ndrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, co-directors of DreamWorks' computer-animated Shrek, set out to deconstruct the fairy-tale genre while preserving its heart. With producer and DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg and the animators at PDI/DreamWorks (Antz), they came up with a film that takes shots at Katzenberg's former employer, Disney, while poking gentle fun at the genre's conventions.
Featuring the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and John Lithgow, Shrek tells the story of a giant green ogre who just wants to be left alone when his swamp is invaded by storybook creatures. With a talking donkey companion, Shrek sets out to rescue an unconventional princess in distress. More than 275 artists, computer animators, software developers and engineers at PDI/DreamWorks spent three years developing Shrek.
Adamson makes his directorial debut with Shrek. A veteran with the animation studio PDI/DreamWorks, he worked on visual effects for several films and television commercials. His visual effects work on two Batman films was short-listed for Oscar nominations.
Jenson, who also makes her directorial debut with Shrek, worked with animators Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi in developing the visual styles for several animated series. Later, she worked as a storyboard artist, production designer, art director and co-producer on films and in television. Jenson worked as a production designer and story artist on DreamWorks' 1996 animated feature The Road to El Dorado.
Adamson and Jenson took a few minutes to talk with Science Fiction Weekly about Shrek, which opened May 16 in New York and Los Angeles and May 18 everywhere else.
The story is a kind of post-modern fairy tale. How would you describe it?
Adamson: We say it's a fairy tale that parodies fairy tales, basically.
Jenson: It's a bit self-referential, but not to the point of being cynical. It's got kind of a modern edge to it. I hate using the word "edge," and you made me use it! Such a bad word. ... The humor was key to us. We wanted to make a funny film. And it was really important that we make a film that said what needed to be said. There are so many fairy tales that come close to that. [Disney's The Little] Mermaid was wonderful as far as talking about a smart young woman, sick of swimming, ready to stand, but just dropped out at the last second, where she goes from the father's home into her new husband's home, from one castle to another. So it got close, but, ah, it didn't get all the way there. And we got to examine why fairy tales do that, and in making fun of some of the old-fashioned ideals about what people are supposed to look like and how princesses are supposed to act and what makes a hero, it allowed us to really poke fun at a lot of the things that we hold valuable in our culture today. So it really went hand in hand with the kind of humor that we're using.
The film has lots of shots at Disney. Whose idea was that?
Adamson: It was incredibly organic to the process, really. The start is, we're dealing with fairy tales. And we're parodying fairy tales. And you can't do that ... and ignore the biggest exporter of fairy tales to today's world. So that stuff came very organically.
Some of the other things--like when they walk into [the kingdom of] Dulac, and Dulac has some slight references there. ... The art directors went up to Hearst Castle, and you can see a little bit of Hearst Castle still in the design. But we were looking for something that was a popular-culture kind of reference to a manufactured environment. Farquaad is the antithesis of Shrek. Shrek has this very organic, muddy environment that's very natural. And Farquaad wanted to recreate the perfect world, the perfect environment. We looked at Universal City. We looked at Las Vegas. And we obviously looked at the most obvious place, [Disneyland].
Jenson: What's the most sanitized place on Earth? [laughs]
Farquaad's Dulac almost looks like Albert Speer's Disneyland.
Jenson: Yes, there you go. That was very astute of you. Because we did really look at some early Fascist architecture. ... How do you embody a megalomaniac's vision of perfection?
Adamson: We did refer to it as a Fascist theme park.
How much input did you get from Jeffrey Katzenberg?
Jenson: A tremendous amount. He's ... wonderful with story. And he's got a great ability to watch the film each time with fresh eyes. What we tend to do before we even animate is shoot the story reels. ... We storyboard the whole movie, because that's the best way to explore it visually. Taking a script ... which is very flexible for everyone, and exploring it sequence by sequence, and playing with the humor and the tone and direction. And we take all those very rough drawings, those early ideas. We shoot them, make a reel out of it, with temporary voices--sometimes us, sometimes our story artists (some of them made it into the movie because they were just so funny)--and we look at the movie, and ask, first of all, is it too long? Is this funny? Are we following the characters well enough? Is it hitting what we want it to hit? Are we learning enough at the right time? It's a great technique for learning how to make a movie. You make it over and over again before you even start animating.
