Directing Duo Debuts with Kung Fu Panda

(andPOP) - It was going to happen sometime. It had already happened once. DreamWorks' 3D animation division made another movie (their first in seven years) that I unequivocally liked.

Part of the reason for Kung Fu Panda's unexpected quality is directors John Stevenson and Mark Osbourne, who are each making their debut feature. Osbourne's career began at the California Institute of the Arts, where many, MANY DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar animators have received their start, while Stevenson began his career with Jim Henson and the Muppets.

andPOP: Tell me about yourselves.

OSBOURNE: I’ve got two kids, I’m happily married, and I’ve spent the last four years of my life in a cave called Kung Fu Panda, so I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world. My background is in stop-motion animation and independent filmmaking. I studied at CalArts. I was actually a teacher there teaching stop-motion animation and while I was at CalArts I completed a couple of short films, one of which got nominated for an Academy Award and opened a lot of doors for me, one of which was at DreamWorks. It’s called More and it’s very different kind of film from Kung Fu Panda.

andPOP: (to Stevenson) How did you end up at DreamWorks?

STEVENSON: (British accent) I started with Jim Henson and The Muppet Show many, many years ago. He was my mentor, and I sort of got into the business working with him and the Muppets.

andPOP: You were a puppeteer?

STEVENSON: No, I did some background puppeteering but I was mostly coming up with new character designs and little ideas.

andPOP: You were one of the puppet makers?

STEVENSON: I wasn’t a puppet maker, no. I was in sort of a weird little niche, where I would work in the puppet workshop. Jim would say ‘I want a tap-dancing moose for this show,’ and I would do some drawings for the moose, and if Jim said, ‘I like that,’ then the puppet builders would go ahead and build it.

OSBOURNE: And Beaker...

STEVENSON: No no no...

OSBOURNE: Why can’t I?

STEVENSON: It’s unsubstantiated myth and legend, that’s all.

OSBOURNE: Well, the myth and legend, unsubstantiated as it may be, is that Beaker was inspired by John.

STEVENSON: I was rail-thin, like a piece of asparagus with bright red hair, you wouldn’t know now because I’m so old and grey, but...

andPOP: It’s still red now.

STEVENSON: Just barely, but it was flame-red, and I was also geeky, and swotty (British slang – a person who works and studies hard), and nervous...

OSBOURNE: But how amazing is that?

STEVENSON: It’s just a myth.

OSBOURNE: “Just a myth.”

andPOP: Where did the idea for Kung Fu Panda come from? Did it originate with you, or did it come from higher up in DreamWorks?

STEVENSON: It was an idea that originated in the development department at DreamWorks, and it was something that people responded to when they heard the two things: kung fu – great, hardcore, use of athletic ability and discipline – and pandas – furry, cute. It was a great mix of two weird ideas, but it hadn’t found a voice. It was languishing in the world of parody –

OSBOURNE: It made everyone kind of chuckle, but nobody quite knew what to do with it, and when we came together we decided to reinvent the idea as an epic kung fu film, not a parody.

STEVENSON: It was going the easy route with being a parody, and we just said, “how about you take that idea, and just make it a real kung fu movie that happens to be funny, but has really cool action and looks beautiful and has great production values and all that stuff.”

andPOP: One thing that struck me about the film... the majority of DreamWorks movies, they do go that easy route, and it’s a lot more difficult to make a film that’s serious. Even with Kung Fu Panda I think the snark rears its head a bit, but for the most part it doesn’t feel like a traditional DreamWorks film in that way.

OSBOURNE: We weren’t necessarily doing it in the context of... we were more paying attention to the genre of kung fu instead of worrying about what animation is doing or what DreamWorks is doing, and so...

