Interview

ANDERSON: I’m not an expert by any means, but that vessel did look similar to the one that we filmed on when we made The Life Aquatic [2004]. There was the main boat that we were on, which was a much older one, but we shot for a day and a half on a NATO research vessel, and that was much fancier. I think it was similar to the type of boat that you were on. But yours was Russian, so maybe ours was like the M16 to your AK-47 . . .

COCKER: I actually wrote a song on the boat—a song that you haven’t heard—which is what I’m going to finish off today. It’s called “Slush.” It isn’t really a global-warming anthem, but it did kind of strike me that that would be the end result of global warming—that we would just have a lot of slush because the ice caps would go to that kind of horrible slushy snow you get in the center of town, so often brown and dirty . . .

ANDERSON: Maybe that image will get through to people.

COCKER: Wading through . . . So I’m looking forward to recording that today.

ANDERSON: You’re doing just the vocal today or you’re recording everything?

COCKER: We already recorded all the music, but now I’ve got this idea that I want to put a kind of ramshackle choir on it, so I’m going to get 20 people in the room who supposedly can sing to a certain extent, and I’m going to have cards with directions on them, so I’ll kind of direct it. I just want people to do kind of howling noises. I’m looking forward to that, actually—it’ll be good fun.

ANDERSON: I’m looking forward to hearing it.

COCKER: I wanted to ask you something, actually. It’s an obvious question, I suppose, but on your film that you’re making right now, Fantastic Mr. Fox, you’re using old puppets—well, do you call them puppets? What do you call them?

ANDERSON: I think puppets more or less covers it.

COCKER: So you’re used to working with live actors. How have you found the experience of working with things that will do exactly what you tell them to do?

ANDERSON: Well, as it happens, they won’t. As you know, the voices are recorded before it’s animated, and that process is more familiar to me—working with actors in that way. So when we’re recording the voices, there can be the same sort of excitement that working with actors normally has—there can be the same surprises and spontaneity. But then when it comes time to animate it, I’m working with people who each bring their own interpretations to it, even if we have very carefully determined what is going to happen in the scene. Sometimes I’ll do a video version of myself doing what I think the puppet ought to do, and then I’ll discuss it with the animator—and there are many different animators working on different stages all at once. But in the process of going one frame at a time to bring the puppet to life, the animator will sort of sculpt things out, and they have somehow trained their brains to sync in this ultra slow-motion way so there’s a performance that they’re giving. And so you can find in that process that you’re very slowly being pleasantly surprised over the course of several days or weeks and saying, “Oh, look at what’s happening here . . .” Or you can slowly see the shot falling apart right before your eyes and see that it’s not working. So there’s no real corollary in live-action movies, but it’s interesting anyway—and fun.

COCKER: So the animators are kind of the nearest thing you get to actors in that process, basically.

ANDERSON: They’re the nearest you get to working with actors, in a sense, yeah.

COCKER: Have you met the animators, the people who do the job?

ANDERSON: Yes, I work with them.

COCKER: Well, let me ask you this: Many of the characters in this story are animals—there are very few people. Do any of the animators resemble the creatures that they’re animating?

ANDERSON: Well, it doesn’t necessarily work that way because there are different animators with different levels of experience who will get different kinds of shots. And, you know, some of these animators can bring great subtlety into the expressions on the faces of these puppets, which are covered with fur but have little metal bones that move under their skin. There’s an animator named Kim, for example, and she has great talent with the most emotional moments and details of the performances. And then there’s another one named Jason, and he is particularly skilled with the main character—I think he understands what makes that character funny. That’s the role that George Clooney voices, and I feel like he might be the one who is most connected to George in the performance. And then there’s another animator named Brian, and it might just be partly the shots that he has ended up with, but his scenes have a bit more of a magical feeling. He brings something surreal to them. Now, I might be projecting some of these things onto these animators because of the material they’re working with, but that’s how I’ve started to see them. We have something like 29 units going at once, so we have a large number of animators working on all those sets, and they’re each bringing something different.