Brad Bird on writing Ratatouille

The Hollywood Reporter has a very cool feature up on their site that features the screenwriters for the Golden Globe nominated films, which includes Ratatouille. Here is what Brad Bird had to say:

“I came way late into the project. When I became involved, (Pixar) had the character design, they had the premise and they had two of the most important sets ‘built’ in the computer. But they were at a crisis point. Everyone loved the idea and the way it was looking, but the story was not at the point it needed to be. I had a year and a half to write a whole new script, do a brand-new set of reels, recast the movie, record all the sound, cut the sound to a new storyboard, design 22 of the 25 sets and get it all done. These things usually take four to five years.

It was a hard script to write, and I had to write it quickly because we had committed to a start date for the animation; I had to have parts of the script ready to go before the rest was finalized. The basic story stayed the same: It was about a rat named Remy who wanted to be a cook. But I changed a lot of things. I killed off Gusteau, the main character Remy was trying to please — then made him come back as part of his imagination.

I reworked it structurally a lot and added a few characters. Then I took my story outline and wrote a brand-new screenplay and did a whole new soundtrack and a set of story reels. I don’t think it is in any significant way different to write a screenplay for an animated film than a live-action one. What’s different is that I know what animators can do and I try to write scenes that I myself would want to animate.

I used to be an animator and know what it is like to be assigned these deathly scenes where you have to inject a lot of shtick to make them interesting to watch. What makes (an animation screenplay) work is having a heightened sensibility that is a little bit caricatured. Many people view that as a negative because caricature is meant to suggest over-the-top. But I view the word caricature in a much more positive sense. Good caricature simplifies things down to the essence.”