The world is in such a place of social unrest and there's so much violence.
The Head of Story is defined differently for each film. But I found that the role for me was to support the director's vision, and to be a conduit to the story team - and managing that team to realize the vision.
We actually talked about Adam Sandler during the creation of 'Trolls,' because he does know how to time jokes.
Since we've done that type of work [ voiceover], we know how isolating it can be, and we wanted to make the actors more comfortable.
We'd all [with Mike Mitchell] been together at Dreamworks for over ten years, so we all had the same goals.
I had to sit in front of all these people, and act like I knew what I was doing. I faked my way through it pretty well.
Mike [Mitchell] brought me on as co-director, and eventually we ended up sharing a brain. It was overwhelming initially when I was working with departments I hadn't had contact with before.
The number one thing is creating this world ["Trolls" ] - what the world is going to look like, feel like and what technology will we need to use to get there.
Sometimes actors come in, you record them, and they do their role.
If you hug someone for seven seconds, it gives you a chemical drop in your brain.
I've always loved that film ['The Three Caballeros'], and we were looking for a way to apply it to our own work, and 'Trolls' was it - psychedelic, musical and kinetic insanity.
It was so complex [in "Trolls"] that the technical team had to build a new program. It was about rendering and manipulating that weird hair. We also wanted to break the mold of what what we thought the princess was about...we wanted to keep her troll 'look' - the stumpy legs, an ugly/cute look, it was all inspired from the doll.
I loved the Disney films, and Sterling Holloway was one of their chief talents. He never had to put on a voice, and that's what Mike [Mitchell] and I encourage. I love the voices that have a unique texture, but it's their real voice.
I was trying to foster a great working relationship between those two departments [design and the writing teams], because classically in animation the two don't get along.
