Hey kids, I'm so happy to have seen a few very funny minutes of early footage from the latest Aardman feature, The Pirates! Band of Misfits.  Director and co-founder of Aardman Animations, Peter Lord was there to give us some insight to the madcap magic of Bristol’s most famous moviemakers.

Dig it!

The Pirates! Band of Misfits Work-in-Progress Presentation

Director Peter Lord

The Lady Miz Diva:  After viewing these hilarious clips, I have to wonder who Aardman makes films for?  There’s plenty of slapstick and physical humour, but then you have the scene featuring the theme from 2001, A Space Odyssey, with a chimp playing the drums, which no small child is going to get.

Peter Lord:  I have no idea who that’s for.  That’s a real good example because it actually works on several levels; because a three year old is going to be delighted by a chimp playing the cymbals.  I could tell you we had a story artist that came up the idea of playing the 2001 theme -- that was his idea, that wasn’t in the script.  He came up with the idea of the guy with the accordion playing it -- good joke.  Originally, the same guy that played the accordion had played the drums -- boom-boom-boom-boom -- and that was pretty funny.  But then somebody said, “Oh, let’s make Mr. Bobo the chimp play the drums.”  And there was no logic to it at all, because he’s Darwin’s servant, but then he gives a shrug as if to say, ‘I’m sorry, they made me.’  And then everyone laughed at that, so we put in the crescendo and cymbal crash at the end that wasn’t in there.  So that’s how it evolves.

And who do we make it for?  For ourselves is the honest answer. Yeah.  Who else can you make it for, really?  If you start calculatedly making a film for an audience, I’m very dubious about that.  I don’t think that works.  It doesn’t end well in my opinion.  So, we make it for ourselves {but} we’re not idiots; we know that parents will bring children who are too young to see it -- that does happen.  And you can’t stop it.  Parents will bring a three year old and a three year old isn’t going to be terribly interested in Charles Darwin, but what he might be interested in is the monkey, or the funny dancing.  There’s lots of pure slapstick because I like slapstick.  I love slapstick well done.  I love verbal comedy.  I like visual comedy.  I like satire, I like a pratfall, I like a fart joke -- in fact, there aren’t any in this.

The great thing about this film is what Amy Pascal, who’s the head of Sony said after a screening; she said, “The great thing is you’ve found a way to tell any kind of joke.” And in some way, which I’m happy to put down to serendipity that it worked out that way; that we found a structure that will take lots of sorts of jokes.

LMD:  I recently asked Arthur Christmas director, Sarah Smith what made Aardman films so different and she thought part of it was being tucked away in Bristol.  Do you agree with that theory?

PL:  That is interesting, because we are in our own world, for sure.  Which I am so aware of when we come to visit Hollywood.  So, you come to Hollywood – WOW! -- you know, here’s a place where the whole damned city is all about film.  Everybody’s thinking about it, everyone’s talking about it, everyone is working in it, of course.  Stars on every corner.  Everyone’s a script writer -- it’s all about film.  Now, in Bristol, not at all.  It’s a very small industry in Bristol.  We’re most of it.  If I meet anyone in the movie business in Bristol, I probably employ them, the few that are out there.  So, we’re certainly not Hollywood and we’re not even in London, where there’s quite a big movie industry.  So, historically we’ve set up in boondocks and we’re very, very happy there.  So, as a result, we have grown our own culture.  I think we have.  I don’t want to sound inbred -- cos you hear about that.  Not inbred, but our own culture of filmmaking, but including in that practical thing, like the way the puppets are made, like the way the sets are made, that’s a highly evolved process now, included in that ...  Perhaps it’s a sense of fun.  Even though we don’t talk about it very much; we don’t, but we know what we like, you know?  After so many pictures and projects, well, you just know.  You just know if you like that project, or you don’t like this – that’s funny, that’s not funny, you just know even if you don’t talk about it consciously.  And it could be also a culture of the sort of people we are.  For example, it’s very, very important to me that people enjoy making the film as much as they enjoy watching it.  God knows it’s five years of my life, it’s two or three years of their life -- they should enjoy it.  I want the making of it to be as much fun as it can be given it’s also hard work.

LMD:  It’s been so long since you’ve directed a feature.  What are the differences either in technology or your approach to filmmaking since 2000’s Chicken Run?

PL:  It was much easier than Chicken Run; I will say that because I loved the digital filmmaking.  Loved it, it was great.  It was completely liberating.  There was something about the culture, again the culture, or the style of filmmaking.  It was as if there were no problems, when actually there were, but as if there weren’t.  Do you know what I mean?  Like whatever I wanted, you could do; whereas in Chicken Run, it wasn’t the case at all because it was shot on film and we didn’t use much green screen and for various reasons.  It felt like we made Chicken Run in quite a constrained way.  Now, I think limitations can be good, but it felt as though Chicken Run was quite constrained and quite difficult.  I often remember saying, “Can we move the camera a bit?”  “Oh no, we can’t move the camera a bit because it will come off the set.”  That kind of thing.  Or literally, “Can we do a camera move?”  “No, we can’t do a camera move because we don’t have enough camera moving devices,” cos you need tracking, panning and titling devices and computers to run them.  So, all that and the fact that the SLR cameras are lighter, we’ve got more space, we’ve have a bigger studio, more tracking rigs, green screen.  The rapid prototype of the puppet’s mouths, I thought was a great idea.  I’ll tell you why; because to be absolutely honest with you, you lose a little bit of subtlety.  Wallace has substitute mouths, but they’re made of plasticine, and so they’re endlessly flexible.  This is slightly less flexible, but you save so many hours in the week -- and I want to say save those hours, which means the animators spends them animating, performing, instead of worrying about the damn mouth the whole time.  I always think, ‘Well, you’re not meant to be looking at the mouth, anyway.’  When you watch an actor on the screen, you don’t look at their mouth, do you?  You look at their eyes, is what you look at.  So, I love that technology, because it meant that all the animators could stay on model and it meant it was a quicker shoot.  I don’t believe in suffering any more than you need to.  Some of the animators like to suffer, they might say, ‘Oh, I shot eight frames today. God, it was tough.’  But I’d rather they shot faster cos I think it’s better to shoot faster.  I think you keep the energy level up better.

LMD:  Recently, you’ve mostly been the producer or executive producer on other Aardman projects.  Why so much time behind the camera and what has it been like to be back on the scene?

PL:  I’ve never been on the scene.  I don’t know what the scene is {Laughs}, but no, it was easy.  I was very glad I did.  To be honest with you, I slid into producing; I never wanted to.  In fact, I never even claimed that title for myself.  I slid in to help out on some other projects, including Flushed Away and there was a thing called Tortoise and Hare that never happened -- that’s how the business goes.  So, I was helping out on those projects and that was so time-consuming and necessary that I never got the free time to do my own thing.  And then we separated from Dreamworks, which was by our mutual consent.  That was fine; that was a good for both of us, I think.  And then there was a bit of quiet time and then I thought, ‘Well, if I don’t direct now, I never will.’ Which is a really scary thought! {Laughs}

~ The Lady Miz Diva

January 17^th, 2012

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