Did the live-action set pieces of Ghost Protocol and Tomorrowland inform how you approached Incredibles 2? Was there anything you picked up working with physical people and props that changed your perspective for animation?
Not really. I think I've always kind of been doing action sequences like that. There are some action sequences in Iron Giant that are fairly complex. I think it's more that animation was my gateway drug to live action, and it made me study the filmmakers and the films that I admire. There's a lot to learn about staging from people like David Lean, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. I've looked at a lot of that stuff trying to figure out why it works so well. So I think that it's more that live action has influenced my animation, which made the transition to live action easier.
One thing I'd say you share with those filmmakers is a respect for clarity – you'll zoom in on something or cut very quickly, and there can be a lot going on in a given sequence but we always understand where everyone is and what they're doing. It's visual geography.
Well, yes. And a lot of people don't do that well. There are people who are good at chaotic filmmaking, like Paul Greengrass, but Paul Greengrass spawned a lot of terrible imitators. And it was because they looked and saw shaky camera and a lot of rapid cuts and close-ups and they thought, "Hey, I can do that!" And so they shake the camera a lot, they have a lot of loud sounds and close-ups. But the thing is, they're not Paul Greengrass. If you look at Paul Greengrass's stuff in slow motion, a little bit at a time, there's a logic behind it. Your brain is being prepared for the next image. It is more chaotic than [the work of] somebody like James Cameron, but there is still the same respect for the idea that the brain works this way. How can you work with the way the brain works. [Whereas] Cameron can do these incredibly complex, fast, cutting patterns, and you're never lost for a second because he knows how to stage action. All of that stuff I find endlessly fascinating.
The Incredibles came out at a point in time when superhero movies were the exception, not the rule. Did that make it trickier to devise the big set pieces for the sequel? I mean, Marvel and DC are doing cataclysmic action sequences every other month now.
I'm a little pickier about that stuff. I see a lot of superhero films where, even though the hero looks realistic, it's actually an animated scan of the person and the animation isn't first-rate. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times you get what you see in Hancock, where Hancock gets hit by a semi truck and then the truck flips and you go, "How much does Hancock weigh? Four tons? There's no indication anywhere that he weighs that much! He's gonna get knocked back!" In the Incredibles [films] I really push the animators hard to try to convincingly portray crazy physics. When Bob [Mr. Incredible] gets hit by a train, he caves in the front of the train. He doesn't stop the train, but his feet break every single [rail] tie, and that eventually slows down the train. Now, that I can believe. I don't believe Hancock.