Geekscape Interviews 9 Director Shane Acker!
Some of you are pretty excited about the new movie 9, coming out this week and offering up a dark, animated story about a group of ragdolls finding their way through a post-apocalyptic world while fighting machines. Luckily, to get you primed for it, Geekscape took part in a round table discussion with the film’s director, Shane Acker, who first envisioned the characters and their world in his graduate thesis film. Take a look at what he had to say about the world which he created 10 years ago… and whether he would enjoy to continue living in it.
Geekscape: How was spending 4 years on a thesis film to then have a feature and go through another 3 years in that world?
Shane: A little exhausting! There wasn’t a whole lot of downtime between the short film and the feature so I’ve been running a marathon for quite some years now. It’s really great to have it out there, to have my work being seen and people are responding pretty well to it so that’s really rewarding after spending so much time on it. You know… it was a tough journey but what a wonderful opportunity. Hopefully it’s inspiring. I think it is to young filmmakers who come up to me and say “wow, you’re really living the dream” and “that’s something I want to do”. So I think that’s great to know that it’s something that can be done. You can go from a project in film school to a film.
Geekscape: Did you have in your mind everything that wasn’t in the short film that is explained now? You knew all that stuff?
Shane: No, I mean, there’s a lot of invention that happened. But by the time the script writer came on I had a lot of that stuff in my head. I thought at a great length so I just kind of vomited all those ideas out to her and she was kinda “okay, okay, okay, let’s figure out how we can get all these little bits and pieces back into the film.” I had some of the ideas behind the backstory when I was making the short just because when you’re designing something and creating a world you should know the history of that world so it becomes believable. So I had loose ideas about who these characters where, where they came from, what the backstory was. But it wasn’t until we started working on the feature that I really kind of fine tuned and refined all that.
Geekscape: You’ve got some interesting producers on this movie- a couple of iconic, amazing visionary directors. What input did that have in terms of getting the film made?
Shane: Tim(Burton) came on- he was one of the first to come on. I met with (producer) Jim Lemley and he got the short and then my treatment in front of Tim and I pitched to Tim. And Tim said that he loved it and wanted to be a part of it so once he came on the team that really started to get the ball rolling. I think once you have a director of that calibre, especially someone who has made a name for himself in animation and pushing the animation medium, it seems to make it an easier sell.
Geekscape: What is that like to go from starting a small film to all of a sudden having Tim Burton on board? What was that day like for you? That’s gotta be a really cool moment.
Shane: Of course it was overwhelming and it was amazing. But I was kind of inexperienced enough to not be over- you know- It’s like I was coming from a point of not knowing so I was like “yeah! Okay! Cool! Setting up movies kind of easy, isn’t it?” Jim’s like, after the first pitch- I guess he hadn’t smoked for years- and he got a cigarette and lit it up and was like “itneverhappenslikethisitneverhappenslikethis!” I’m like “really?” It seems pretty easy! When you pitch to Tim and now I got a movie going! So there was a little bit of that. But then the reality set in that this was a high calibre project working with high calibre filmmakers with a studio that’s know for making, I think, really quality movies- really independently, director-voiced movies. So I knew that I had probably bitten off more than I could chew so it was time to get to serious work. And I think that kind of fear of failure is what really propels me to try to do the best that I can under the circumstances.
Geekscape: Did you ever feel any pressure to maybe lighten things up or make contemporary the setting? You have this sort of amalgamation of a post World War 2 Stalinist world- and it’s dark. W
as there any pressure from anyone sort of saying “you know what? We can’t make money off of anything this dark.”?
Shane: That was never really an issue. You know, you’re making a film with a group of other people so it really is a collective group of people making decisions. And working with the writer I probably wanted to go into some darker areas than maybe the writer went to and I think maybe she was about pulling some of that stuff back. But they were all pretty supportive about the look and the world and what we were doing. So there really wasn’t an issue. Plus, we were trying to do it for so cheap that we could take these kinds of risks. And so we were trying to do it on a modest budget because we knew this was something new for the animation genre, or at least the marketplace here in the States, and that we were gonna go a little darker and push the edges and the boundary. They did approach me about doing it as a PG movie and I just told them I didn’t know if this movie was going to land that way. I knew the movie that I wanted to tell but I couldn’t guarantee that it was going to be a PG movie so they said “okay, we’ll agree on a PG-13 if that’s where it lands.” We didn’t do anything gratuitous that would give us a PG-13. There’s no nudity or swearing or blood or anything like that. But it is intense. There’s scary moments and has a dark backdrop even if I think its a hopeful journey that these characters are on.
Geekscape: What are some of the ideas that you couldn’t get into the film?
Shane: That’s an interesting question. It’s all a process so you’re constantly trying things and throwing it out so there’s a lot that we threw out. Not a lot of footage but a lot of- We went through a really extensive story boarding. We kept story boarding the whole film so you throw thing out-
Geekscape: But in the writing stage-
Shane: Well, I thought that- and it’s all to try and pull more emotion out of the audience- I felt like one of the twins should die and the other twin would-
Geekscape: Uggh!
Shane: See? See? It would have been terrible, right? And then the other twin is there and seeing that their other counterpart is gone- the only one that they can really communicate with. You see, that’s really like heavy, dramatic stuff.
