Before you interview Hollywood bigwigs, especially stars and star directors, a SWAT team of publicists and assistants often descends to offer advice. Don’t mention this, feel free to ask that, only eat the blue M&Ms. That kind of stuff.
Brad Bird, you are told, will not tolerate a dumb question. But he likes it when people challenge him and push him. Under no circumstance refer to animated films — like the two he directed for Pixar, The Incredibles and Ratatouille — as cartoons.
There is unfortunately no way around that last one, as it cuts to the heart of why Bird decided to step out on Pixar and direct Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, his first live-action film.
photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Bird, 54, is an animation virtuoso with credits that include The Simpsons (he helped design Sideshow Bob) and The Iron Giant, one of the best-reviewed films of 1999. The 2004 film The Incredibles made him an Oscar-winning member of Pixar’s famed creative council, or “brain trust.”
But Hollywood still sequesters animation at the kiddie table, and the likes of Bird feel the sting. To be taken seriously — to be a “real” filmmaker — you need to make pictures with real people doing real things. “It’s frankly insulting,” Bird said during an interview last month at Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’ lavish postproduction site in this wooded hamlet north of San Francisco. “A film is a film is a film.”
Bird, who looks like a soccer dad with strawberry-blond hair and flashing blue eyes, said he didn’t tackle Ghost Protocol with the specific intent of becoming an A-list director without an asterisk. Live action represented a new challenge.
photo: EPA
“I don’t want to make the same kind of movie over and over,” he said. But it’s clear from talking to him that part of the challenge is not just mastering a different kind of movie. It’s proving that a director is a director is a director, breaking out of what is perhaps Hollywood’s most restrictive ghetto.
Bird’s movie, the fourth in the Paramount Pictures franchise, cost an estimated US$145 million to make and was filmed on location (Dubai, India, Russia) using Imax cameras. Adding to the pressure, the movie’s star, Tom Cruise, who is also a producer, urgently needs a fresh hit.
Bird got this gig largely because of Cruise. He called Bird shortly after The Incredibles was released. “His composition and storytelling was absolutely wonderful, and I said, ‘If you ever want to direct live action, please, please direct me,”’ Cruise said by telephone from Tokyo. Bird was charmed. But he went on his way, pursuing an ambitious live-action project about the wild and woolly scene in San Francisco just before the 1906 earthquake.
Then, one night at about 11:30, Bird got a text message from J.J. Abrams, a friend (they used to share an agent) and a producer of Ghost Protocol. Abrams also directed Mission: Impossible III. His message read: “Mission?” Bird was intrigued. “It sounded big and daunting in a good way, crazy, but the kind of crazy that I got into this business to embrace,” he said.
In many ways the core of Bird’s job on Ghost Protocol was the same as on a film like Ratatouille: coordinating various creative teams, making decisions on myriad small details, staying on schedule, paying attention to thematic questions. Are the characters relatable? Can the audience understand what the characters are thinking from moment to moment? Does the story elicit emotions? Is the ending surprising yet satisfyingly inevitable?
But directing animation is very different for a few reasons. You’re always under a roof, for starters. Many components of animated films are also completed in isolation, or nearly so. Voice actors record their lines separately from one another, for instance, and the words are added to the pictures later. With live-action films, everything is done in one giant swirl, and you had better pray that it doesn’t rain on that outdoor set.
Rather than setting up shots inside Pixar’s cushy headquarters, Bird found himself on the 123rd floor of the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyscraper that is the world’s tallest structure at a little more than 828m. For a scene in which Cruise’s character scales the tower’s exterior Spider-Man style, Bird had to remove windows and dangle cameras outside the building.
Ghost Protocol picks up with the Impossible Mission Force as its top agent (Cruise), blamed for blowing up the Kremlin, is disavowed. Along with other Impossible Mission Force fugitives — played by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg — Cruise’s character traverses the globe to unravel a terrorist plot and clear his name. Because the agents are operating for the first time without backup from headquarters, their high-tech gadgets sometimes go on the fritz, heightening the tension.
Ghost Protocol aims to be funnier than its predecessors in the series and includes some unexpectedly quirky moments, at least for this type of action film. One comes early on, as Cruise’s character breaks out of a Russian prison during a riot. A bouncy Dean Martin tune plays as the thick-necked thugs tear into one another. “That’s all Bird,” Cruise said. “He found that song, and I was like: ‘Wow. OK. Let’s do it.”’
Cruise said he was “constantly amazed” at Bird’s ability to pull off concepts that seemed a little squirrelly at first, though people who have worked with Bird before are not surprised to hear it. “If you’re going to pursue a dream, you have to wake up first,” said Patton Oswalt, the actor who voiced Remy in Ratatouille.
“Brad has unreined imagination and enthusiasm and what comes first with him is the gee-whiz. But what makes him able to execute on all of that is an incredible foundation of professional knowledge and experience.”
Bird, who is married with three sons, the youngest of whom is 17, was born in Montana but spent most of his childhood in Corvallis, Oregon. He traces his interest in moving images to the age of 3, when he drew a rudimentary rabbit named Boinky in sequential pictures.
When he was 10, he saw Disney’s Jungle Book and something clicked. “I realized that an adult somewhere made a living deciding how an arrogant panther should move, and that’s what I wanted to do,” he said.
In person, in the Heidi conference room at the Skywalker Ranch (named for its kitschy Swiss decor), Bird oscillated between curt and intense, and chatty and quick to laugh. He has a tendency to break into character voices, talking like a grizzled old man to make a point about his age. (Bird provided the voice of Edna Mode, the persnickety fashion designer, in The Incredibles.)
He also exhibited a controlling demeanor that along with an attention to detail, revealed his director’s stripes. He routinely interrupted our interview to ask that something he said earlier be tweaked or ignored, for instance. Asked if he was trying to direct this article, he said, “No, of course not.” But then he tried a few more times and stopped on his way out of the room to adjust crooked mini blinds.
If a big-budget sequel like Ghost Protocol isn’t what you would expect from a guy who has spent his career making unconventional choices (a rat cooking in a kitchen?), Bird has a bit of a hard time explaining it himself. He talked about wanting to work with Cruise and Abrams, wanting to do a spy movie and wanting to prove that “a commercial movie can still be art.”
But what about the time, back in 1999 in an interview with the Orange County Register, when Bird said he had no interest in “copying whatever made a lot of money.” How does Ghost Protocol square with that statement?
“OK, so you have your gotcha moment,” he said, a bit icily.
He enjoys people who challenge him? Hmm.
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