CHRIS NEUMER: I think this is the darkest interview I’ve ever done.
CONRAD VERNON: And afterwards it’ll be even darker than you’d imagined.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s true too. All right, I promised you I’d be more prepared, and I am. I was so excited to learn that you were the voice of the Gingerbread man.
CONRAD VERNON: You didn’t know that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, I probably knew that one of the directors did the voice of the Gingerbread Man, but I don’t think I ever knew that it was you who did the voice of the Gingerbread Man. I’d yell at my brother, don’t tell him anything, all the time, so it’s kind of funny, that’s finally something to share. Was that like a bonus, a little added extra for you?
CONRAD VERNON: A lot of crew does a lot of the voice, like another storyboard artist, Cody Cameron, he does the voice of the Three Pigs and Pinocchio. Our head of story on the last film and the director of Shrek 3 does the voice of the Magic Mirror, Chris Miller.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ok.
CONRAD VERNON: He was head of story on the last film, Shrek 2. Storyboard artist with me on Shrek 1, and he’s directing Shrek 3 at the moment, so Chris Miller did the voice of the Magic Mirror.
CHRIS NEUMER: Are you signed up to do Shrek 3?
CONRAD VERNON: No, I don’t care, no.
CHRIS NEUMER: You had said yesterday that the experience of making Shrek 2 was horrendous, on a project that was really good. What made the experience so horrendous?
CONRAD VERNON: It was — these films take a long time to do.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is it the repetition of it all?
CONRAD VERNON: No, it’s not the repetition, it was, the first Shrek film took 4 and a half, 5 years, and to take something from the very beginning idea, through development, through finding the character, through writing it, through storyboarding it, through finding the story, yeah, replacing Chris Farley, which happened right in the middle of production was a huge setback. It was just, it takes a long time to get something down, and it took 5 years for the first Shrek. And then with the second, they said well, now we have to do this in 2 and a half, 3. When you say to someone, we only had 3 years, they say what do you mean only 3 years, that’s a long time. Well, not when you’re doing any 80 minute film one frame at a time. Every single frame is labored on by a lot of people.
CHRIS NEUMER: So, outside of it being long, you seem adamant that it was a horrendous experience, that was your words, was there anything besides the length, was it just sort of having to do all the work in half the time?
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, that, and the fact that you’re just trying to find the story, and the characters were already set, so we had that ok, but there was also the whole thing about traveling back and forth between San Francisco and LA, I loved living in San Francisco, but the flights back and forth really got tiring, there was also a lot of eyes on this film, because it was the second one, so there was a lot of people we pitched to, and tried to get the work done. Like, we had sponsors coming in, we had…
CHRIS NEUMER: When you say sponsors, you mean --?
CONRAD VERNON: Well, not sponsors, but product ties, like with Burger King and stuff like that, we were pitching to them, and we were pitching to guys that we were getting to do music, so there was a lot of going down, stopping, we never stopped work, that’s why we had 2 directors, at the very end.
CHRIS NEUMER: I thought you had 3.
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, we had 3, but at the very end, Andrew had peeled off to go and do his other film, to do Narnia, and Kelly and I took the production from there. So Kelly and I were flying back and forth. One of us would stay up North to keep the production going; the other would fly down to LA.
CHRIS NEUMER: LA’s more the business?
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, I mean, we did story in LA, but all the animation was done up at PDI, up north.
CHRIS NEUMER: What’s PDI?
CONRAD VERNON: Pacific Data Images, in Redwood City. Between the flying and the short time span we had, and all the pitching we had to do, it was crazy, really crazy. But, the one thing that I think kept me going personally, was I’d get back up to San Francisco if I’d flown to LA, and they’d set up a computer so I could check shots, and as I saw the shots come through lighting, I was just inspired, like you wouldn’t believe, it kept me going just to see the amazing stuff that was coming back. I’m incredibly proud of the film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was it interesting for you seeing it dubbed into English and Spanish subtitles yesterday?
CONRAD VERNON: I loved it.
CHRIS NEUMER: You did?
CONRAD VERNON: I did, I liked hearing the different voices, I liked hearing how they did my voice, and it was pretty spot on.
