While I was attending San Diego Comic-Con this year, I had a chance to attend the Brad Bird panel in Hall H. It was a great panel, and here’s a recap of what Brad talked about during it.
Brad Bird knows how to make great films. Two of his movies, The Iron Giant and The Incredibles rest atop by favorite superhero genre movies. His panel was to promote his upcoming project, Ray Gunn and to reflect back on his impressive career.
He began by discussing his early work on The Simpsons.
“The writer’s words sometimes make sense on the page but really hard to convey visually.”
The experience allowed him to make the movies he made because of that pressure he felt during The Simpsons experience.
Bird went on to explain his theory on why The Iron Giant underperformed upon its theatrical release.
“Marketing; if you don’t do it, it can really hurt your film.”
However, he conveyed an optimistic view as he continued to elaborate on the movie.
“People did catch up to The Iron Giant.”
He recalled that “The studio got the pitch and I said that I wanted to do something different than the original story. ‘What if a gun didn’t want to be a weapon?’”
With The Incredibles, he was convinced that it was possible to make very compelling animated characters.
He talked about adjusting to “brain trust meetings” at Pixar.
“You get a reputation if you argue against notes. I don’t mind notes if they’re not stupid,” he said jovially before conveying that “it was good to go through that process.”
“With Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I had been trying to do 1906″ (1906 refers to a movie that he’d had brewing in his head for years, referring to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906). So I looked around for things ready to go.”
This came at a time that Tom Cruise invited him to his home.
“We talked movies for two to three hours. Cruise said that if I ever wanted to do live action, he’d love to work with me.”
Bird elaborated by saying that the Tom Cruise vehicle was his chance to do a spy movie and recalled that “…we shattered 37 windows for the Cruise external shots,” when it came to his climbing of a skyscraper.
Bird’s main focal point was to promote his upcoming movie, Ray Gunn; it is set for a Netflix release on December 18th. Attendees were granted the opportunity to watch the first seven minutes of footage. Not surprisingly, it had a Pixar flavor to the future noir storyline. It appears that the two-time Academy Award winner will once again deliver the flavor of unique storytelling that Bird tends to produce.
