I remember when my daughter was twelve, suddenly a boy started hanging out in front of our house after school. It was this kid, Justin. My office at the time was right in the front, so I just looked out the window. I couldn't write. I couldn't concentrate. I was like, "What are you doing? What do you expect to achieve by standing in front of my house with my daughter inside?" I hated that kid so much.
We have never pushed it far enough to know, but we decided 47 percent was the right percentage. You can quote us on that. It's very mathematical.
Ken has three kids. I have three kids. The first movie was basically the story of our lives. Every man is kind of a villain until he then has kids. And then, they soften us up.
You want to find the right balance, but you have to have the Minions because people responded so much to them. We wanted to find a story that would make the Minions more a part of the story than they were in the first movie. In this one, as you know, they're disappearing. What's happening to the Minions? We made them a much bigger part of the movie in those terms.
In all honesty, because my name is Cinco and I grew up in Phoenix, I had a lot of exposure to Latin culture and those sorts of things, and that inspired the idea of this villain, El Macho. The name came first and everything else came after that. We loved the idea of this villain. Ken actually has a lot of Latino roots in his family, too.
But the world of Despicable Me is such a cartoony world. It is much more Looney Tunes than I would say the Pixar world or those movies. We can get away with a little more, although I know some people responded negatively to the Iron Maiden beat in the first movie where it looks like Edith.
When we wrote that scene about the Sleepy Kittens where he's reading the storybook to the kids, it's like we've had to read these stupid books to our kids, and we all want to just tell our kids, "This is really bad. Don't you know that? Can't you see that?"
I would say it was the directors. We have to give credit to the directors for this, because in the script, we just said, "Gru's Minions do this or do that" in the initial draft. And then, they came up with the characters' design and the philosophical concept of the Minions. And then, we started writing to that. We have to give a lot of credit to them.
Then we just took it and ran with it, and then just wrote as many scenes as we could with the Minions. Now we have Minions falling in love in this new movie and there's the fire scene in Gru's office.
