Where did the idea to have that song?
He blessed us to have Tori sing “Don’t You Worry About A Thing.” We literally were sitting around like this, going “Wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it be great, if Stevie Wonder then came in for real?” Again, you’re thinking, “Yeah, but who is going to do that?” Universal Music said, “There’s this demo, and maybe he could write with Ryan Tedder, because Ryan Tedder‘s keen to be part…” And the two of them came up with the new song “Faith.” Ariana [Grande] came in and duetted and it literally fell into place like that. That doesn’t happen.
Was that further on down the process?
Yeah, that was right at the end. That was right at the end. We’d done our second sort of preview, and we were trying to think, it would be great to have an original now.
It’s been a few months since I’ve seen the movie. Is it just over the end credits?
It’s over the first two minutes of the end credits. There’s an animated sequence of squid. The last thing you’re left with, musically, is Stevie Wonder and Ariana with a liquid fireworks display with squid. It felt like a good way to send you on your way, do you know what I mean? It’s such an unashamedly joyful song. It doesn’t pull its punches. It’s out there to make you feel good. That’s amazing. When you get a blessing from someone like Stevie Wonder, that means a lot to me.
How old are your kids?
They’re now 13, 11, 9, and 6.
This is in their wheelhouse then.
Yeah.
Did they give their thumbs-up? Were you worried about getting your own kids’ approval on it?
Yeah, yeah. They only saw it maybe two weeks ago, was the first time they saw it. They hadn’t seen any of it.
What? Hadn’t you worked on this for years?
Neither had my wife. My wife hadn’t seen any of it either. Whatever was online, there were trailers and things, they’d seen that, but they hadn’t seen anything else.
Did you do that on purpose?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I just, firstly it’s quite healthy to just get on with your thing. Here’s the thing as well, when you’re with a friend or in my case my wife, I’d know by the way she moved one eyebrow, if that hadn’t quite connected. I don’t need that. You couldn’t get anyone more supportive, but at the same time we both know each other so well that, I don’t know, it just felt healthy to just carry on with this thing. Between us we have these four sons to raise, and she has her own work. Let’s just carry on with it, you know? She knew what I was doing during the day, but she didn’t know, “Oh, Rosita builds a bunch of contraptions and they end up feeding the family and no one in the family notices”, you know. Didn’t know any of that.
So, to preface this, this movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in a huge theater.
Yeah. That’s the first time my wife saw it.
Oh, she saw it there? You said two weeks ago. I thought …
The kids saw it two weeks ago. They weren’t with us in Toronto. It’s quite expensive moving children around the planet. We’ve been living in Paris for the last three and a half years, because that’s where the studios are. We went back to London two weeks ago to show it to my friends and family, who I’ve missed for the last three and a half years. It was very emotional, it really was. In all the right ways, you know. The kids saw it, and yeah.
Even your thirteen-year-old liked it?
Yeah, it was a really big deal. They actually play the voices of the piglets. It’s sort of based on my family life, anyway.
Do the piglets have accents?
They just did American accents. Yeah.
Talented kids you’ve got there.
Thank you. We’re training them. No, but here’s the thing. For most British kids you grow up watching a lot of American movies, a lot of American cartoons. I always remember one of my kids, when he was young, he said, “There’s a boy in my class, Jamie, he’s so good at running that one day he’s going to be American”. When you get really good, you become American. Isn’t that lovely? I thought it was really funny.
Technically really wrong.
I had to say, “Son, it doesn’t quite work that way”. Also, they’re little bite-sized chunks of voices. It’s like, “Goodnight, Mummy” or something like that. You could do that. If he had to do a scene, he would fail.
In terms of the cast itself, you’re going with the star model. You’re trying to get names to bring in and…
Sure, but you’re also trying to get people who can sing. They all sing their own parts.
Although Matthew’s character doesn’t, does he?
He does at one point. Although his was different. His was different. He wasn’t … It wasn’t about his singing voice at all. He sings “Call Me Maybe” in a fun sort of way at one point. No, Scarlett, Reese, Seth, Tori, Taran, they all had extraordinary singing voices, and that was the key, that they would sing their own parts. They fell in love with the idea of the characters, but it was the chance to do something that you don’t normally do, rock out or sing “Firework” or whatever it is. It made it fun. I think it’s just nice, even if you don’t know that it’s them singing those parts as well, I think you just feel that they’re really…you have to be invested in the performances at the end. You have to be rooting for them at the end.
Do you have to convince any of them? I’m sure some of them were like “Oh, an animated Illumination movie. I’m into it”. Many actors, I feel like, when they talk about it they say they were very nervous about singing, unless they have sang professionally before.
Right. I think it was probably the fact that we had Harvey Mason Jr on from the get-go, who was producing all this stuff, and everyone loved him. Everyone knew him. Even if they hadn’t worked with him, their friend had worked with him on some other movie. He’s done so much. It was like, “Oh, I’m with this guy”.
I’ll be safe.
I’ll be safe in the singing booth, and I’ll be safe with Garth because he’s done a bunch of other stuff with actors so I think they felt like they were in safe hands. It’s not just in the studio. It would be in the run-up to that. Sharing the demos, working on rehearsals, so that when they get to the studio, they don’t feel like they’re suddenly being dropped into the frying pan, that it’s something they’ve worked up to. It’s different for someone like Tori, this is her life. Actually you don’t need so much. You send her the demo and see her the next day and out comes “Hallelujah.” sented with, I guess.
