I'm Karey Kirkpatrick.
This is Tim Johnson.
And I'm Bonnie Arnold.
Welcome to our commentary track for Over the Hedge.
I do love this sequence so...
This opening came rather late in the game.
It used to begin with RJ
racing straight to the cave with his mind on robbing the bear.
But about nine months before the film was released,
the realization that we were beginning
with something more suspenseful than humorous
sent us in search of something funny or something a little more outrageous
to open the picture with.
That was Damon.
Damon O'Beirne, our head of layout,
his comment about, "You need to let people know that this is gonna be a comedy."
What I love about this sequence is
it was the quickest turnaround from concept to execution.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the challenge to find something fun
to open the picture with yielded a bunch of ideas
and one of them from Maurissa Horwitz,
who is in John Carr's editorial department,
came up with this idea of a vending machine.
Right, and then Tom Owens, one of our board artists boarded it...
- Right, storyboarded this... - ...in about three days.
We approved it by the end of the week and had it into animation
- and turned around... - A week or two after.
Yeah. That was very, very quick.
No, no, bad idea. Bad idea!
You can't believe how many different versions there are of that stomach gurgle
to have finally come up with the winner.
Yeah, this is where the film began.
That shot right there, where RJ leapt in,
used to be the opening of the movie.
But the stomach gurgle, I remember being an important story point to say...
Remember there were all these questions about a year and a half ago...
What exactly does he want?
What does he want? Why does he...
And also, I think, to make RJ understand what his issues were
and what would make him a little bit more sympathetic.
I think that was the note that we had gotten a number of times
when we showed it to our crew, that...
There was some concern about
creating some sympathy or empathy for RJ.
When we just saw him open like it is now, at this point
in the picture, where he's raiding the cave, he was just a little thief,
but making him a pathetic thief actually is much more sympathetic.
Yeah, with the impulse control problem illustrated right there.
Hopefully, somewhere on this DVD
will be samples of all the different packages
designed by our art department to populate our world
with consumer junk that we have throughout it
because every single label and logo is invented.
We don't have any real products in there and they're really, really fun.
This pile of food and junk food is all invented.
And thanks to the sound team
for finally making those tins as loud as I wanted them to be.
I just have to give credit to Kathy, Paul and Christian,
our production designer and art directors,
for doing such a terrific job on all the design and products and...
Yeah, actually it's a challenge right away.
The first scene is at night and you can overbalance things
to be dark and gloomy
at the beginning of your comedy if you're not careful,
and Kathy Altieri with Craig Ring, our head of effects,
took a look at all of this stuff for us.
This is one of my favorite shots in the movie.
This was John Hill,
this great shot and great facial expression.
That's one of my favorites.
I think...
How about the contest of naming the Spuddies?
- Oh, yeah. - My daughter keeps asking me about that.
- How did you come up with the names? - There were about 200 different names.
It used to be a known brand which shall remain nameless,
that everybody knows what it was.
Then it was Jingles, Tingles, Dingles, Hingles...
And then there were like... Tim said there were hundreds more other than that.
We went through a list, we had a contest within the crew
of who could name that chip.
No.
And we had the advertising line which was, "Spuddies.
"They're like your friend, only they're a potato."
Nick Nolte nailed that line, we gotta find that for the alternate soundtrack
'cause Nick was absolutely amazing to work with.
Guy shows up with research on bears.
Actually looked on the Internet,
came in with an inch-big stack of paper
and began to, to our embarrassment since we had not done our research,
tell us everything we did not know about Ursus americanus.
"Did you know the raccoon's related to the bear?"
"No, Nick, I didn't know that, thank you."
I liked watching him the best, as you guys know,
every time he would do a different take, his face would just change ever so subtly.
But it would just give a completely different read on the performance
and I thought it was so interesting to watch him.
- And you'd break into a little sweat. - Absolutely.
Well, and Karey was in there reading with him
when he was doing all these growls.
And we kept telling Nick, "We can find bear noises, it's okay."
He goes, "No, no, I'll do them. I'll do them."
Karey at one point, looks over his shoulder at me in the booth...
"Help me.
"Help me."
He looked genuinely terrified of Nick as a bear.
"I love those things."
