIRD: So, there's a little cactus over Bob's shoulder there, that is in the shape of Huph. And there's great art direction things here, with Lou Romano and company, where the chair kinds of looks like it's frowning. The desk is kind of pointing out at Bob. All the little pencil things are pointed in Bob's direction.
*WALKER: Can you imagine a more uncomfortable chair than the one he's sitting in?