Geekscape: You would have lost me on that one.
Shane: But then you always try and pay that off with something else somehow in the end- I dunno. But that was my instinct for good or for bad and we had to pull back on that one a little bit. That’s just on example.
Geekscape: After 7 years, do you have any thoughts on sequel?
Shane: Actually, we had a couple meetings and I think we’ve come up with a couple fun ideas. It was fun. It was Timur (Bekmambetov), Jim and I just kind of spitballing stuff but- It’s interesting because we’ve sort of set up at the end of the film that maybe life will be returning to the planet so the next chapter might be “how do they deal with it?” If they’re sort of the internal shepherds of this new world and life is coming back what happens if that life begins to push in and encroach on them or threaten them? Do they step in and try and alter that or change the course of that or do they let it play out naturally and step back? It could be interesting questions. And also, how would they be able to evolve themselves or replicate themselves? Do they still hold true to that human spirit inside of them or do they recognize that they are machines and try and evolve themselves mechanically? Does that then become the slippery slope that slips them back into the trajectory that the machines were on? So these are all just sort of interesting questions that we can begin to ask.
Geekscape: Would you want to stay in this world another 3 or 4 years?
Shane: I’ve been working on other projects which has been fun. It’s been fun to take my head out of it, but it could be a really rewarding experience to get back into it. I dunno.
Geekscape: The 7 years ago when it started- what was the first thought?
Shane: It was actually 1999 when I started the process.
Geekscape: Okay, so the 10 years- what was the first thought? How did it spark?
Shane: It was like “wow, I’ve gotta come up with something for this thesis film!” And I really loved the world of stop motion so I wanted to make a stop motion film. I loved the texture and the quality the way you could create- I really wanted to express the armatures and the things that were within the characters- like The Brothers Quay- some of these independent filmmakers. So it kind of started there. And then I imagined this post-human world- this world where we’re gone. And now there’s this new life form emerging out of what we left behind. But they still have this creative spirit- this intelligence. But there’s this legacy from the past that’s trying to smother that and take that from ‘em. And that was that beast. So these are some of the ideas. And then also, how do you do just pure visual storytelling with no dialogue? So I looked at a lot of graphic novelists like Moebius. He did this Arzach series which was just this character in this world. And each one was just 3-4 pages of a visual story but they really rich and you really got the sense of who this character was and what this world was like just from those panels. So those were the kinds of ideas that were the impetus for the short.
Geekscape: You’re CGing something to make it look real rather than CGing something to make it look unreal.
Shane: Kind of, I guess. Back in 1999 it was a reaction to how clean and sterile and bright and cheery all this CG was. I don’t really connect with that. I want to make a world feel like it’s been lived in and there’s a history. It’s like the Star Wars movies vs 2001 where everything’s so clean and pristine and then in Star Wars he kind of trashed it all up and everything got all dirty and it was falling apart and they’re always fixing things. It made it feel like a real world- like there was a history. It grounded it somehow. And that’s what I wanted to do in that film.
Geekscape: So when you think of stereoscopic 3D- when you think of something like Coraline, going more into the real- they can do some amazing things with something that’s real. Would that be something that you’d be interested in?
Shane: I dunno about stop motion. That’s just a completely different- I think I like CG. But stereoscopic- it’s an interesting question. I think Coraline is a good example of what you can do with stereoscopic. I think there’s poorer examples. You’ve gotta get past the whole “poking your eye out” thing and find out how we can use this technology to better tell our stories. Otherwise I think it’ll just be kind of a gimmick in some way. I mean, that’s kind of my take on it. Until I see really clear examples of how we can use it to help us tell a story… because it’s interesting and what I don’t like about it is when you wear those glasses somehow it helps to separate me from the motion picture rather than immerse me in the motion picture. Somehow it’s like 1 or 2 stops darker and there’s this technological interface that’s bothersome to me. If they can figure out a way to do away with that and pull you in then maybe I’ll have more interest.
Geekscape: Talking about story, you’ve got the story of the film and then you’ve got sort of the story IN the film that starts with the blank slate of the character. What was the challenge in writing a blank slate character or was it liberating? And then introducing them to this history that had existed long before him? When did all that start coming together: the bible of the story? Was it in the screenwriting?
Shane: I guess it was. The screenwriting was sort of the kick off and then really it’s story boarding in animation where you really start to find your film. We had a really condensed story board phase where you storyboard the whole thing in 6 months. You just barely get it up and see it. And you realize the train wreck that it is and then it was sort of “okay, let’s get off to production!” So that was a real challenge. The whole film we were sort of stumbling over ourselves trying to keep reworking the story while we were in the middle of production which was really hard to do. So at some point you just start with “we’ve gotta make the footage so let’s just make it and then in editorial let’s just keep playing with and try to move it around and find what’s the best fit.” The hard thing with animation is it’s not like you shoot a bunch of footage that you have a lot to make movies out of. It’s an inverted process. You kind of draw everything that you want and then you’ve gotta make that specific thing. So we didn’t have a whole lot of material to do recuts with so it was really a challenge to still be working on story yet producing everything and yet not having a whole lot of opportunity to kind of reshape the movie when it was done.
