Brad Bird Tells Kristian Harloff Ray Gunn Began With a Misheard B-52's Song

Brad Bird says his new Netflix film Ray Gunn started with a mistake: the first time he heard the B-52's song Planet Claire, he thought it was a new version of Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme.

I got to see Ray Gunn early, at what Bird described as the first screening people got to check out, and I told him when he walked in what I thought as I left: it's just a cool movie. We covered its long road to the screen, his run from The Iron Giant through The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, why he turned down Star Wars, and what he is doing on Incredibles 3.

Brad Bird traces Ray Gunn back to Planet Claire and Peter Gunn

My sense from the film was that Bird doesn't just love making movies, he loves movies. I could see classic film noir and science fiction blended together, with a tribute to Casablanca here and there. When I told him that, he agreed.

The origin, he said, was unlike any of his other ideas. Hearing Planet Claire, he first thought it was a cool new take on the Peter Gunn theme, then thought it sounded like a weird monster sci fi movie from the '50s. Then it clicked: Ray Gunn, the guy's name, just like Peter Gunn, only retrofuturistic. "I just kept thinking about that idea and adding to it," he said.

Bird proposed the project before The Iron Giant. Development was done, but the studio he was developing it with got absorbed into Warner Brothers, which didn't want to make it, and that is how The Iron Giant happened. "It haunted me," he said. He described his ideas as a big shop floor where different things are being assembled, and said he has five or six he wants to make as badly as he wanted to make Ray Gunn, though there is usually something about them that makes them harder to finance.

Why Ray Gunn ended up CG instead of hand drawn

For the longest time, Bird wanted Ray Gunn to be a hand drawn feature like The Iron Giant, only with a bigger team and more polish. He noted The Iron Giant had to be made quickly and economically even though the movie was ambitious. He still thinks Ray Gunn would have been really cool hand drawn, but said some money people see that as old fashioned and think audiences won't go for it, which he doesn't agree with.

He was clear he has no problem with CG, pointing out he has made more CG movies than hand drawn ones. Ray Gunn is a big movie, and if it were shrunk down it wouldn't be what he wanted. People were willing to give it the size of commitment it needed if he did it in CG, so, in his words, no harm, no foul.

I mentioned a scene toward the end, a landscape, that was so gorgeous I could fool myself into believing it was live action. Bird's response was that it's hopefully not realistic, but believable. He pointed to Bambi, where people remember the forest as realistic even though any shot is an impression of a forest that isn't detailed. The light is placed in just the right spots and the brain creates the memory of detail that wasn't there. One of the magic things about animation, he said, is choosing where to put the detail and encouraging the mind to do the rest.

Bird credits Andrew Stanton's rule: "Make me care"

When I suggested it was also a matter of getting the audience invested enough in the characters to feel like they are right there, Bird brought up Andrew Stanton, one of the Pixar people he has gotten to know over the years. Stanton's simple way of putting it, Bird said, was "Make me care." It is not about being academically realistic; it is about being emotional, and whether you can get somebody to care about characters that never existed.

Casting Ray Gunn meant letting the movie know best

A lot of that depends on chemistry, and the cast of Ray Gunn is full of cool people, including Tom Waits and Scarlett Johansson, as discussed in our conversation. When I asked whether he knew right away who he had to go after to play Ray, Bird said sometimes you know best and sometimes the movie knows best and you are catching up to it.

There have been times, he said, when his first casting choice didn't work out, he ended up with his second, and then realized the second was much better than the first would have been. The movie knew something he didn't. So he has learned to try to be in control only a chunk of the time and to surrender when the movie is insisting on something else. I told him I understand that completely; sometimes I wish a decision had worked out, and later realize the other thing was supposed to happen for a reason.

I also brought up Alan Tudyk. I work on Katee Sackhoff's podcast, and he was on her show recently, and the way he maneuvers his voice stood out to me. Bird said animators love it. The game in animation, he argued, isn't marquee value. Some people hire actors so they will go on talk shows, rather than picking them for how inspiring they are to animators. For him that is the whole game, because animators are magicians too, and great readings push them to work hard to meet that bar. The best actors to use, however famous, are the ones that get animators excited.

Bird says producing is about a vibe that is intense but relaxed

You hear all the time about animators and effects artists being worked to the bone, so I asked how he balanced that on a movie this big. Bird said he could spend an hour on it, but the quick answer is that it's part of the job as a producer, which he is on Ray Gunn alongside several other people. The goal is a vibe that is intense but relaxed: everyone works hard, but in a way that respects their abilities and their home life.