I mean, the way he inhabits the character now,
it's fun to watch and...
I love, too...
At one point when we were using real brand names,
before we decided not to do that,
these were potentially gonna be Funyuns, remember?
That's right.
And he had the line, "I love those things. They're like an onion, only funner."
The shots of the moon were actually photographs taken in my backyard,
in the greater LA sprawl here.
I have a telescope and took some shots of the moon.
I used them just to talk through the phases of the moon
that are gonna track RJ's progress,
but they ended up being good enough
to just pop into the matte painting that's in the sky there.
Tim is our moon expert.
- Yeah, yeah. - He knows the phases of the moon.
Every time it would go up, it's like,
"Well, that would actually not be waning crescent,
- "it would be waxing gibbous." - "Waxing gibbous, "there you go.
Waxing gibbous is my code name, by the way.
Is it? It's on your license plate?
Well, it's the way I travel so people don't know where I'm staying.
It doesn't sound right.
Ben Folds, what a great teammate he turned out to be.
Ben came on board, not much more,
about 14 months before the film was released.
While that sounds like a lot,
when you're touring and promoting a new album,
writing three songs, recording five for us was a ton of work for Ben.
He did tons of demos for us, he'd be sending us little clips.
And the best thing about working with Ben is he tends to pick
whatever headline is at the front of the paper
and sing those lyrics to the tune,
so "the long arm of State Farm" was one lyric.
He sings a lot about Abe Lincoln.
That's right.
We can't even say what this song was originally called.
It was slightly blue, his original lyrics.
Some version of "I'm a jerk."
But he nailed it and I think we did great
in making the choice to have one voice for the music for the movie.
I think that was... It took us a while to get there,
but it was the right fit for the emotion.
We really tried to let Ben do his own thing on the lyrics,
although we were constantly telling him whose voice it was at any given point.
So we directed him in the same way, I suppose, we directed the actors.
Not telling them how to read the line or how to write the line,
but trying to build a structure
where they were nailing the emotion of the moment, so...
We had many versions of that title sequence, too.
Thom Enriquez, another one of our story artists,
must've done it like 40 times.
Yeah.
- Hello, Verne. - Hello, Garry Shandling.
This is one of, if not maybe, the hardest scene in the picture.
There are certainly challenges when you wrap a movie
so there's some challenging scenes at the end.
But introducing the characters,
keeping a pace, moving forward was hard.
And we have a lot of characters to introduce.
And a lot of information that you've got to get across
in order to understand the emotional journey
the minor characters go through.
I have to say, this is one of my favorite music cues before we leave this moment.
Rupert Gregson-Williams did our score,
phenomenal narrative quality to the score.
He really knows how to tell a story with the orchestra.
It also gave it an extra bit of heart.
- Yeah. - I really like it.
Finished. No, wait!
Come on, everybody. Wake up. Don't make me come in there.
Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy,
they only got to actually see each other on this movie
- after it was done. - At the press junket.
But, man, were they great.
We tried to get them together, but, again, on these kind of movies,
it's hard to get the actors' schedules synced up to what they do.
- Actually, Eugene lives in Canada. - I know.
And even though... But they have worked together before and they...
And there's a natural chemistry to their voices
that lets you relax into this happy married couple.
It's funny, when we told them what we were trying to do
in terms of the Midwest thing,
they both keyed into the same thing
without actually being in the room together.
Yeah, they found that Northern accent.
Lou, that'd be just super.
All right, kids, you heard your mother, and now, you listen to me. Shape up there.
Boy.
This is what I was afraid of.
So, Hammy's first appearance here,
this is done by one of our leads, Dave Burgess,
who really nailed Hammy.
Just really got his kinetic energy and he's teaching him how to draw.
Later on, on this very desk.
And he also does the last shot in the movie, too, of him,
- which he does so sweetly. - There you go.
Avril Lavigne's acting debut.
Dad, it was just snow.
Avril was phenomenal to work with.
She was probably our most nervous on the first day
because she had never done acting before in a feature film nor an animated picture.
But, Avril, of course, is used to pouring
her attention and emotion right into the microphone,
so we directed her to perform like she's singing but without the notes.
I love that animation on Ozzie, too.