And during the course of that, we're screening it for, not just for ourselves, because we get so close to things sometimes that we get too close ... and Jeffrey was one of those people who was seeing the movie over and over and over again. And he has a unique ability to see it as if it's for the first time, and know what does an audience want to have happen here? What's going to be satisfying? What can we tweak? And he was incredibly instrumental throughout the process.
Adamson: He's like an incredibly educated audience member. The thing about Jeffrey is he has incredible instincts. And I think that's why he's been so successful; it's his story instincts.
How many of the shots at Disney come from Katzenberg?
Jenson: I don't think any of them. I mean, he certainly laughed.
Adamson: This is the thing, people like to hit on that, but no one sort of says we're making fun of the people that made The Matrix, because we played with the Matrix stunt. Obviously with the political climate, people like to point that out. But we also ... parodied some of Jeffrey's finest moments. Beauty and the Beast received a lot of accolades. And he was hugely instrumental in the making of that. And ... our movie as a whole is a parody of that movie.
Was this movie screened for Disney to make sure they wouldn't object?
Adamson: Yes, I think we showed it to 20 or so executives from Disney.
Jenson: And they were very complimentary about it.
Adamson: I think one of the things about the movie, it's a very good-natured movie, and I think it has a lot of heart, and I think people who look for more than that in it are probably looking in the wrong place.
Jenson: It's not mean-spirited at all. I think ... people would rather feel attached to it than distanced from it, because it makes you feel good.
Is it true that you had to scrap millions of dollars of animation to allow Mike Myers to re-record his dialogue with a Scottish accent?
Adamson: Yeah, definitely. We'd done the thing that we do with most actors originally, which is, because the characters are already cartoonish and caricatured, we encourage them to use their real voices, so that the performances are very real. And we'd kind of done that with Mike, and worked for a while with him using his voice with the kind of distinct Canadian accent. And he came in and saw the movie and said, "You know what, I think I can do something better than this."
Jenson: It was one of the screenings I was telling you about. We had only about 20 minutes or so of animation by that point.
Adamson: And he said, "I want to go back into the studio and play around." And Mike's at his best when he kind of creates a character from whole cloth, and he disappears into that character. So that's what he did here. We went back to some stuff we'd done earlier. We used to have a scene where he was reading a letter from his dad, and he initially did that in the Scottish accent, sort of from So I Married an Axe Murderer days. And we just went back to that. There was something in that that was sort of blue-collar, Middle-Earth that worked.
Jenson: It gave him a whole wealth of backstory to play with now, about where Shrek came from, or his parents, or what kind of colorful things ... in ogre lore ... that he was just able to create. It just brought such a wonderful warmth to the character, and also a refreshed humor as well.
Adamson: I think Mike essentially disappears. When you're watching the movie, you don't think Mike Myers. Which I think he did a great job with.
Why did you pick Cameron Diaz to play Princess Fiona?
Adamson: She was pretty much the first choice for the princess for me. When I became involved with the picture in '97, we didn't have anyone for Princess Fiona. And she's someone who's Princess Fiona. She's this ... very sweet, down-to-earth person who's a supermodel and lives this glamorous Hollywood actor lifestyle. And Fiona is this very down-to-earth person who believes she has to live the life of a glamorous princess. So Cameron was pretty much the perfect choice for that. She'd come into recording sessions after doing eight hours of kung-fu training [for Charlie's Angels] or three-days-of-survival-in-the-desert kind of thing. So she is this kind of tough person who's managed to stay true to herself in the face of this whole Hollywood thing.
Jenson: She was cussing a little bit in Cantonese, which we didn't use. She'd learned quite a bit ... from the trainers [on Charlie's Angels].
Why did you decide to go with 3-D computer animation rather than traditional 2-D animation?
Adamson: It was for some reason never really a question. We knew that we wanted to create this kind of look of a fairy-tale storybook come to life. We wanted it to be a very dimensional world. We wanted it to be a world that, once the audience stepped into it, it had as much kind of its own sense of reality and depth and perspective and atmosphere as the world that we exist in, but at the same time was very stylized. And we also wanted to give it a live-action language: the use of the camera, things like lens flares, that kind of thing. We wanted it to have a familiar feel from a live-action sensibility. So CG was always kind of the best option to explore those things.
