“It‘s very easy during the making of a movie for one to succumb to so many pressures, and there are all sorts of things you can focus on and forget about why you wanted to make your film in the first place. Go back to why you wanted to make your film in the first place and stay true to it”
We‘d like to request you for some words of advice for young budding Indian directors?
The most important thing is that you have to love the story you are going to tell. You better love the movie you are making. I don‘t think you can play to your true potential unless and until you love your project. It‘s a very long and laborious process and you have to be passionate and committed. The main job is to inspire 100s of people working with you to be as inspired as you are… unless they aren‘t as charged and committed and involved, you haven‘t succeeded.
And how do you ensure that the team is charged up and involved?
Firstly if you love your film, then talk about it with genuine passion. Your crew, your team will feel that, and that in turn will excite them, if you talk about your film dispassionately, then you cannot expect your team to be enthusiastic about it.
I can tell you some pointers that we have used during the making of KungFuPanda….
1. Genuinely Involve your team: Right in the initial stage, Involve and ask your crew all their thoughts on the film, let them share. My co-director, Mark Osborne, our Producer, Melissa Cobb and I would always show everything to our crew. Generally it‘s quite a common thing for directors to be reticent and keep the film to themselves, especially in the initial stages, until they have themselves figured things out. But the point is that if the crew feels excluded, then they are not emotionally connected and then it‘s just a job for them.
On the flipside, if you are open right from the start, you will get to know what the crew likes and doesn‘t like about your film, it‘s hard to hear sometimes, but in the process, you will get 100s of smart people giving you ideas. Not all of them will be good, but some will definitely be and when the crew sees that some of the ideas that people gave are being included, they see the product as theirs.
Kung Fu Panda took 4 ? years in the making and throughout this period, we were improving the film and making it better. The last 6 months are very critical for any animation feature production and this is the time when the enthusiasm sometimes begins to wear out, but in the case of Kung Fu Panda the team was completely charged and they wanted to make the film as better as it could be.
2. Acknowledge Contributions Openly: When somebody comes up with an idea for making the film better, instead of taking credit for it as the director, you should publicly acknowledge and thank the person who came up with the idea. That doesn‘t take any time or money but simply by taking those 15 seconds to thank someone goes a long long way in the team work and in the product. And that doesn‘t require special computers or 100s of Millions of Dollars.
3. Direction by Delgating & Management My belief is that your job as a director of the film is sort of like the music conductor, and not of a star soloist. The director‘s job is to ensure that everybody in the orchestra is playing to their best and to the same tune; it is to empower people working for you to come up with solutions on their own. The danger is that often, people can get into micro management, but its better to trust and empower people whom you have chosen or else you wouldn‘t have hired them if they weren‘t the best.
On Kung Fu Panda, I would spend a long time writing launch documents whenever any of the processes were being started and at each new juncture in the film‘s development life cycle. These documents would include the single most important point, the emotional subtext, the camera style, the color style and all other details. With each time at the beginning of every new process, we went through really long meetings where everybody understood the story telling, the character point of view and all the other things…and when it was done things were then left to the departments. I would say, “Now don‘t show me anything until you are satisfied yourself!”
What happened was that 85% of the time, the work was good. Not necessary that they would have approached a certain thing, the way I would have, but it was about the broader picture of what was wanted and then it would take me only a couple of iterations to get that sweet spot.
People need time to think things out, and its no use popping in every two -three hours to check things. I would have the art directors and CG supervisors see if everything was right, but I didn‘t want to see it until they all thought it was good. As long as you are okay with people solving problems in their own ways and I was open to that, and as long as you understand the big picture, then it‘s about that isn‘t it? ‘The Picture‘. Some directors think that everything has to be their idea and if not, then they haven‘t directed. But that‘s not the point, direction is about giving direction to the film and the team and the project.
