The directors of Disney’s Strange World chat to us about filmmaking, pulp science fiction, eyeballs, dogs and making films at Disney.
Just a year or two back, Qui Nyugen and Don Hall – the directors of Disney’s new animated movie Strange World – were doing the publicity for their last movie, Raya And The Last Dragon. Given that it usually takes four years to make an animated movie at Disney, that they’re back out with a new film in under two seems surprising, until the pandemic is factored in. The two projects, as it turned out, overlapped, with Strange World's development preceding the making of Raya.
We got the two of them in a posh London hotel room to talk about the movie and their work, and – crucially – the skydiving thriller Terminal Velocity…
The obvious starting place, and going spoiler light: congratulations on making the second best film to be distributed by Disney with a three-legged dog in it.
DH: Second best?
Yeah. Terminal Velocity, with Charlie Sheen. A really good skydiving film. Better than Drop Zone that came out around the same time.
QN: I did now know that!
That notwithstanding, as a nerd by trade and having watched your sci-fi infused movie, I feel like I should ask you for a bibliography for this one.
DH: Well the film started in 2017. I was just thinking about… We were just coming off Moana, and I was thinking about my kids and what kind of future they’re going to have. Environmental concerns were on my mind.
And we just wanted to tell a generational story about, you know, what it means to be a good ancestor. And then I love pulp adventure stories. Raiders Of The Lost Ark all the way up to King Kong…
… the 1976 version I assume.
[Laughs, nods] And Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I got to kind of go back and reread a lot of that stuff.
On expenses?
Yeah!
QN: Libraries, pulp novels…
DH: But it was actually kind of fun. Because I approached it as a fan, but I got to approach it a little academically, too, which was kind of fun. Looking at that, that archetype of the adventurer who was on covers a lot, like Doc Savage, is actually a pretty good example. He was on the cover of a lot of those adventure magazines, you know, the ripped shirt, trying to conquer nature. I thought that was a really interesting thing to deconstruct.
So it was generational story first, then the world?
DH: Yeah
Qui, you came to Disney a few years ago from a playwriting background. How do you come to the Disney world and bring your playwriting skills to it?
QN: It’s about remembering the heartbeart of why you’re doing this. If you’re going to spend years of doing this, and putting yourself into it. This one was really easy because it wasn’t just me making it personal. Don had such a personal connection to this already. There are lines from Don’s history that are lines in the film!
And I think it’s the same approach I do when it comes to a play or a TV show or a screenplay.
DH: By the way, he’s as big a geek as you and I are!
QN: Not at all!
DH: It was clear from the first meeting that we were kindred spirits. We had the same references, we read the same things.
QN: I was saying this earlier, but people used to come in [when we were working] and say ‘you guys should probably talk about your movies, instead of what you say on TV!’ We burned hours geeking out about the stuff that we like.
But when it comes to the reachability factor with writing, the narrative that comes across sometimes is that it’s really difficult to jump from writing a play to a screenplay to an essay. Is that true?
QN: I would say that those who have a hard time doing it, jumping from discipline to discipline, they have a hard time recognising there is a different medium. If you try to write a movie using your playwriting skills, it will be too dialogue heavy. You’re not really taking advantage of what the screen does, which is the visual aspect.
If you’re trying to write a play like a movie, all your scenes are going to be super-short; they’re going to be discombobulated. You’re going to be sitting around with a bajillion set changes and you won’t get the rhythm there.
The heartbeat of storytelling is the same. You’re still trying to tell it in a three act structure, you’re still being character based. Ultimately, the mediums are different. You’ve got to you have to kind of honour the medium that you’re working in
When you’ve found that, as you did in this film, how then do you build a futuristic world? How firm are your rules?
DH: This was an interesting one – it was a little bit of having cake and eating it. A civilization that lives in isolation, that was central to the story, because, you know, that was a central question is ‘what is out there?’ That’s what’s driving Jaeger [Clade, one of the lead characters]. But I also love the idea of airships!
I was looking at a lot of images from the turn of the century. I went back and reread all those novels. The birth of the adventure novel! I loved the aspiration of what people thought the future was going to be like at that time. And there was a lot of flying stuff, a lot of flying, you know, ships and stuff like that. And so I kind of wanted to honour it.
We kind of started there, and there was some early stuff that looked a little more steampunk-y, to be perfectly honest, but I kind of gravitated away from it. Not that I hate it. It’s just felt like we could do something more unique.
QN: That’s kind of the joy of working with Don. He keeps surprising us, saying ‘I want to go underground, I want to be on an airship, I want cute little creatures in our movie but not Disney eyeballs on them.’ We’re going to keep playing with this and pushing, but it allowed for the new original ideas to appear because of that.
I wanted to talk to you about eyes, because presumably there’s a more realistic look you could have gone with here, but Disney seems more and more about leaning back into more obviously animated, less realistic.
DH: Coming off Raya And The Last Dragon, which is actually a very heightened and realistic-looking film, we knew were going for that look. With Strange World, we wanted to try something a little different, and with the character designs, I wish I could say I came in with this idea. But it was a reaction to Raya really. How can we do something different? And I love all kinds of comic books, but French and Belgian comic books…
Tintin?
DH: Yeah, and Asterix. And I gave them to Jin Kim, our character designer, and he got super-excited. That sort of became the DNA of the character deigns, and we went for something more oval-y, rather than the traditional kind of big Disney eyes.