STEVENSON: Y’know, I think it’s true... when I grew up, the only animated films in the world were Disney films, and they were rare events in my childhood. They would come along every couple of years, if that, and the thing that was most special about them was they were always timeless stories. They would just involve that story, whether that story was Lady and the Tramp or Pinocchio, there was nothing from any other world, there was just this place that you could visit only if you went to see that film. And we wanted to go back to that more timeless story that wasn’t contaminated by anything from today’s world, that just referenced itself and had its own set of rules. And one of those rules that we laid out for ourselves, which is maybe where you mentioned the snark, was because we love Jack Black, we just said, “okay, Jack’s our oddball in this world. We allow Jack to speak in his natural, comfortable voice.” So he does use anachronistic speech patterns. Everybody else we asked to be a bit more formal in their speech patterns, so you got that kind of contrast, and hopefully, we thought, that would make it an interesting, an oral texture if you like. The other thing, a choice we made, was everybody in our movie is Chinese, whether they’re Caucasian, or African American, or Asian, so we didn’t ask anybody to put on an accent. Jack speaks like Jack, Dustin put a bit more gravel in his voice, but he’s not adopting –

OSBOURNE: He took the New Yorker out of his voice.

STEVENSON: But we have Jackie Chan and James Hong and Michael Clarke Duncan, and we just said, “you’re all Chinese, you can all speak the way you usually do. The umbrella of our world allows you to speak in your natural voice because you all come from different parts of China, that’s why you have different accents.”

OSBOURNE: I think the high concept that came out of that idea, Jack being the oddball guy, was what if Akira Kurosawa shot a Jerry Lewis movie? And that was the big idea that everyone could rally around, which is let’s make a real epic kung fu movie that looks beautiful and is amazing, but has this ridiculous character that’s bouncing around in the centre of it.

STEVENSON: Again it’s back to that thing, when it was NOT coming together as an idea at DreamWorks, one of the things was “we’re gonna make a real movie,” so a real movie for us was not this sort of comedy film look, slightly over saturated, very bright. And then there’s the sort of movies that we really like –

OSBOURNE: Which is dramatic, epic films.

STEVENSON: The cinematography in those films is very graceful, very beautiful, and we just thought it’d be interesting if you could get the laughs, but have the majesty and beauty of epic filmmaking.

andPOP: How did the characters and story change as you were working on it?

OSBOURNE: In every way.

STEVENSON: You spend four years making a movie and it’s a constantly evolving process. There’s never a finished script. The script’s a living document, because we have script writers, we have story artists, a team of about eight story artists who are also writers. They draw story ideas, but it’s a constant back-and-forth, so it totally changes, plus the choices the actors make in a recording session. Suddenly you may see something that happens in their vocal performance that makes you go, “oh! That gives us a clue!” And then you go back and you change things you’ve already done. That’s one of the good things about something that takes four years; you can revisit things. If you see that there’s a way of making it better you have the chance to back and correct it.

andPOP: Do you think CG animation was the best tool for this story?

STEVENSON: I’m guessing one of the reasons you asked is that we have a traditionally animated component to the film, which we love...

andPOP: Watching it I really, *really* wished the whole film had looked like that.

OSBOURNE: Really?

andPOP: When Disney (with Atlantis and Treasure Planet), DreamWorks (with Sinbad) and Fox (with Titan A.E.) tried courting older audiences, they never made good movies, whereas Kung Fu Panda...

OSBOURNE: I think CG is vital to our story actually because we needed the contrast of the fantastic 2D dreamworld and the reality – the weight of Po is so important, is such a key element in the story that we needed to have a grounded, realistic world that CG’s great at...

STEVENSON: That kind of defined how we did kung fu, the kung fu was the most technically challenging aspect of making the film.

andPOP: And that was easier in CG?

STEVENSON and OSBOURNE: Well, it was not easier, but –

OSBOURNE: – It was like you could actually... there was more realism to it.

STEVENSON: You had to believe gravity and physics and mass and weight, and you have all those extra clues you can get with CG because of the lighting and everything. If we did our jobs right then in all the sequences where we weren’t doing kung fu, where it’s just dialogue, if we made you believe the lighting, and we made you believe that Po did weigh 400 pounds as he moved across the room, then when we start to do those big crazy action scenes you hopefully would have that sense of mass and physics, you understand something extraordinary’s happening, whereas in 2D...

OSBOURNE: It all depends on the story, it all depends on the character, and it’s not like there’s one form of animation that’s “best” or anything, it’s all just tools for telling stories.

STEVENSON: We would love if in the future, someone did something like Kung Fu Panda that was all in traditional animation, that’d be awesome.