So you are not a control…
Of course, I am a control freak! As a director it‘s your job to be one. There are ways though and you can micro manage or you can control things by being open to other people‘s ideas. As long as it makes the film better and as long as you understand where the film is going… It‘s about giving more responsibility and more ownership to people who are working with you.
From a production standpoint, it‘s a very effective way of working and everything we wanted to achieve for the film was achieved.
There are directors like Bill Plympton who do everything on their own which is extraordinary, but unless you can do the whole thing on your own….
Your skilled team is an enormous resource if you can harness it correctly. You will have a good morale, efficiency, high quality and as long as the film works and people enjoy it, it doesn‘t matter who came up with the ideas. My job is to make the best film possible.
What was it about Kung Fu Panda that initially attracted you towards it? Was it the script of the film that pulled you to it?
There never really is a finished script, we are always writing and rewriting. When I came on the film there was an idea and a title. The original storyline that had been developed to go with Kung Fu Panda wasn‘t appealing to me. It was more of a parody of martial arts movies. I love martial arts movies a lot and I didn‘t want to make a parody of it, because a parody doesn‘t have much from an emotional viewpoint. I thought there were a lot of great stories to be told with martial arts, instead of making fun of martial arts, I sought to make a great movie that understood the conventions of martial arts movies. It could be funny at the same time as well, you can make a comedy out of something you love and respect. And when you are doing it out of the affection for the subject, there is a very big difference!
What we tried to do was make a real Kung Fu movie. The Kung Fu fight scenes were really Kung Fu and accurate, we didn‘t do karate or jujitsu or taekwondo. We took a long time to figure out how it was going to work with the anatomy of our characters, and that took a lot of creative invention from our people. We put together a group, called fight club, Rodolphe Guenoden was in charge of making sure that all the actual Kung Fu moves were accurate, and because he is a very good classical animator, he would animate the 2D fight scenes before they were done in 3D and the artists could analyze his drawings….
At the same time we wanted the other part of martial arts films too, we wanted our film to have heart and emotion. We wanted to make a real film, silly and funny and we wanted our action to be very exciting.
So the process of story development was on throughout
Yes! Of course there is a strong story and script to begin with, but in terms of improvisations and iterations, we were working on the story all the way through the 4 and half years, and our story board artists, writers, everyone contributed to the iterations, improvisation, it was a living document, changing and getting better.
It was always going back and forth….
We were always working and reworking sequences. Even in the voices, the performances, the nuances, for some of our very complicated sequences, we would record as much as 15 times just trying to get the best performance. The sequence with Po and Shifu when he admits he has no idea, just to get the actual expression, we recorded it 15 times. It‘s a hard scene to get right, to give Shifu the hint of how to train using food.
A lot of these ideas, you know what you need to do but not necessarily how to do it. We sometimes would say Big Fight Scene to come here, sometimes we would say Shifu will train Po and we knew what we wanted there, but it was about cracking how to handle that in the best manner. If you go back and look at your film, very often when you want to find solutions, you will see clues. Shifu initially says you can‘t do the splits until you have done it for 10 years and when Po does the split for the cookies.. it just shows him the way.
Very often what happens is when you have a story problem you try and look out of the film, but usually if you look back into your own film, you always have the answer in there. You have to listen to your movie, you have to make your story with love, if love is in the DNA of the story and in your team you will find the solutions. You will find that you have sown good seeds and the good will and positive thought in the atmosphere will help you if you will let it do so.
It‘s very easy during the making of a movie for one to succumb to so many pressures, and there are all sorts of things you can focus on and forget about why you wanted to make your film in the first place. Go back to why you wanted to tell your film in the first place and stay true to it…..
The interview time for the telephonic conversation with Stevenson was up, but we felt that it had just begun, John has promised part 2 of this wonderful interview to AnimationXpress while at X Media Lab in Suzhou, China.
If you are a big fan of Kung Fu Panda and have any questions that you want to ask Stevenson, mail them to us and they might find their place into the 2nd part of the interview.