CHRIS NEUMER: I guess that’s true, I couldn’t really tell the difference, I closed my eyes, and tried to listen to the difference between Eddie Murphy, between the donkey and Shrek, and I couldn’t tell that much of a difference. I think between Fiona and the Fairy Godmother, I wasn’t really sure about that.
CONRAD VERNON: In Spanish?
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, I just couldn’t discern the different voices, but I think I’m just not that familiar with them. But let me ask you this: You had said that you had stories; I know you talked about fleshing out better stories and fleshing out the characters, but did you ever feel like that working with characters that were so set, whose paths and feelings were so well-constructed in the first, that that wasn’t as freeing for you guys?
CONRAD VERNON: No, actually, it was more freeing, because we knew who Shrek was already. We didn’t have to find a personality. Mike Meyers had come in and nailed that for us on the first one. So we knew the personality, we knew how he would react to certain situations, but the interesting part was going in and saying Ok, but now that he’s in love, how does that change the way he reacts? Usually he would just, you know, Say Argh! I’m out of here, I’m not going to deal with this. But now there’s someone else he has to think about. It was interesting to go in and actually put Shrek in these situations. In the first one we knew how he’d react, but in the second one, now that he has Fiona to think about, and his very good friend Donkey to think about, how does he react now? And so, it was freeing not having to sit around the table and debate, well, would he do this, or would he do that, you know? We knew kind of where he was.
CHRIS NEUMER: It was almost like you could build a third and fourth story, or something.
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, and that’s kind of what we did with the second one. We didn’t just do a rehash of the first one. We wanted to take the adventure further.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think that’s a line right out of the review. I’ll send you a copy of it when I get back. But I think that’s what you did. I loved the film; I think you’ve gathered that.
CONRAD VERNON: I’m glad.
CHRIS NEUMER: It was good that you didn’t just rehash. Like Austin Powers, the second one, same movie as the first one, just like, this worked, let’s do it again, there’s no expansion. But like sitcom slagging, the way 2 characters usually have a baby, or another baby, and it’s kind of like, "Well, we’ve done what we can with these characters." Did you do anything to control a situation so it didn’t just feel like, let’s just add on?
CONRAD VERNON: One more time, I’m not sure I understand the question.
CHRIS NEUMER: You introduced new characters, now I know the Fairy Godmother was either storyboarded or scripted from the first one, but you introduced a host of new characters for the second film, the Fairy Godmother, Fiona’s parents. Did you do anything, either when you were pitching the characters or writing the story, so you didn’t feel like you were adding on just for the sake of adding on?
CONRAD VERNON: No, all the characters that we put it in, were really organic to the story. Andrew was a very big part of that, because he had the very first inkling of the idea on where to go in the second one. He said, what if we had this story where Shrek and Fiona have to meet the parents, and who does he meet while we’re there? And then we had these 2 characters, Puss in Boots and the Fairy Godmother, especially Fairy Godmother is a very big part of fairy tales that we didn’t go into in Shrek 1. I mean we had the 3 sleeping beauty fairy godmothers just flying around, but we never really saw them do anything, they were just background characters. But the fairy godmother is a huge part of fairy tales. So we wanted to go in and figure out how to twist her because that’s what we do with fairy tales in the Shrek world, we turn them all, that old Jay Ward thing, fractured fairy tales.
CHRIS NEUMER: I know you mentioned one with the guy with his thumbs chopped off, in different interviews.
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, I’m telling you, we went through all the Grimm’s fairy tales books, And we said what we going to do We were just like well these are weird, Grimm’s fairy tales are really weird, they’re really dark.
CHRIS NEUMER: Sick twisted demented little stories.
CONRAD VERNON: And a lot of these are meant to scare kids into doing good like chopping off your thumbs and so we thought why can really do these but the fairy godmother is a fairy tale staple we had to do something with this idea, so we had her as like a Sopranosesque, I even mention this in the DVD commentary, we had like a Sopranosesque therapist at one point The where she was kind of like a psychiatrist you lay down the couch saw her and told her your problems and everything and that felt a little to grim and talking heads, and how can she move around.
CHRIS NEUMER: Isn’t talking heads a TV concept?
