“It seems like the only way to look at the future these days is dystopia,” said director Brad Bird at Deadline’s Contenders London this weekend. “And that’s OK. I like a lot of movies that show that thing, but there are other ways to look at the future, and you can do that.”
Bird was talking about his new animated film Ray GunnThe voice cast includes Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits. The Netflix and Skydance Animation production is set in Metropia, a giant city in an alternate future inhabited by aliens and humans, as seen from the perspective of 1939. The story revolves around private eye Raymond Gunn (Rockwell), who is embroiled in a case involving a murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova, voiced by Johansson.
Bird said, “What I was interested in was utopia, but also showing that the characters are desperate.” “They’re still lying. They’re still murdered… All those things are there, but if you set it in an idealized setting it’s a little more interesting. So, buildings are over a mile high, and aliens and humans co-exist, and that kind of stuff became very interesting to me.”
Bird, who was joined on stage by the film’s composer Michael Giacchino, talked about the film’s long journey to the screen. Ray Gunn is a 35-year-old passion project of Incredible And Ratatouille Director Bird.
Bird quipped, “The easiest mistake to make is to think we’ve been working on this for 35 years, which makes us look really stupid.” “It wasn’t. We tried to make it a long time ago and, for whatever reason, the financing didn’t come along with us, so we had to set it up. Basically, it went into a file, collected dust and we had to move on with our lives. I made iron giant and we worked on it Incredible And Ratatouille And time passed and the opportunity came to bring it out of the deep freeze, and I always believed it and eventually reality agreed with me.
Giacchino talked about his approach to scoring the film and said that New Zealand singer-songwriter Kimbra wrote and produced all the original songs for the character Venus Nova.
“She writes incredible music and she came up with some songs for Venus, which are incredible. So, my role was just to create the world beyond that and fill in everything else and create textures and themes and character stuff and make sure that the movie fit the glove that it needed to fit,” he said.
Giacchino said that he and the team used “old recording techniques”.
“We’ve got microphones from the 1920s and ’30s that we used here at Abbey Road. We had an 80-piece orchestra, so there’s a really organic score there, but there are some things in there, like weird vintage synthesizers that I use… but that’s not the focus of it. It’s just decoration on it because the real emotional thing you need has to fit into the story.”
Check back Monday for panel video