Jenson: Not that the story couldn't have been told traditionally. Not that there's anything inherent about the story or the tone that wouldn't have worked in traditional [animation]. ... It was really a stylistic choice. I think DreamWorks ... was really curious and wanted to keep pushing with what they'd discovered with Antz, and Shrek was a wonderful opportunity to do that.
It seems like you break some ground with the computer animation in this film?
Adamson: Definitely. When we first started, I knew that we wanted to kind of raise the bar. When they came out of Antz, we had the lucky experience of being able to work with a seasoned crew that had already honed their skills and much of the software in Antz. They said, "How far do you want to go with this? How complex does it need to be?" And as a general ballpark, we said, "Five to 10 times the complexity of Antz [laughs]." And once everyone got back up off the floor, we started talking about how to do that.
There were a number of things that we had to achieve. One of which was, this movie is a quest. It goes through many different environments. Many of the previous CG movies have been relatively contained within underground environments, or in a bedroom, and a relatively small number of environments. As well as that, we had characters that were human or humanistic, even though they were stylized and existed in this kind of animated world, they had to be recognized as human characters. People had to respond to them on a visceral level. They had to look at Fiona as a beautiful woman, not a cool-looking CG character. So that involved hair and cloth and skin and all those kinds of things.
And then ... they developed some water techniques that received a lot of awards and so on in Antz. And we now had mud and beer, and beer and mud mixed together, so we had fluids of different viscosity to deal with. Fire ... pretty much you name it. Whatever, we tried it.
The fire in the movie is computer-generated?
Jenson: It's CG fire.
Adamson: There were two shots that actually had composited fire that we had to actually stylize slightly to make them work. But all the rest was CG.
Is this the first film built around a CG human character in a lead role?
Jenson: It's funny. It's always been considered sort of the Holy Grail, the human form in CG. And it was something that was part of our story, it was right there. We needed a princess. We did actually achieve even more realism with her, but it didn't really suit what we needed in our film. As Andrew was describing, we did need a princess that fit into the stylized world that we created, of the fairy tale, the book that you walked into. So any more realism on her would have looked like we took someone from the audience and popped her into the movie. And we wanted the audience to connect to her as a princess and a human, but she had to be part of that world. So we did end up stylizing her more. We'd actually gone a little further in the pendulum swing, as far as making her cartoony at one point, and that didn't quite work either. It was an interesting thing to find that balance for her between Shrek and Farquaad and reality versus realism.
Adamson: From an animation point of view, she was pretty challenging, because we're all used to looking at humans on a daily basis. So even though she was stylized, if she ... moved in a way that was too inhuman, it immediately revealed itself. You can get away with a lot with a talking donkey, because no one's seen one talk before. The lip-synch is easier.
Jenson: We always end up looking at mouths or eyes when people are talking. And that happened with Fiona and also with Farquaad.
Adamson: Eyes, in particular.
Jenson: And they really had to reach that next level of believability, so we wouldn't keep yanking ourselves out of the reality of the story. And even the way the mouth shapes are formed is based on the way anatomy works. The animators had to pull muscles to make that happen. The way that lips stick together a little bit as the mouth opens was another little innovative program that they came up with up there. I think that the movie that's coming out [Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within] will have a little more of a library of shapes. ... I think it's shape interpolation ... that they do in between. Where, when you're watching it, you'll see kind of a morphing going on. In this case, we really wanted you to not think about how the mouths are moving, just be very comfortable in watching her and knowing that that's a character, that that's a real person up there that you're paying attention to, so you can hear what she's saying and not how she's saying it.
Adamson: When we got into that with the eyes, it was kind of an interesting thing, because early on, we weren't as ... detailed around the eyelids, and hadn't paid as much attention to simple things like eye darts. It's amazing how, when you're watching someone or conversing with someone, they're looking around. They're looking at one eye, and then the other eye. They're looking at something in the room. They're looking back at you. ... And that sort of reveals their thoughts. So I think the animators really examined how to use the eyes in a big way.
In Final Fantasy they use a lot of motion capture to capture the gross movements. You didn't do any of that?
Jenson: No, not at all.
Adamson: No, we didn't. I've done a lot of motion capture in the past. We first used it on Toys, a film for Barry Levinson, where we were actually doing some human skeletons fighting, so it was very appropriate. But for this movie, we wanted to use more stylized motion, and motion capture is better at creating kind of replication. It's more like rotoscoping. ... Motion-capturing a donkey is pretty tricky.
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