He said becoming a father helped him a lot as a director, because everyone has their own day. Some people's days start out tough, maybe a hard time with their kid on the way to school, and you have to approach them in a way that doesn't add to their frustrations. He compared it to an orchestra: everyone is gifted or they wouldn't be there, and a solo improvisation will sound great, but if they all improvise at once it will be horrific. The job is getting them to harmonize for the benefit of the movie and unlocking the artistic part of each person.

When I asked where that passion started, Bird said he has had his share of failure, and it sobers you up. He began at age three with drawings that he stressed were not impressive, like any three year old's, but they were sequential. He would show one, pull it away to reveal the next, and tell the story as he went. He thinks he was trying to make movies even then. He was making animated films by 11, and that taught him the larger language of cinema.

I told him I thought one scene of Ray sitting with Venus had a bit of a John McClane feel, with what looked like a white tank. I wasn't sure it was intentional. His reply: "I love Die Hard."

Why Brad Bird never pitched Ray Gunn at Pixar

Despite his good relationship with Pixar, Bird never took Ray Gunn there, and the reason was simple: he wanted to aim it at a slightly older audience. He said people don't realize there is an "ungodly amount of pressure" in animation to stay in a very narrow spot, with forces greater than his wanting everything made for a five year old. There is plenty of entertainment for five year olds, he said, and animation is too great an art form to limit to that.

The pressure extends to technical things like a PG versus a PG-13, he said, as if animation has to stand in its little corner of the cinematic universe and not move. He repeated his argument that "animation is not a genre"; it's an art form that can do any genre, with its own strengths and weaknesses. He feels it is too limited in terms of what kinds of ideas get backed.

I pointed to what Netflix has been doing with animation, and Bird agreed that Netflix will back a weird idea, noting it backed this one. Still, he said there were moments where the film had to be PG for financial return reasons, and he felt it was judged differently from a live action film. Things no more risque than what was in Seinfeld drew a "what are you doing?" response. He said he wasn't saying that came from Netflix people, only that the pressure existed, and that whatever is okay in a PG live action film should be okay in an animated one. He thinks animation is considered a children's medium and that it's very hard to break from that.

A fan on our podcast makes that same point often, that animation is not just for children. I brought up Arcane, which I consider one of the greatest things I have seen in animation in a long time, and told him that with Ray Gunn I felt like I was just seeing a movie with cool characters. He added that great movies have great characters all over the place, citing Robert Duvall's character in Apocalypse Now.

The gloves, Safety Last and failing tech shaped Ghost Protocol

Bird called the Mission: Impossible films "surprisingly fluid." He said he thinks J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk were in Dubai, saw the building and thought it would be cool for something, without a specific plan. Bird brought in the idea of the gloves. He said the franchise wasn't looking for a house style, so the Brian De Palma, John Woo and J.J. Abrams films are all different, he thinks his is different again, and Christopher McQuarrie is another style. Tom Cruise, he said, embraced that.

The gloves idea came from Harold Lloyd's silent film Safety Last, which he and Cruise had discussed; it was funny but also suspenseful, with Lloyd hanging from that clock. Another idea he pitched was that the great technology wouldn't always work, and they loved it, so throughout the film the technology fails and the team still has to do the mission.

He confirmed the jump went Iron Giant, Incredibles, Ratatouille, then Mission: Impossible. The project was huge, on five continents or something like that. Paramount wanted 3D, but Bird said "I'm not a 3D guy, but I am an IMAX guy," and talked them into shooting half an hour in IMAX, boarding what he called the Chris Nolan train. But it was very daunting, he said, and intricate. I remember, when I was working at AMC or Collider, I can't recall which, everyone saying the fourth one was the best one.

Bird turned down Star Wars to make Tomorrowland

Star Wars was offered during prep for Tomorrowland, Bird said, which made it a hard decision because George Clooney had already committed and they were scouting. He thinks everyone expected him to drop Tomorrowland and was stunned when he didn't. "I felt like um Star Wars was going to get made and be very successful whether I did it or not," he said. As he was saying there are always armchair quarterbacks, my phone rang, and it was my wife, which was not timed, I swear.

Bird said the idea he, Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen wanted to explore was worthy: that we create our future every day by what we do, and that there shouldn't be today's fatalism. He said that is even more acute now with AI, where everybody seems to say we're heading for a cliff, and compared it to lemmings who won't stop running. He is willing to accept they didn't nail it, but is proud of big sections and of what they set out to do.

He said he and Lindelof flagged during the screenplay that people might expect the whole film to take place in Tomorrowland and be disappointed by what is kind of a road film. They decided a Tomorrowland that closes its gates, a gated community policing who gets in, is not the future we want, an idea he still thinks is worthy. He has noticed that people who were advertised to expected something else, while those who come across it with no preconceptions like it more. That's partly why I rarely watch trailers, including the Ray Gunn trailer that came out the day before we spoke. I went into The Long Walk knowing nothing, and it became one of my favorite movies of that year.

