Brad Bird from the medium of Animation to Live Action Feature Film Interview by Peter Crithary Photo Credit: Kimberly French Photos: ©Disney Enterprises, Inc
Q: You came from the medium of animation, and then you crossed over into live action. Tell me about your background. BRAD BIRD: I think from the very beginning, I was trying to do movies. I started drawing at the age of 3, and the very first drawings I did were sequential. I didn’t figure this out until later. They were just stick figure drawings, but they were meant to be viewed in a certain order. When I started doing animation at the age of 11, I had to figure out which shots were in close-up and which shots were medium shots, and which were pans, because I had to draw them and then shoot one frame at a time while I moved the background or changed the drawings out. I recognized that certain directors were making me laugh more consistently than others in animation, and I started noticing that certain filmmakers in live action were consistently getting my emotions involved in a way that other filmmakers were not. My parents talked about how Hitchcock could get a chill to go up your spine right when he wanted to, and that became fascinating to me. How do you do that? Just like you might have a favorite ballplayer or a favorite singer, I was noticing that certain filmmakers were consistently engaging. So I wanted to do a live action film almost as long as I have done animation. Animation was just kind of a 1
back to TOC
gateway drug to the world of film, and I love both the medium of animation and the medium of live action film. To me, it’s all film. I got my first breaks in animation, but I always intended to get into live action, and it took me a little longer to cross over than I originally imagined. Q: What was your first big break into animation? BIRD: I had pitched a short animated project to Steven Spielberg with the idea of bringing theatrical shorts back to movie theaters. Steven didn’t elect to do it, but he remembered it. Years later, I got involved with writing an episode of Amazing Stories for Matthew Robbins, and I was meeting with Spielberg. I had done another Family Dog storyboard. He had seen my original storyboard, just a series of little sketches. I brought them to the meeting when we were going to discuss other scripts, and I just showed it to him. He asked if I could do a half an hour of it, and I said “Sure.” So we made the only episode of Amazing Stories that was animated, and it was also the only negative pickup, meaning they just gave us the money and a deadline. It was the only episode produced outside of the machinery, so to speak, of the rest of the show. I had gotten a couple of screenwriting credits but that was my first opportunity to write and direct, and then it just kind of went from there. I got involved with the Simpsons through Family Dog, and then my first chance to do a feature was Iron Giant.