Brad Bird and Michael Giacchino on the Long Road to ‘Ray Gunn’

For Brad Bird, the idea behind Ray Gunn dates back nearly 30 years, but getting the film to where it is today was anything but simple. After an earlier attempt to make the film stalled, Bird eventually gave up on the project. It was so far gone that he compared it to “the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where it gets boarded up.” So, after going through some red tape, Bird connected with Netflix to distribute the film to a global audience, while also hoping it would hit theaters.

When another opportunity to revive Ray Gunn finally emerged, Bird still had to fight to get the project out of its previous studio and free it from its existing obligations. “I had to get it out of a studio and get it unencumbered and be able to pitch it and get financing,” he explained.

Bird stressed that the project hadn’t been in active development for three decades. He had tried to make it years earlier, put it away when “forces that be weren’t friendly to it,” and only later seized the opportunity to bring it back. “It was never passive,” he said. “I took the opportunity to get it out, and it wasn’t easy.”

Once Ray Gunn was back in motion, Bird turned to Michael Giacchino, one of his most trusted creative collaborators. Having scored several of Bird’s films, including The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Giacchino became involved with the film early in the process.

I asked Bird and Giacchino whether that long history had created a creative shorthand between them, or whether they still found ways to push each other toward something better than what either might have arrived at on their own. Giacchino said it was a little bit of both. “You never go in feeling like, ‘All right, I know what I’m doing,’ and you can just do it. There’s always a push and a shove, and him trying to drag me this way, me trying to drag him this way, and somewhere meeting in the middle, we make the thing,” he said.

“And that’s always the great part about it, because having a collaborative, creative relationship that you can trust and that you keep wanting to come back to — that’s kind of rare in this town, especially,” Giacchino continued. “There’s a lot of things that you do, and you want to run away and go, ‘I never want to go back there again.’”

“But I think whenever I see Brad’s name on my calendar, I’m like, ‘Yes, that’s going to be the highlight of my year,’ because it’s like working with a creative buddy that you have,” Giacchino concluded. “The instinct is just — you want to make something. You just want to make something fun and cool, and that never leaves.”

Bird described their creative partnership as the kind of connection where two people meet for the first time and somehow feel as though they have already known each other for years. Much of that immediate bond came from a mutual love of the animation they grew up watching, including Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest.

Giacchino remembered their first meeting at Pixar, when he had primarily worked in video games and television and was stepping into what he described as a “cathedral of animation.”

“We started talking instantly about all the animation we loved growing up,” Giacchino recalled. “Jonny Quest became the thing where they had to separate us.”

For Bird, that same enthusiasm still defines their collaboration years later.

“It’s kind of like me going down the street and going, ‘Can Michael come out and play?’” Bird said. “There’s a very childlike vibe. We get very enthusiastic about things.”

That enthusiasm has occasionally spilled over into spirited debates. Giacchino recalled one night after a screening in Portland when a conversation with The Incredibles head of story Mark Andrews turned into an argument over the proper way to introduce someone to Star Wars. After Andrews admitted he had shown his children the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back before they had seen the original film, Giacchino immediately objected.

“Them’s fighting words,” Bird joked.

What followed, Giacchino remembered, was a shouting match intense enough that Bird compared it to “almost breaking bottles.” But for Bird, the ridiculousness of the argument also illustrated something fundamental about the people he likes to work with.

“The fact that that could engage that kind of passion between middle-aged men is really funny to me,” Bird said. “You want to tell these stories as well as you can because you recognize the opportunities are rare, so you collect people that are equally passionate about different aspects and let the fur fly.”

While Bird and Giacchino’s partnership has endured for years, Ray Gunn has been part of Bird’s creative life for even longer. The filmmaker first conceived the project nearly three decades ago, long before the version now arriving at Netflix Animation took shape. So when asked what the film would have looked like 30 years ago, Bird said it most likely would have been hand-drawn rather than CG.

And for Giacchino, since he’s been such a frequent collaborator, he went into production for the score fairly early on. These two are so close that, according to Giacchino, he also helped with the voice work. “In fact, on this film, I got to have fun throughout the whole thing because I was doing scratch for you,” Giacchino said. “I love the whole process of filmmaking, anyway, in all of it. So being around early is always fun for me as well.”

