ill Pullman provides the voice of Capt. Korso, the mysterious starship skipper in Fox's animated SF epic Titan A.E. He's best known to genre fans as the jet-pilot president who saved the world in Independence Day. But he's played everything from romantic leads (While You Were Sleeping) to dark psychos (Lost Highway, The Last Seduction), and much in between. Titan A.E. marks Pullman's first venture into animation.
Not so for Gary Goldman, co-director of Titan. Goldman is a veteran director of animated films and partner of legendary animator Don Bluth, with whom he has worked since 1972. Titan is the duo's 12th animated film, coming on the heels of such hit movies as Anastasia and The Land Before Time. Goldman also worked with Bluth on the first animated laser disc games, Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Titan marks a departure for Goldman and Bluth in many ways. It's their first SF feature; it has the biggest mix of computer animation and traditional animation; and it's their first feature aimed at a teenage audience.
Recently Pullman and Goldman took a few minutes to talk to Science Fiction Weekly about Titan A.E., which premieres nationwide on June 16.
Bill Pullman, tell us about your role in Titan A.E.
Pullman: I play Captain Korso, who's in this world after the Earth has been destroyed by this hostile alien force. And Earthlings are spread all over, and they're all struggling to just get by as second-class citizens. And he is doing pretty good, but he is also aware of the fact that there is a possibility, a quest to be had, with this young kid, where they could probably, maybe, find a way to bring the human race back together.
This is your first animated film. How is that different for you from things you've done in the past?
Pullman: There's a lot about it that reminds me of the post-production on every film. There is this [dialogue] looping thing that goes on in every movie. With every movie, when you come to the looping, there's an incredible amount of angst about "why does this have to be so perfect?" And then you just realize that it has to be perfect. So this kind of process is a little like that. ... You just don't get the fun stuff before it gets tough [laughs].
Are you a science fiction fan?
Pullman: I like certain aspects of it. ... Twilight Zone ... was my inaugural thing. ... My brother and I used to [read] these comic books, The Mars Patrol. That was [also] the Earth trying to fight back.
Speaking of which, is there anything you can tell us about plans for a sequel to Independence Day?
Pullman: That has been one of those flowers that blooms and wilts and blooms and wilts. And I think there's definitely been some attempts to ... get it going. I think right now, it's a little bit quiet. And I don't know if there's anything going yet.
What other projects are you working on?
Pullman: In the fall, [I'm doing] this movie that Nora Ephron directed, called Numbers or some version of Numbers, with John Travolta and Lisa Kudrow. And then I'll start a picture that will be out next spring, kind of a conspiracy story.
Gary Goldman, this is a departure from what you've done before. Why did you take it on?
Goldman: It is very different from anything we've done before, and [it] appeals to a slightly older audience than what animation normally goes for. The target for this film was adolescents, and adolescent males. As we built the film, it seemed to expand. It expanded to even more adults than just adolescents, and it expanded down a little bit at least to, say, a 10-year-old, that we felt would be able to really be entertained by this movie, understand the sophistication of the film without question. ... What was interesting is, though, as we built the film, and as we came to the end, the movie expanded beyond the male skew. And women started liking the movie as well, mainly because [of the] relationship between the two lead characters [Cale, voiced by Matt Damon, and Akima, voiced by Drew Barrymore].
The departure for us was not only science fiction, but was also to create characters who were working in a world that wasn't bright and cheerful and full of wonderful colors. ... We tried to make a very dark movie, a movie that would be considered maybe akin to a dark comic-book style. And our challenge was to take the audience to new environments, environments they'd never been before.
I'll bet you never expected to make a movie that would be compared to Heavy Metal or Japanese anime.
Goldman: No, not at all. But the question has come up often. In the international [press day] that we had in Phoenix, a lot of people said, "Did anime have a big influence on you?" And we said, "Well, we're familiar with anime. We've seen most of the movies. We like them." [But] no. ... The films we looked at were movies like Outland [and] Alien. Not so much the Star Wars movies, although everybody's familiar with Star Wars. But I found Star Wars ... actually a very light movie, ... the way it's lit and everything ... and probably more like a matinee movie of the '40s and '50s.
The second one [Empire Strikes Back] got darker, which I loved. ... That was a look that I really enjoyed. And we had a lot of [the] color people on our staff looking at movies like Outland and Alien, and saying, "How were they lit?" And, "How can we get away with making an animated movie that's dark, and light it so that it's enough for everybody to see what's going on in the screen, and in some cases, not see so well," because that can be a little more frightening.
You also mix 2-D and 3-D animation in a much bigger way than in the past.
Goldman: We started mixing 3-D in with our 2-D animation back with All Dogs Go to Heaven. But in each picture, we seem to be adding more and more and more. And we had a lot of it in Anastasia, which you couldn't really see; we really hid it. But in this film, about ... 87 percent of the movie has some form of [computer-generated imagery] in every scene.
How does that affect the 2-D animation?
Goldman: We had to actually tone down the 3-D stuff. So we don't light it so it's shiny and looking like plastic or hard metal. And we had to light the hand-drawn animation with more shadows. Doing a lot of tone masks over the characters, highlights in their eyes. Akima's got her lip gloss on. You've got to make the characters as three-dimensional as you possibly can, and move them really like human beings. So you really create a reality that you may have not seen before in animation.
Are you working on a new sequel to Dragon's Lair?
Goldman: We're doing a 3-D video game that we premiered at [the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles] this year. And we just got word back that in the top 10 there, it was rated No. 5 in its performance. And we're very excited about it. The team working on it is working in California. We did the opening in traditional animation, and [at] the end of the opening, it transitions into 3-D. And it's very exciting. It's sort of a combination of the original game concept and Myst, so you can explore the castle. In fact, our fan base for that game is big enough that ... one of the projects we're developing for Fox is a feature film based on Dragon's Lair.
