Chris Wedge, Ice Age Interview by Paul Fischer in Los Angeles.

He's an Oscar winning animator whose first feature film, the irreverent comedy Ice Age, is already getting considerable attention. Wedge talked to PAUL FISCHER about its genesis and trying to compete wiuth all those other pesky computer-animated films.

Paul Fischer: This is your first feature, was it hard to make the transition?

Chris Wedge: No, it was a transition I've been looking forward to since I was about 12 years old.  So, no, it was fun.  We felt completely prepared for it.

P.F: Why this particular period of history?

C.W: Well, it was a concept that Fox had been kicking around for a little while and they had a draft of the story together which ended up being the main bones of the dramatic story of Ice Age.  What appealed to me about it was just that the setting was just kind of ripe with possibilities for invention and exploration.  The ice age doesn't sound sexy when you first say it.  But when you look at it, it's the world in transition.  All these animals that were hanging around for who knows how long and suddenly the climate is changing and humans are appearing.  It just seemed like an interesting pressures on these guys and an interesting world that is both kind of familiar and alien, because it happened so long ago, in a place that we live on now, that looked a lot different back then.

P.F: You were told no dinosaurs, but most people believe that dinosaurs were killed off by the ice age?

C.W: No, I don't think so.  I think it was a giant meteor.  Interestingly, enough there are ice age cycles that happen.  We are talking about the most recent ice age that ended, I think about ten to twenty thousand years ago.  The polar ice caps descended down as far as the middle of America.  New York City was under a mile of ice.  Of course, it wasn't a city then.  It wasn't a city until the glaciers receded.  But the dinosaurs were off the stage for about 300 million years from what I understand.

P.F: Did you actually research the ice age for this project?

C.W: Yes we did.  I felt an obligation.  I felt duty bound to research the ice age when we started and then I felt like throwing it all out the window and making a comedy about it when we got to start making the movie.  We did do a lot of research.

P.F: Why did you decide to do the voice of Scrat?

C.W: Well, we do all the voices before the actors do, because we cut the movie together with just the storyboards and our voices to start working on the pacing of it.  We kind of make the whole movie backwards, we edit it first and then we execute all of the animation.  So, one afternoon we needed the sound for that Scrat to be running, screaming, being manic and so I put it in and that's just what we kept.

P.F: How hard is it to cast these projects?  Where did Ray Romano's name appear?

C.W: Ray wasn't the obvious choice for us, because what we first thought was that Manny's voice should be a big deep voice and we went for James Earl Jones types and played those up against the drawings of our character and they sounded big, but they sounded kind of obvious.  Ray was a suggestion I think from the casting people at Fox.  Some actors when you take their voices away from their faces they just sound like you or me.  But Ray's when you take his voice away from his face, it sounds like Ray still.  When we put that voice on our character we had something really unique.  I think a lot about Ray's demeanour, he's a big kind of teddy bear anyway.  We just made a bigger version of that.

P.F: You couldn't see his mouth move, was that a challenge?

C.W: It was a challenge for us because it takes away some of the elements that we use to make faces expressive, but it left us with the most expressive part of a character's face; the eyes.  If you think about the mammoth, all you have is the eyes and the head.  He can't even use his arms.  He doesn't have any.  He stands like a table and so his eyes, his gesturing and Ray's voice do all the acting.

P.F: The trunk was pretty amazing.  Was that new technology?

C.W: There was no new technology for the trunk other than fur we had developed to apply to everything.  That kind of flexible shape changing animation has been around for a while.  It's all design that makes it look and move the way it does.

P.F: What about the footprints in the snow?

C.W: Actually, we did come up with a very clever technique where that all happened automatically.  The technical directors were able to give us that capability automatically, so when they stepped a footprint would be there and when they ran they'd kick it up.  We chose a style for the movie that didn't require us to make everything look perfectly, photographically realistic.  We picked a style that we knew we would be able to apply to everything evenly, so some of those weather effects, rain and snow, end up making it look really real.

P.F: Are you aware of what the other animation studios are working on and their similarities to your project?  Does that concern you while you are making a film?

C.W: You can't think that way.  The films that we were reacting to were films that have been done when we started the movie, films that were done three years ago, and two years ago.  But by the time some of the films that people inevitably compare us to were in the theatres we were finished with animation.  Certainly finished with story and it was just rendering it up and doing the post on it.  Whatever similarities there are, it may be just some group consciousness at work.

P.F: What about the human characters?

C.W: Well we stylized the humans certainly.  We didn't feel any. . . I wasn't interested in making the humans look realistic at all.  There are five billion humans on the planet right now, if you can't find one of those to use than you've got trouble, but we styled them along with the style of the whole movie and I think it makes them more convincing somehow.  The notion that they don't speak is just that they are not central to the story.  They are just kind of the maguffin in our story.  They are the things you have to get to and deal with.  What happens along the way is the real story and it's all told from our character's perspectives.

P.F: How serious do you think Fox is about animation?

C.W: Well, Blue Sky has been it's own company.  Blue Sky is in New York.  We're 3,000 miles away from the studio and we have nothing to do with the history of animation at Fox before us.  We just weren't involved with it at all.  I can't speak for Fox.  Hopefully they are excited about the movie.  I think they are.  And excited about the future potential of Blue Sky.

P.F: Did Fox come to you?

C.W: Fox came to us with the concept for Ice Age and they came to us with the first draft of the script.  They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.

P.F: Do you expect other studios to buy animation houses?