QN: I first came to Disney four years ago and I remember talking about Moana with several artists there. They had the ability CG artists do to go photo real all the time, and it’s actually easier! But the reason we have the look that we do is it’s all a choice, right? And the artists make this choice. I don’t want to name them, but there are other movies that have that uncanny valley thing. Raya was a prime example of being very close to the edge of what could have been uncanny valley.
DH: Also here we were going for a bit more of a broader character design. It helped me because I was a little concerned at the beginning, I didn’t want the movie to be too serious, and take itself too seriously. So when we started to design the characters more broadly it blossomed from there. Because then the animation style started to follow suit and become more broad, and started to evoke the animation from Disney from like the 40s and 50s, which I love.
The colour palette here pushes at the edges too. Can you take us into trying to mesh such potentially conflicting colours to build a tangible world?
DH: It was a challenge. It really was. A restriction I placed on the art team early on was… I saw a few pieces early on and a lot of Earth tones were being brought down into the strange world and it didn’t look weird enough.
And I wanted a big separation, I wanted it to feel like something that we’ve never seen before. So we kind of restricted the use of earth tones. It necessitated everybody to come up with different colour combinations, and our production designer, he just rolled with it.
I worked with a man once who talked about he understood why grandparents and grandkids get on so well, that they have a common enemy. We’ve seen lots of father and son stories on screen, but here you’ve got a broader generational dynamic. How did you find the nuances of grandfather, father, son?
QN: Well, I think what’s so great about it was it was these three characters that Don and I related to mentally you know. We are parents too, and we’re ambitious too. And then there’s Ethan [the grandson], ‘I know you set a path out for me, but I have to actually cut my own.’ So I think that made it super relatable. Those are things that, you know, we want and that’s why there’s, you know, quote unquote, no bad guys. You want a bunch of antagonism, quote, unquote.
It’s like King Kong in a lot of ways, man versus nature too…
… the 1976 one.
QN: Exactly!
DH: The proper one! [laughs] Wasn’t Charles Grodin an oil guy?!
[A short discussion about 1976’s King Kong ensued, where we talked about Rick Baker’s massive contact lenses when he was in the King Kong suit.]
Don Hall, Roy Conli and Qui Nguyen
When you came to do Big Hero 6 Don, you put on film there the blended city of San Fransokyo. The research trips you took to mash those worlds together was also fascinating to me. But where does your research trip take you when you’re making an alien world?
DH: We researched a lot of mountain environments, from the Himalayas to the Andes to the Alps. We looked at the societies and cultures that live around them, that was one part of them. The other was the technological restrictions, trying to keep it sort of in the early part of the 1900s. Not even too far into the 30s. We kept it in a little box and then turned the artists loose.
Can you tell me then about how your lives have been for the last two and a half years, because this film has followed your last – Raya And The Last Dragon – remarkably quickly for animation. Do you two still like each other, given how closely you’ve had to work on both?
QN: They fit into each other, right? We started this project [work started on Strange World first] and Don and I didn’t know each other very well to be honest. Raya really built our relationship together as a team. We kind of went to war together.
What does a bad day between the two of you look like though? Do you have a rumble in the car park?
DH: You know, we were so aligned on everything.
Was that in the preparation you built that?
DH: I think so. And also just having similar sensibilities. I don’t think we ever really had a disagreement.
QN: I think in a lot of ways we became each other’s shelter in the storm. It’s not to say that making a movie at this size is ever easy. There’s a lot of stuff, but because we work at Disney, we’re NDA’d and can’t talk to our families about it.
You can’t talk to your families about the project?
QN: The people we talk to are each other. In a lot of ways we are each other’s support system through this really intense four years.
DH: I mean we could, but our families don’t want to hear it! [laughs]
Have you had any unusual reactions to bits of the film? I love asking this question….
[This is mulled for a while]
DH: Okay, this is not interesting, and you will never use it. But in the scene where Jaeger and Searcher are sharing a beverage let’s say, where it seems like they’re growing a bit closer and the walls are coming down, we take our time with that scene. There’s an intentionally awkward silence. And I remember in a preview there was laughing, as if we were going for a joke.
I think people have become conditioned with animated films to always think people are going for the joke, and we were just honouring what it’s like when you know you don’t quite connect, and there are awkward silences. I don’t think people knew how to take that yet.
QN: Also, and this is something we learned early on, every time Legend [the dog] showed up, he kind of stole the show. To the point where we were like, ‘we’ve really got to gauge that dog, because that dog can eat our movie!’
Is that why you took a leg off him?
DH: Yeah, it was delicious!
Were you watching Terminal Velocity a lot?
QN: Well, if Charlie Sheen can do it… [laughs]
Finally then, put aside the money, and whether this makes billions or not. In 20 years’ time, what is it that would make this film a success to you?
DH: That’s a really good question. I mean, we’re under no illusions that we’re going to solve climate change…
Wait, that’s my clickbait headline. Solving climate change it is. I’ll take this out of context.
DH: This movie will solve climate change! But seriously, we know our films have a sizeable voice.
If we can just get people to think about it, and be a bit more deliberate about their decisions, and think of future generations…
Qui Nguyen and Don Hall, thank you very much! Strange World is in UK cinemas now.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
