I've been putting together the story with Rob and putting all the details of it together and looking at all the various designs they have for the toys and stuff, it's pretty exciting.
When I just write something, it's usually because I love it, I love the material, but I feel like I really need a creative partner to crack it. And I certainly need and have a lot of creative partners as a director.
All of the things I've directed, I'm really emotionally close to. That's why I choose to direct them and spend years on them.
When I write something, it's usually 'cause I think it's funny or I have a way in, but when I direct something, I really need to be close to it.
For my wife and I, our first child was really easy to have, but our second one was really hard to have. We had to go to a lot of fertility clinics and do that whole thing.
All movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.
I was able to bring my process of doing improv with actors into the animation world, which was fun.
The worst thing you can do is animate something, and then throw it out because it doesn't work, story wise.
Like everyone is either, "I grew up with it," or "I loved it," or loved them now. And when you watch The Muppet Movie now, it is so current. It's like The Simpsons before The Simpsons. It's not as cynical as The Simpsons would be but it's self-aware and there are a billion jokes, it breaks the fourth wall every five minutes, it's astounding, it's awesome. It's very exciting to be a part of that.
Yeah, because we wanted to go back to the original tone. It's one of the original movies like The Muppet Movie, Muppets Take Manhattan, The Great Muppet Caper. Those kinds of movies. So that was really important that we hit that tone and those have a lot of cameos in them and so Jason and I started asking people and everyone we asked just wants to do it.
I'm like really bad at like remembering all these things, but basically we finished...we wrapped in August and we locked in February. It was like we did our first friends and family screening I would say 8-weeks after we locked...after we wrapped or 8-weeks after we wrapped.
When I was writing the script I thought he is this guy. I really hoped...I kept imagining him as that guy. And then he came in to audition and I was really nervous because I really wanted him to do Greek, you know? And he...I didn't know who else I could cast. And he was amazing in the audition. Really funny.
I remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so.
I never liked the extended cut personally because I like...we spend a lot of time figuring out our final cut. We test and test and test it, whatnot. Having said that, there's one sequence we're adding back into the movie for the extended cut that is pretty amazing that I think people are going to love.
And there's so much extra material. I mean, I've certainly read as you asked about do I read reviews and stuff, like people are like none of the jokes in the trailers are like in the movie. And it's like and we have whole sequences and scenes that weren't in the movie.
We have tons of live performances that we're putting on there. We have music videos. There's a music video for the song called I Am Jesus what is one of the funniest music videos, like we just could not find a place for it in the movie, but it's like crazy funny. And we have the whole video.
Every video you see in the movie we have an entire video of it that will be on the DVD, so the whole video for African Child, the whole video for Super Tight, you know the Jackie Q songs.
Yes, the fans are going to get their money's worth. It's like...and everything on there is funny. It's not like random crap they put in a movie. I think it's all very funny, so.
Maybe I'm just not that humble but our script is awesome. Like Jason is so into the Muppets and such a fan. I'm such a fan of Muppets.
I think the script's actually pretty solid. It really is a labor of love for us to get this thing off the ground. It was scary but then there was the change in leadership and I think that the new guy in charge is basically like, "We should just do this."
It won't be that expensive, the script is fun, the guys just love this thing, and with all of that, the world is just ready for the Muppets again. It's strange that there hasn't been one for so long. I think there were a lot of political reasons for why that was the case but it's just exciting that now it's going to happen.
They literally have what they would call "a four-quadrant" movie that they could just release at any moment. Parents want to go there, kids want to go there, hipsters want to go there. It's like everyone will want to see it.
It's interesting to have the awkward moments play out, and the real human interactions. The more you cut that down, you lose the joke, which is that this is painful and hard.