CONRAD VERNON: No, talking heads is a term we use in animation, where you just have people sitting around talking to each other and not doing anything.
CHRIS NEUMER: Not like the newscast talking heads.
CONRAD VERNON: No, no just a bunch of characters talking instead of acting and doing what animated characters could do. You can get away with a lot of that if the characters are really interesting. We have a lot of that in Shrek. But it felt like every time we went that direction with the Fairy Godmother character, just sitting and talking to each other, we wanted a lot more with her magic so we basically looked at Sleeping Beauty, at Cinderella especially, and we thought how can we take this type of Fairy Godmother and turn her on her ear. Well, she’d fit perfectly into Beverly Hills because someone -- and I think Jennifer Gunderson came up with this, that we didn’t use because we thought it was a little too adult -- but it was a great way to nail the character. She said, well, would you like a breast enchantment, weight-loss hex, you know, I can make you look pretty.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s definitely Beverly Hills.
CONRAD VERNON: Exactly, we said that’s our Fairy Godmother, that’s how we’re going to turn her on her ear. She can use her magic, she can be a bad guy because it’s all about surface, it’s not about what’s inside.
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me ask you this, which is basically me being a jackass, but I figure while I have you here. It dawned on me last night, when at the end of the film, human Shrek looks at hot Fiona and says, you have a choice about what it is you want, and she says, I want to be happy. She realizes she loves Shrek for who he is. At that point in time, couldn’t they have stayed hot because she had that revelation?
CONRAD VERNON: They could’ve, and we debated about this, but there was no question about what they were going to do, because she loved Shrek for who he was when she fell in love with him. He was an ogre when she fell in love with him; he was not a handsome man. And I think it just strengthened and underlined the theme of: you are who you are inside, not what you look like.
CHRIS NEUMER: Although I think every guy in America was like, give me the red-haired Cameron Diaz, kind of an interesting thing. About the trio of directors, I know you guys talked a lot about the relay-race of directors, you said that you pouted in the corner, but did you feel that your background allowed you to be better prepared for certain aspects of the story than Kelly or Andrew, or did you feel that it was sort of three people with very similar styles who were working on the project.
CONRAD VERNON: Well, I’m not sure I got the pout around the corner thing.
CHRIS NEUMER: You had said in a number of different interviews that working with three directors, and there were times you’d be like —
CONRAD VERNON: Oh no, you know what that is, that’s just being a human being, working together. I don’t think any of us were more or less prepared or anything. If you took all three of us and put us on three separate movies we’d all know how to make one of these. We all know how to get all the way through it.
CHRIS NEUMER: I wanted to know if you’re like the Terrific Trio, if you have a power that maybe Kelly and Andrew doesn’t.
CONRAD VERNON: Oh yeah, definitely.
CHRIS NEUMER: Who was better at what?
CONRAD VERNON: I think Andrew’s really good at nailing the emotion, making sure that the underlying thread of storyline that goes all the way through is continually being brought out.
CHRIS NEUMER: Can you give me a specific scene, example or something?
CONRAD VERNON: A specific scene example is Shrek and Fiona at the very end. They look each other in the eyes, and she says she wants to be happy, and then he goes to kiss her, because he thinks that’s what happiness is, and she says no, with the ogre I married. He was very good at saying this is the way they should say this, this is the way Shrek and Fiona — just to bring that piece of the story and the theme out. He was very good at watching that all the way through. Even when Shrek finds the Fairy Godmother’s card, we don’t want him to just run off and take a potion, because that would make him look a little dopey, and at the same time we didn’t want him to just sit on a rock and pout. So, Andrew was really good at saying ok, so this is where Shrek finds the card, she’s a teardrop away, he has Donkey cry on the card, and he says, ok, we’re going to go find this Fairy Godmother and see if she can help us with this problem. Instead of just going, let’s go steal a potion immediately, he says let’s go talk to her, and see what she has to say. It’s just making sure that—
CHRIS NEUMER: More subtle.