How did you know that Taron was such an amazing singer?
I didn’t at first, but we all loved him, and somebody said, “Oh, he can sing”, and you’re like “All right, yeah”. You know that thing where actors’ agents say [they can do anything]? You say to the agent, “It’s very important in the scene that he knows how to swim” and they always say “Oh, the guy’s a fish. He’s swimming every day!” Then you get the actor in the water and they’re drowning, they’ve never swum in their life, they have a fear of water, and you’re like “What happened here?” That can happen. Taron came in and auditioned and just sang for me. He sang two songs, a acapella, straight in the voice booth.
He’s so great, I was like, shocked when I saw it was him afterward.
Seriously, so was I, and I had the same feeling that audiences were having when they go, “Oh, that’s really him.” I’m sitting there going, “This could go either way”. This could be a one-off where I’m like, “Hey, thanks for coming”. He was phenomenal, and I had to sort of hold myself back from saying so.
He should be in a movie musical.
He has this thing as well in the studio, you can see it. He will be fabulous in a musical. You can see he’s got this desire to get it right, and also this sort of natural flair. It’s not just professionalism. There’s just like a natural raw thing going on. He’s just got like an instinct for it. I bet if somebody said to him, “Right, I need you to dance down this staircase”, give him 20 minutes with a choreographer and he’ll flipping smash it. He’s just got that thing about him. He’s just got a natural sort of gift for just working. We lucked out with that cast.
Speaking of that cast, there’s always these stories of directors who are doing animated movies who are like, “I had to be in a limo when they were going to the airport and record them in a portable recording device”. Because you have such a huge cast was there anything sort of strange like you had to travel to God knows where to get what you needed?
That’s true. There weren’t any fun ones. I wasn’t ever in a limo with a voice thing. Always the schedules for all our cast were all over the place, so you were grabbing [them when you could]. Like Taron was doing “Eddie the Eagle” so for a month I remember someone saying, “He should be down the mountain by noon”. Or, “Oh, there’s been too much snow, he’s trapped in a log cabin.” It was always like “Taron’s up a mountain. Taron’s in Geneva. Thank you.” I always recorded whenever I could with them, and most of the time I was with the cast, but there were often time when suddenly Scarlett would be available in her schedule for “Ghost in the Shell” or whatever it was she was getting ready for, and we would just hook up with the studio she was nearest to and be on Skype, and you would do it that way. For most of it I would be with the actor in the studio.
Out of all the sequences, in an animated movie, and sometimes it’s hard for a director’s eye or vision to be caught in an animated movie. I think people might see “Happy” Feet and not necessarily think it’s a George Miller movie, for example. Is there a part of the movie you feel like “Oh, this is definitely me”?
A, I love that question, and B, I would say the carwash scene is very me. The carwash scene is when Buster is really down on his luck and he’s given up. Not only is the theater gone but he’s given up. He starts washing the car with his body and he’s wearing a Speedo. [Laughs.] It’s not just that, though. He starts doing that, and he’s failing at that too. He’s lying in the gutter and Eddie comes along, picks him up, and says, “You wash, I’ll dry”. They wash the cars together to the sound of Pavarotti. It’s both ridiculous and I find kind of moving as well in just the right way. I feel very close to that sort of thing and that it’s representative of the kind of sentimental fool that I am. To be honest, I feel so attached to all of it. Like you said, it’s a difficult one to nail, but if I had to pick one moment, that would nail it, pretty much.
Now that the process is all over what was the one part of it that was much more difficult than you’ve ever expected?
Oh, the writing.
I would have imagined that would be the easier part.
Oh, man, no. Trying to juggle six storylines. Six storylines, you know. You’re doing like, an ensemble thing, but you’re jumping from a mouse in a nightclub to a koala arriving at an elderly lady’s house. You’re going then to a housewife who is struggling to have her husband understand what she needs. Doing that stuff, getting that just right so that when you arrive in that scene, you feel like their life has continued since you last saw them, and you kind of know where they are. You get where they are. That really was just a mind-melder. Trying to get that to work, and refining that, and then storyboarding it and then going back to just constantly re-writing and tearing up. That was the hardest aspect of this whole thing. Working with animators is like working with actors, but different. Just loved that. Working with the actors. Loved it. Recording songs, people singing, is one of the greatest things you can ever do with your day. It really is. That writing process is the hardest thing, and in a way it should be. If you’ve done it, you’d be trying to make all the decisions there. All the hard stuff should be done there so that hopefully you hand all these story sections to people and they can fly with it. That tends to be, for me.
Clearly your life has been very busy making this movie. Do you know what you want to do next?
No. I’ve had a very eccentric sort of career path. Very eccentric sort of music videos that we used to make, eclectic mix of films starting with “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” then making “Son of Rambow.” Now I’ve made an animated film, and I wrote a book. I’m literally like one of those hose pipes that’s just firing in all directions around. I have no business plan or career plan at all. I just keep trying to find things I can fall in love with.
“Sing” opens nationwide on Wednesday.