C.W: It costs a lot of money to make these because there are so many people involved and so much technology.  There's a lot of overhead involved with it.  Nobody really wants to be saddled with it.  We carried it on our own for a long time and Fox came along as a partner that would help us grow the company to the point that we could make a feature film.  We added a hundred people to our staff in a year.  So you need the kind of investment, marketing and distribution muscle that a company like Fox has.

P.F: How many other projects do you have in development?

C.W: Well, we have one that's quite far along in development right now and there are ideas in behind it.  We are still a relatively small company in comparison to some of the other studios that are out there.  We are hoping that there will be some success associated with Ice Age that will allow us to build up more of our own internal development.

P.F: What were some of the major decisions you had to make to get this movie to the screen?

C.W: We had a lot more material than what ended up in the film.  In spite of it all, I wish we had more time to add more to the movie.  There were more characters.  We actually had to cut some characters out.  We spent more time with the tigers.  We spent more time with some of the extras.  There was a romantic interest for Sid that is really brilliant, funny stuff that will appear on the DVD.  There were things we cut for pacing issues.  Sid's girlfriend we cut completely for pacing issues.  We just wanted to get the story started faster.  We made some changes to the story late on for the end of the story, that knocked out our ability to do a tag sequence that was going to tie up a couple of the other characters so there was no point in having them.  There was some tone stuff that ended up cutting, especially we took the hot tub scene a little further than it appears in the movie.  Some of the funniest stuff to us we had to cut because you could tell it just wasn't playing.

P.F: If you started as a drama when did you realize you wanted to make a comedy?

C.W: Fox said, 'Let's make this movie and we'll make this movie with Blue Sky as long as they can make it into a comedy'.

P.F: Was that tough?

C.W: Yes, it was very hard.  Comedy is hard.  For idiots like me, it's really hard.

P.F: Were you surprised at the success of the teaser trailer?

C.W: You know I resisted that idea at the beginning because I always want to save everything for the audience.  So every time I see a new gag in a commercial, I ask them 'Please do you have to show that gag.'  They say, 'Don't worry, there are so many gags in the movie, nobody is going to feel like they've seen them all in the marketing.'  That was a sequence where I was really looking forward to seeing how it played and ironically, as many times as people have seen it in the theatres or on the Internet, they laugh their heads off.

P.F: How surprised are you by this movie?

C.W: I'm really happy with it.  I knew going into it we would solve it.  I knew going into it that we would solve it.  We weren't sure what we were going to have when we started, but inevitably you pull things from that creative ether that you don't expect to find.  You put all the ideas you can into the movie at the beginning and then after a while you've created a Frankenstein that starts to live on its own.  It has its own personality and it kind of tells you where to go.  It's really like raising children.  You have no idea what you're going to start out with and then you have something that looks like you when you're done.

P.F: Does the animation community talk to each other?

C.W: I'll tell you it was back when we were younger and more innocent, we used to talk about what we were working on all the time.  There's a fair amount of openness.  I think everybody knows, most of the people that could take advantage of it and know what we're working on next and we know what people are working on.

P.F: What about the Academy Award nominations for animated features?

C.W: I hope it does get one every year.  You need to have enough movies so that three nominees are warranted.  Actually I'd like animation to be accepted so it doesn't feel like a niche category.  There's a perception that has been attached to animation and I can't think, some film historians are going to have to help me figure out where it started, that animation is for kids and I think that's kind of restricted the amount of serious attention the Academy pays to it anyway.  They're pandering, it's for kids anyway.  It's not serious.  I think there's some of that going on.

P.F: Adult animated movies don't seem to do well.  They do in Japan.

C.W: Maybe it's a cultural thing.  I don't know.  I'm not saying that I'd change anything about our movie because I think it's something. . . you don't have to be a kid to enjoy our movie for sure.  We didn't dumb it down for kids.  I'm excited that animated films will get their recognition now, because they take so long and they take so much work by so many talented people.

P.F: Do you envy other studio's technology?

C.W: I like the way our fur looks.  The technology kind of evolves at a pace.  It's kind of fuelled by the amount of people that are into it, but you can kind of tell how fast it's going to go.  It's happening a lot slower than I thought it was going to go and I've been doing this for twenty years.  But the one thing that all these. . . the successful films that people point to have a decent story and that has nothing to do with the technology at all and that's why I think there may be some point in the future when someone wants to take a risk and spend this much money on a film that's just for adults.  You may end up with a Matrix movie that's all CG, that actually hits because there's a story there.

P.F: Did you ever realize that this story is Three Men and a Baby?

C.W: Yeah, I mean I was really trying to play any kind of label down on the movie.  There are definitely moments where you have that three men and a baby thing going on, but I wanted it to be less about the baby and more about the relationship of these three guys.  Last night at the very end when they were waiving bye I was sitting at the back of the theatre, Sid goes, 'Goodbye' and I heard this little voice behind me, 'Goodbye'.

P.F: Was there ever a temptation to throw in a couple of songs?

C.W: Never for the characters to sing.  There wasn't really any pressure to do that.  Ray probably has a pretty good singing voice.

P.F: Couldn't Scrat be part of a short?

C.W: Well, yeah.  I think it's the economics of making the shorts that have doomed them long ago.  I've made a lot of short films and I can tell you there is absolutely no way to make a living doing it.  You can work on something for three years and then make about $3,000 in prize money after a full year of having it tour around the world.  Bunny made as much prize money as you could possibly ask for and I couldn't run the household on it, plus I had to distribute it to all the people that worked on it.  We made a fund at Blue Sky. . . basically we threw a lot of parties with the prize money.

P.F: And where do you keep the Oscar?

C.W: Oscar is home sitting on the shelf.

Filmography

Bunny (1998)