Even if Ray Gunn had been hand-drawn, Bird said computers still would have played a significant role in creating its look. The larger obstacle, however, was an industry increasingly reluctant to view hand-drawn animation as commercially viable.

“My love of hand-drawn is not shared by nervous executives,” Bird said, explaining that the format eventually became viewed as a business decision, with studios operating under the belief that audiences would no longer accept it. It’s an assumption Bird strongly disagrees with.

Still, bringing a film of Ray Gunn’s scale to life meant working within the realities of how such projects are financed and produced. “I’ve done three films in computer animation, and I’m fine with it,” Bird said. “A movie of this scale, though, you have to marshal resources. So I think that a hand-drawn version of it would have been great. I think the version that we made, I love it. So I’m fine with it either way.”

What Bird remains less willing to concede is the industry’s underlying assumption about the medium itself. “I don’t agree that hand-drawn animation is not commercial, which is a thing that the industry believes,” he added. “A lot of different studios believe that, and I don’t.”

That conviction goes beyond how animation is produced. For Bird, what matters just as much is what animation can reveal about a character through the smallest details and movements. So he drew a distinction between animation and what he considers true character animation. While animation can make virtually anything move, he argued that the best character animators use movement to reveal a particular detail about the person on screen.

To illustrate the point, Bird looked around the room at the journalists sitting in front of him. Everyone was essentially doing the same thing. Some were “fiddling” with their notebooks, while others were checking their notes, and most were sitting and listening. Bird was trying to illustrate how each person occupied the space differently. “Really good character animators do movement that tells you about the character,” he said.

“That’s what animation is great at if you do it,” Bird said.

The challenge, he explained, is that animation is expensive, laborious, and time-consuming, which can encourage filmmakers to standardize details rather than individualize them. Even something as seemingly insignificant as a character’s teeth can fall into that trap. “People always do the same teeth,” Bird said, joking that characters often end up with identical “game show host Chiclets.”

For Bird, those imperfections are part of what makes a character feel specific. He pointed to Venus Nova, who was designed with a small gap between her two front teeth, and cited animator Milt Kahl’s work on Madame Medusa in The Rescuers as another example of embracing distinctive physical traits rather than smoothing them away. “To me, that’s the name of the game,” Bird said. “I enjoy great animation.”

That resistance to standardization also helps explain why Ray Gunn can draw so heavily from familiar noir and science-fiction traditions without simply reproducing them. For Bird, the difference comes from what animation can bring to those influences. “What’s different is animation, man,” Bird said. “Because the process is laborious, there’s a tendency to standardize things to the point where they’re not interesting, and I didn’t want to do that.”

Instead, Bird surrounded himself with artists who were equally interested in pushing against those conventions and creating characters with more extreme, individualized qualities. Film noir already lends itself to heightened personalities and distinctive archetypes, but Bird saw animation as a way to push those characteristics even further. “In noir, the characters already are extreme,” Bird explained. “But that kind of thing plus animation — like really good animation, where you take your time, and you think about that stuff — that’s unusual. Animation is able to bring things out of those situations that are unique.”

For all of Bird’s enthusiasm about finally bringing Ray Gunn to life, he also made no secret of wanting audiences to experience its scale on the biggest screen possible. Bird has long advocated for the theatrical experience, but he was quick to reject the idea that his preference puts him at odds with Netflix. In fact, when asked about how he feels that Ray Gunn will be seen primarily at home instead of in a theater, Bird didn’t see the question as a gotcha question, and had no trouble answering it. “In order to have people see it on a big screen, the movie has to exist,” Bird said. “Netflix took a big leap in backing this film and giving us the resources to make it on a big scale. So I’m grateful for that.”

Bird said he hopes audiences have the opportunity to see Ray Gunn theatrically, arguing that the film was designed to hold up on a screen as large as the Cinerama Dome. Giacchino jokingly encouraged anyone who wants that experience to make their interest known. “If you feel like you want to see it on a big screen, you should tell every single person you know that you want to see it on a big screen,” Giacchino said.

Bird added that the film will receive some big-screen showings, but ultimately returned to something much more fundamental than where audiences watch it. “Mainly, mainly, mainly, I’m grateful that it exists, that we got to make it,” Bird said. “I have been wanting to see this movie for a really long time, and the only way to see it was to make it.”