Brad Bird is one of the most celebrated modern animators. From The Iron Giant to The Incredibles and even through his work on The Simpsons, Bird has left an indelible mark on the medium.
But throughout the years, the filmmaker has steadily been trying to get a passion project made, a sci-fi noir full of intrigue, cool gadgets, and weird little alien creatures. It’s a project Bird describes as The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers. Enter Ray Gunn, which is set to debut on Netflix on December 18.
The film is set in Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future styled after the late 1930s, but with a sci-fi twist. The film follows the last human private eye, Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell), as he investigates a series of murders with a strange link to a pop superstar named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). The opening of the film, as shown at the Annecy Animation Film Festival recently, looks stunning, combining Bird’s love of art deco and film noir with great sci-fi alien creatures, crisp and fluid animation, and stylish action, as well as hints of a compelling mystery involving disappearances and kidnappings.
IGN caught up with Brad Bird at Annecy to talk about the long development of Ray Gunn, moving from animation to live-action (and back again), and more.
IGN: I am fascinated by directors who move between live-action and animation from project to project. What was it about this movie that needed to be told in animation?
Brad Bird: Well, it didn't need to be told in animation. It could be told in live-action. The studio who previously owned the movie tried to make me do it in live-action, and it could work, with aliens and flying cars and all that stuff, but I didn’t see it that way. I needed to see it in animation. When I first started out, I met some old-time animators who believed if you could do something in live-action, there was no reason to do it in animation.
I disagree with it completely. Something doesn’t need to be in one medium or another; it’s about what your vision for the story best dictates. You have to envision the project in your mind and it’s either live-action or animation. When I was doing Iron Giant, people kept saying “You stage things like a live-action movie,” and then when I got into live-action, they’d go, “You stage things like an animated movie.” But it's just storytelling; it's the same thing. It's shots, music, color…
IGN: How did the movie change throughout the years of development?
Brad Bird: Not that much, actually, in terms of story. I first thought of the film as 2D in the ‘90s, but I couldn’t get support for doing it hand-drawn, so CG became the only option. Thankfully the technology has changed over the years. It’s become more like live-action in the sense that it can stage better lighting and textures. Makes it easier to establish a vision and visualize it from the start.
IGN: What do you look at in terms of inspiration? Do you look more at animation or live-action?
Brad Bird: I tend to look at live-action a little more just because there's a lot more of it. I've said this before, but animation was my gateway drug to live-action, to cinema. Once I started paying attention to how people were using the language of cinema, it became more interesting to me.
IGN: Watching the opening sequence of Ray Gunn, it’s clear you’re taking inspiration from film noir, which isn’t something that young audiences are necessarily familiar with. And yet the film doesn’t feel like adult animation. How do you find the balance of tones in terms of allowing audiences of different ages to buy into the movie?
Brad Bird: I’m not thinking about ages at all – I think it’s too complicated. If you think about it logically, my job as a filmmaker is to tell a story that someone will watch two years from now. So if you think that it is your job to make something that someone specific will like two years from now with completely different lives and completely different experiences, that just makes you go insane. So you can't think of that. You have to say, if you’re in a darkened theater and the curtains are opening, what do I want to see? And then it becomes very simple because you're just going, what would grab me? That makes my job manageable. I wanted to see Ray Gunn, and the only way to see it was to make it.
IGN: Did your approach to Ray Gunn change at all now that you’ve worked on several films, including live-action?
Brad Bird: There were a couple of times where I’d given up hope the movie would ever get made. The thing early on in my career was that I could do a pitch and I could always sell a pitch, but they would buy it and I was very cheap at the time. Then, if they didn't want to make it, you couldn't take it anywhere else because they own it and they would sit on it. So I had trouble with that and finally after a few successes, I could bargain to get the film out of the studio to find it a new home.
I thought coming out of the pandemic that it would be easy to get financing because my previous movie had done very well, and I had written it and I had directed it and it made a lot of money. The funny thing is some other filmmakers told me when I did Mission: Impossible [Ghost Protocol], a couple of filmmaker friends of mine said, “Why are you doing Mission: Impossible? You can do anything you want in animation.” And they said people will trust you in animation. You won't have to fight over it, all this stuff.
A lot of people would go, “I'd go see that movie, but I don't want to spend my money to make it happen.” So when Netflix stepped up and backed it, it was a big deal. It was really hard to get backing.
Ray Gunn will (finally) debut on Netflix on December 18.