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, it’s just making sure the theme comes out. I was the one who brought out — and it’s hard for me to tell, it’s all very subjective — other people will know what I brought to it better than I do, because they’re seeing me do it. But I think what I brought to it was, I could definitely take a scene, for example, the first board of Puss in Boots was done by me. No one knew what the character of Puss in Boots was, they said are we going to do this or are we going to do that. Is he this type of person or that type of person. I would go in there and write the character and I would give him personality. I did that a lot in TV shows; I would develop and define the humor of the TV show and the style of the TV show. I did that on the first Shrek and this one as well. I think I go in and I can define characters really well. I can bring them into the picture and define their personalities and the way they deal with other people within a scene.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s one of the highlights of the series though, thus far, just the fact that even characters like — and it’s such a small world — like reading something like the Wolf or Pinocchio, I was thinking more the first one in his cross-dressing days, but stuff like that, you’re able to very finely tune the character in a very small amount of time.
CONRAD VERNON: When I see a new character I instantly want to attach a new personality to it, it’s someone who annoyed me in high school, or one of my friends now, or my parents.
CHRIS NEUMER: Would you actually think back to that, someone who annoyed you in high school and think back to those traits that were so annoying for characters in the film?
CONRAD VERNON: Sure, I think that’s what all writers do, that’s what everyone does, they kind of draw on their own experience, and they put it into the film.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, I was thinking more specific — but yeah that’s true.
CONRAD VERNON: It’s not specific; I don’t think back and go, Jeff blah, blah, blah, really annoyed me in high school because he did this to me and now I’m going to get him back. I’m not doing that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ok.
CONRAD VERNON: I’m just doing, I remember this guy always used to eat sandwiches with his braces, and then he’d talk a lot with his teeth showing, and it was really gross, because he’d be drinking milk with Wonder bread in his braces, and it would drive me crazy, and I’d think, that’s kind of funny, I’ll give that trait to a character.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which character ended up with that one?
CONRAD VERNON: That was just off the top of my head.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ok.
CONRAD VERNON: (Laughing) I was giving you an example. So that’s what I’m trying to nail. I look back on my experience, I look back on people I knew, and I think even David Sedaris does the same thing, when he writes about his family.
CHRIS NEUMER: Dave Isadaris?
CONRAD VERNON: David Sedaris, the author.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, David Sedaris, I thought you said David Isadaris, ok.
CONRAD VERNON: He’ll go back and look at his family and he’ll write about them. And he’ll probably exaggerate some things and play back some things in order to tell a funny story. And I think that’s what everyone does; you’ve got to drop something, that’s what I do. Kelly, he was really, really good at just communicating and making sure that everyone got everything really, really straight, bringing -- especially in the animation -- the story out in the acting, of the animation. He was really, really good at that. And he was also very good at communicating with people, he did a lot of the pitches to people, and because he knew how to tell a story really concisely and really quickly, he got everyone on board and really knew how to bring them onto a story. When he was directing the animators, he was really, really good.
CHRIS NEUMER: Had his whip ready?
CONRAD VERNON: Excuse me?
CHRIS NEUMER: The whip?
CONRAD VERNON: No, not the whip, he was very fun. That’s the thing, he was always like — what we tried to do when we were directing the crew is, we wanted to bring down this oh my god, the directors are coming! Just get it really, you know, we wanted to inspire them, and get their morale up. They were working a lot of hours at the time. And I think Kelly basically instructed me, because this was my first film, and he’d directed before —
CHRIS NEUMER: He did Cinemarun, the stallion movie, I can’t remember…
CONRAD VERNON: Yeah, he did Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and he was also on Shrek 1 for a while. But he taught me how to go around and just have a real rapport with the animators, make them feel at ease; make them feel like, you know, this should be fun. We’re working on animation, it should be fun.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was there a lot — and you don’t have to run with this, I’m just curious — I know in Disney 2-D in the early 90’s you’d hear that the word sex would come out in the dust, or you’d hear little things that cell animators would put in, does stuff like that go on in 3-D, CGI?
CONRAD VERNON: Shrek’s littered with it, it’s just not anything scandalous. We kind of took that idea and just decided, let’s put in really funny jokes,
CHRIS NEUMER: [Inaudible], stuff like that?
