Greg Mottola On Seth Rogen And Joe Lo Truglio’s Roles In Bringing Paul The Alien To Life

Later on, we’ll bring you our full and candid chat with Greg Mottola about the making of his new film, Paul. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt of interest in which Mottola explains how Seth Rogen performed the role of Paul, and the quiet, unglamorous, but crucial role that Joe Lo Truglio also played in bringing the character to life.

To justify the cost of making Paul, the cost of the CGI, which was a good third of the budget, we had to make sure that the person who was going to do the voice was a recognisable name. It was a given, we didn’t even have a discussion, we all knew that was going to be the case. And we wanted someone who is seasoned, and really funny, and having worked with Seth I knew how inventive he was, and that is energy would be a good contrast with Simon and Nick, that there could be some good friction between them but at the same time, he would mix nicely with them.

Even though Seth’s Canadian, Paul is very much an Americanised alien, a very different character to those that Simon and Nick had written for themselves. Going after Seth was a no-brainer, but at the same time we didn’t have the budget to do the animation and also pay Seth what he gets paid to be on set and speak lines off camera. Also, he wasn’t available for that, he had a very short window. So we knew we weren’t going to have him on set, which was tricky.

None of us had done this before and the first day we started shooting and Simon and Nick were speaking to a stick with ping pong balls for an eye line they were just like “Oh, shit, this is going to be a disaster.” Luckily, we’d thought about it enough that in preproduction, we did two weeks of rehearsal with Seth in which he was wearing a motion capture suit so they could get down some of his basic movements and ideas for physical bits, and had this face camera on so they could really dial in lip-sync and facial expressions which is one of the most challenging things with a character like this. We went to a soundstage and we just ran the whole movie like a play.

Paul in the film is more key-frame animation, but they use the motion capture as reference in many cases, and the facial expressions have definitely gotten into it.

I have to say that the sound recordings of Seth’s voice we did before the shoot, very few of them have made it into the movie. We did that rehearsal period and then we went and shot the film and Joe Lo Truglio, who plays the character of O’Reilly was on the set the whole time so we asked him to be the voice of Paul on screen. We wanted someone who was really funny and a good improviser and a really good actor to be there for Simon and Nick to play off. That worked out well, but not surprisingly, once the scenes were actually on location, or on a set, and Joe was doing the voice, things started changing.

Lines got changed and the rhythm of it changed and when we cut in Seth’s performance, which we had videotaped – literally, we were cutting Seth in, in a little box, pasting him into the shot to try and approximate what the scene would be and show the animators at Double Negative where he was in the frame and how he should be moving, vaguely – everything was off and it just wasn’t the same rhythm. Either the lines had changed or the rhythm of the scene had changed so we had to go back and redo all of Seth’s ADR.

It was an incredibly generous thing for Joe to do and a huge favour and, yeah, he’s sort of like an unsung hero of getting this film made. I think that if it were just a script supervisor reading lines it would have been much, much harder. The fact that Joe is really, really good and very smart, and he took it very seriously, he came in prepared, he knew the role he was playing, we needed that. With Andy Serkis being Gollum he was there, playing Gollum, but we were under an obligation to have a marquee name and Seth’s the person we all wanted but he wasn’t available to be there. This was just the best compromise. But I owe a great debt to Joe, and Seth, also, who is shocking egoless, just heard Joe had done and would be like “I’m going to steal Joe’s line here because it’s really funny”. We owe him a super special thanks, a long one minute credit roll that just says Joe Lo Truglio.

As I said, more later.

Paul is released across the UK on Monday, which is Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February. If I say it’s the perfect date movie then you have an excuse, even if I’m fibbing.

It’s the perfect date movie.