Five Things About Megamind With Director Tom McGrath

Bleeding Cool were these week lucky enough to sit down with Tom McGrath and Will Ferrell, director and star of the -finally-out-in-the-UK-today, Megamind. What Ferrell told us will come later, but first, here are Five Rather Interesting Things that McGrath gave up about this movie, and about his moviemaking in general.

1. The Making Films As A Kid Story

I remember in the Super 8 days I could check out movies from the library. The Max Fleischer Superman, Heckle and Jeckle, but I really grew up on Bugs Bunny. That’s what really made me want to get into animation. I was like any kid, though, you get a Super 8 camera when you’re 12 and you just make movies. And one of the films I made was a parody with my brother on Superman. It was called Stuporman or something and it had animation with the neighbourhood kids. We took my living room and we turned it into The Daily Planet office and we had that way for two months until my parents said “You’ve got to take this down”.

2. A Long, Long, Long… Long Line Of Superhero Movies

Originally the script was written as live action in 2003 by Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons, who stayed on as writers all the way through to the end. They had an idea that they wrote in their idea book as “What if Lex Luthor won?” and they eventually wrote a script and Ben Stiller’s company Red Hour picked it up shortly after to do as a live-action movie.

It was written kind of more like an R-rated, pretty edgy movie. But I think the Red Hour slate was pretty much booked solid. I know Ben Stiller pretty well from the Madagascar movies, we have a good relationship and on the press junket for Madagascar 2 he said “Hey, I’ve got this movie…” and I just couldn’t pass it up. I love Superhero movies.

It does take from Superman very much and I guess the twist, for me was “What if he didn’t land with the Kents but landed in a prison?” and there’s a nature versus nurture kind of component to that. There’s also the Marlon Brando riff that Will had done. It was kind of on the spot and he just started doing Marlon Brando with a lisp.

But I try not to reference or spoof too much. I kind of learned my lesson on Madagascar to not try and do pop culture references and reference other movies because you can get a cheap laugh but then the audience will hate you for kicking them out of the movie. I was trying to find the balance of playing off of the genre but not at the expense of cheapening the film.

We had a hard time trying to find superhero names that hadn’t been taken for other things. In the film you hear a very shortened version of Will’s riff about the name. It was very difficult naming things. The film originated as Mastermind but there’s so many projects associated with Mastermind that we couldn’t use it. We changed it to Ballunatic but somebody had Balloonatic, then we changed it to Oobermind but that was confusing people. Then we went back to Mastermind and finally settled on Megamind, which I like. So we had the record of the most name changes.

3. Alice Cooper vs. Elvis Presley

At least in the superhero movies I’ve seen, they’re going hi-tech with the polycarbon fibre suits so, to me, it was like this: if there were superheroes they’d be like celebrities, rock stars – Alice Cooper versus Elvis Presley. So that informed the leather and spikes and the fringe and the rhinestones which, because it was a comedy, we pushed a little further, made a little absurd.

Also, the music felt like it was in character with the Alice Cooper versus Elvis idea.

4. Saying The Lines, Or Saying Not The Lines

I think Tina Fey is funny in the film but there always has to be a centre. Not necessarily a straight man but when you have a lot of characters acting silly it’s great to have an anchor for them. The part really required her acting skills and I think she’s a great actor and she was doing stuff that I was really blown away with.  And every line we had, she came back with three that were ten times funnier because she’s such a great writer. “Girls, girls, you’re both pretty” was totally Tina. So she took a relatively straight-written character and gave her a lot of flavour that way.

For Will and Tina, because of the love story, they were the only ones I recorded together. Even the pauses between the lines are part of their timing and you can’t really manufacture that if you record them separately. Will would improvise, then a month laterDavid Cross would come and improv off of that. A month later, Will would improv off of that, so they played off of one another over the course of eight months. It’s part of the magic of it that you do feel like they’re in the same room together. At least I do.

The great thing about recording on tape, it’s not like film and you don’t have to reset a shot at all, so with Will he taught me the way he works with Adam McKay, in which he can throw things out and just keep going. Recording this, there’d be monologues that would go on for ten minutes. I’ve now just started working with the other people like that and it creates a better environment to record.

Brad Pitt, for example, liked the idea of being this Elvis character. He didn’t want to sit behind a podium to record so we gave him a microphone encased in foam and he cruised around the entire recording booth. He’s a very physical actor and you can’t really tie him up behind a microphone on a podium.

6. Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo Del Toro came in during the last three weeks of production. We showed him the movie and he really liked it. He had a great idea for the beginning of the movie. It used to start on the baby and it started with narration and he said “You know what, if you open with narration then you know the character is going to live no matter what happens with him” and his idea was to start with him falling to his death and you don’t know if he’s going to survive. Fortunately there was enough time to lay it out, animate it, get it lit and get it in the final cut. That was such a smart idea from him. And he’s a joy to be around – he’s much more fun than me.

Thanks to Ben Mortimer for the loan of his skills.

I think I should say that the Tina Fey section came about because I really wanted to know why female characters so rarely get to be funny in these films, even when they’re being played by popular and talented comedians. McGrath made it clear: on the page, she was an even less comedic character.

Megamind is in UK cinemas now, is rather good and very nicely put together, has some lovely 3D and is well worth catching with a big crowd.