CONRAD VERNON: A lot of those came from the art department, too. We asked them, we said, basically we need a lot of Beverly Hills store names, and they went down there and took pictures all over Beverly Hills and they said there was Versace, there was Abercrombie and Fitch, there was Old Navy, and then they came up and they redid the logos, in new medieval terms. They came up with some brilliant ones. And luckily all we had to do was go, these are funny, these are funny, and luckily we came up with some ourselves.
CHRIS NEUMER: Were there any that didn’t strike you as funny that you remember that you just left out, or things that just didn’t quite make it in?
CONRAD VERNON: I don’t remember which ones we didn’t put in.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which ones were your favorite, which ones still get you today? After three years thinking about it every single day?
CONRAD VERNON: One that no one ever sees that I always thought was kind of funny was instead of Polo by Ralph Lauren, we had Joust, and they took that little guy on the horse, they made it into a jousting guy, which was really clever to me. One I came up with that I liked was Friar’s Fat Boy, which not a lot of people got because it was based on Big Boy. And we had burger prints at one time, and we put that into the background, but we thought Friar’s Fat Boy would’ve been funnier, especially with that big statue out there, with the mutton chop on it.
CHRIS NEUMER: All right, this is one of the last things I have for you. One of the films that has excited me the most, just from my own visual style, is the French film Irreversible. Are you familiar with that?
CONRAD VERNON: I haven’t seen it.
CHRIS NEUMER: But are you familiar with it? The idea is, it’s 12 scenes, they’re all one take, and it’s not just shot around an apartment, or two people having dinner talking, they actually get on the Subway, they move around, they’re at a party with literally hundreds of extras around, they’re doing 12, 13 minute scenes steadicam and stuff like that.
CONRAD VERNON: Is it improv? Or were they written and when you forgot you just kind of found your way back?
CHRIS NEUMER: Sort of, I don’t know if you’d call that improv, but it was the same type of thing. I was realizing that, with CG animation, it seems like there’s a Catch-22 at work, like, you can do whatever you want with the camera. Before I came out here I happened to watch the opening of Disney’s Dinosaur, which I still enjoy the opening, they go under a brontosaurus at one point in time, and you can do that because you’re playing around with the camera. You can put the camera wherever you want, you can do what you want. But it seems like there are certain times when you do that, like where the pig was in the air at the dinner table, where I realized that’s not something you could do live-action, at least not very easily. But the thing is, I realized that you want the film to be taken as a film, so you’re probably not doing this really wacky, really cosmic, far out — I’ve been smoking weed all day and I came up with this crazy camera angle — film. Do you get that sense when you guys are storyboarding that you have to make this look like any other film?
CONRAD VERNON: No, that was a stylistic choice that they’d made on the first one, which was, basically, this is going to be shot like a live-action movie, because they wanted it to feel more like a live-action movie done in animation, just camera-wise. And then every once in a while, when we were doing a gag, or when the story demanded it, they would like — when Robin Hood shoots the arrow — and you follow the arrow, it’s kind of like a take-off the Robin Hood, Kevin Costner movie. When the gag calls for it, or when the story calls for it, and that’s rare, we would go ahead and do that just because watching the film like a live-action movie and then all of a sudden this shot hits you, there’s a contrast there, and people will either laugh more, or it’ll become more exciting because it contrasts from the rest of the film. I’m not saying the rest of it is dull or anything.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, it just resembles more like the other standard.
CONRAD VERNON: In Shrek 2, there was a shot when Shrek and Fiona were sleeping in bed, and he saw the Sir Justin poster, and he was walking around the room, it was a really tough camera thing that we had, because in order to get Shrek standing up and walking past the camera over the fireplace, we would’ve had to stick the camera in the wall, and that broke our rules. There was no gag to play out because of it, so we said this doesn’t fit into the style of our film, let’s find another way to shoot this, and of course, in thinking about this, we thought, it would be great if he went over to the window and looked at the Far, Far Away sign, because that’s how he feels, away from his home, out in the middle of nowhere and that came up just because we wouldn’t let ourselves cheat and stick the camera in the wall. Doing some hypercritical thinking about all this brings up new ideas, and setting limits on yourself, and a style gives you more creativity I think.