Bird wants studios to own theaters and movies to cost less

After Tomorrowland, Bird said, the pandemic happened, and a lot happened. He has several projects he is as excited about as Ray Gunn, including the earthquake project. The bulk of that would be great as a series, but you don't want the earthquake and fire on a tiny TV set, so another approach would need someone to be adventurous.

I told him some movies pushed into theaters feel like streaming movies to me, like a recent romantic comedy that didn't do well. Bird said for sure: you are asking people to leave home, maybe get a babysitter, and pay for expensive tickets and popcorn. Among the thousand paper cuts the business has suffered, he said, is that movies cost too much to attend, which makes backers conservative, which makes films more predictable and less worth leaving the house for. He would love studios to buy theaters again now the consent decree has changed. He also thinks movies have to cost less, which he called the possible good side of AI: more economical tools for artists.

On AI more broadly, he said you can't use it to decide for you and can't expect it to be artistic: "it is not artistic." It should be a tool for artists, and could be a tool for curing cancer, but it carries the dark and light side technology always has, and we can't cede the fate of the planet to a machine. When reports in recent weeks said AI could take us all out, I wondered if no one listened to James Cameron in 1984. Bird said it is the human way to abuse good things, and that The Iron Giant touched on this, with a piece of technology wrestling with its function.

The Iron Giant's box office stumble was about a closing division

The Iron Giant is an animation classic now, but I believe it didn't perform great at the box office, and Bird agreed. Bird said he came along at a small window when that kind of film could be made, partly by accident, and he asked for process things in his contract, not money. When Quest for Camelot didn't perform, the studio wanted to shut the whole division down, but it was cheaper to finish his film. They planned to shelve it until an opening came along, and were shocked by its high test scores. By then it was too late to lay the track an animated film needs, especially one that isn't familiar IP. When people saw the poster, he said, they thought it was a Japanese film.

I think the marketing just failed that movie. Bird said that is the way it has gone down in the history books, but it stuck around, and they were very happy that it did.

Brad Bird hands Incredibles 3 to Pete Sohn, with familiar characters teased

Bird is writing and producing Incredibles 3 with others rather than directing. He said he doesn't have infinite time and wants to make originals, adding he doesn't want to be a hundred and still holding on for financing. Just as he jumped into Ghost Protocol, Pete Sohn can give his best to The Incredibles. "I wanted Pete," he said. Sohn worked on The Iron Giant and both Incredibles films, storyboarded the Jack-Jack and raccoon sequence in the second movie, and voiced Emile, the main character's brother, in Ratatouille. Bird said Sohn sees movies as a giant salad bar of the arts.

Bird said he didn't want to phone it in at all. He had ideas for the second film that never found a spot, and they fit better in this story. Asked for a tease, he offered: "You know, there might be some characters that you know well."

Michael Giacchino is doing the music, and Kimbra did songs for Ray Gunn. Bird cuts temp music elaborately to help people see the movie he wants to make, but said it's never as good as a great composer's own themes. On The Incredibles, Steve Jobs liked the temp so much he wanted to license it, which Bird said would have cost well over a million dollars, and he told Jobs it would never be as good as what Michael would do, though Giacchino hadn't done a movie then. Bird said Giacchino has something with Warner Brothers: "Let's see if they make it." I hope they do, because Werewolf by Night was cool.

No rush on Ray Gunn 2, but never say never on Star Wars

I think Ray Gunn will do very well, and Bird said he hopes so. But a sequel would put his other ideas back on pause. He noted people called Ray Gunn a dream project, and said those often disappoint, though a good idea that excites you is a good idea regardless of age. He is not anxious to do another one.

On a hypothetical Lucasfilm call for an original Star Wars film, Bird said "you never say never." He never imagined doing Mission: Impossible, but when asked what he wanted to see in a spy movie, he listed six things and got to do five; the sixth just didn't fit. Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams were open and not constrictive, and he said that mindset would be necessary, because films take too much energy not to be into them. Each film, he added, is like going back to square one, as the financial community's perception keeps shifting.

Brad Bird on why he made Ray Gunn at all

I asked about audience funded films like Obsession and Backrooms. Bird said anything that gets new visions onto the screen is really cool; when it's the same 15 ideas over and over, it starts to feel like musical chairs. He named directors he admires, including Greta Gerwig, the Coen brothers, Edgar Wright and Christopher Nolan, and wants to see what they want to see. The reason Ray Gunn got made, partly, is that he wanted to see it, "and the only way to see it was to make it."

It really is special, a blend of classic noir and science fiction that pops with color and blends in darkness, with comedy and action, and as we agreed, it goes good with popcorn.

Should Brad Bird make Ray Gunn 2, or spend his time on the original ideas he still has cooking?