With the hands together, the praying thing
and the way he pulls his fingers down from his nose.
I look like a nest and smell like a swamp.
Yeah, one of the challenges in introducing the characters
was introducing the different physical language for them
so that the porcupines are kind of slow and waddly.
Obviously, Hammy darts about with super speed.
Ozzie strikes these poses
that are very theatrical even when he's just chatting.
And we wanted to give a language of motion
that was very different to each character in the picture.
We always said Verne should walk like his shell is a 50-pound backpack.
So rather than make a turtle slow, which could have all sorts of problems
in all of the action in the picture,
we decided, "Let's just make him awkward
"so that he's always a little bit stumbling."
I meant, really serious...
We also have a...
Like that shot just now
with those porcupine kids stuck to their dad's back.
That was the bane of our character effects department,
just getting those porcupines to not kill every animal that they...
We had actually gone back and shortened their quills, didn't we, a little bit.
- A little bit. - To make it...
Every time they turned,
they assassinated every character behind them,
so we decided that was kind of uncool
and shortened them up a bit.
This was a late idea, too.
Adding the firefly?
Adding this and the firefly.
Just to sort of make...
We had a constant issue of reminding us narratively
what's RJ... What is he after, you know?
And why does he need this group of people?
And we added that in to hear them saying, "We're foragers and what do we gather?"
"What do we forage? Food."
So that RJ gets the idea,
"These guys could really be the answer to my problems,"
knowing that there's a suburb over there.
I have to say, I think John Carr, our editor, did a really good job,
the whole editorial team, actually, of putting our characters',
what we call background voices, in every scene.
- By just kind of... - Yeah. It feels populated.
Make you always feel present, populated and present.
Even though we only have five, six additional...
Six or seven additional characters.
Now I have seen this scene, 800 times, I think.
'Cause this is one of the very first ones.
I think it's the second scene we animated, actually.
And a challenging one, since it has all the characters in it
and all of the leaves and grass blades and everything that make it difficult.
But this scene has been sort of...
We always knew, obviously,
that the animals would discover a hedge, so this was always a safe one to go at,
and this was from an early brainstorm that we had with the writers' roundtable,
I remember that we came up with this idea of, "Let's call it Steve."
It used to be, "Let's call it Jeff."
I don't know why, Steve is just funnier.
- Steve is funny. - We went through a long list of names.
It was cute, it got a lot of early positive response
- from other than the crew, I think. - Yeah.
Folks from the marketing...
- People laughed at it, that's all. - Yeah.
And it helped that first trailer set up that premise.
I loved when I first saw... One beat is the effect of Hammy moving.
Yes, that's Richard Anderson...
His jet trail. Well, the sound and the visual
that Mahesh, our head of effects, did.
I'm a lot less scared of Steve.
Great and powerful Steve!
- What do you want? - I don't think it can speak.
I heard that, young man!
The whole scene was sort of challenging to film,
although a fun kind of challenge.
Damon O'Beirne and his team in layout looked at films like 2001,
and other films in which you're discovering things of great scale,
and as we discovered throughout the picture,
when we try to stay to the scale and point of view of the animals,
long lenses, telephoto lenses, zoom lenses work better than wide-angle lenses.
So a lot of what we see here is cropped in
and it helps make the animals look small and the hedge look enormous.
- Steve ate Verne! - All right, Steve...
There's actually a parking structure at DreamWorks that's covered with ivy
and it's about five stories tall, right?
So it's about 30, 35...
It works out to be just exactly the right scale.
If the animals are 5' 10", then their proportion to the hedge was the same
as we at DreamWorks standing near the parking structure.
And believe me, standing near that parking structure,
you did feel small next to a five-story wall of ivy.
This is the first bit of animation we did as a test for the movie.
There was a version of it.
Yeah, Verne stumbling into the backyard, so...
We tried to make a very different world here in the suburbs.
You'll see the sky only has contrails from jets rather than puffy clouds.
Colors are altered and more contrast, darker shadows,
just a more severe landscape when we go into the human world.
Was there balloons up in the corner up there,
just to make sure that when we used those later they weren't contrived?
I think that was some of the challenge for us,
just to go back and make sure
everything we used would be setups in some way
and put those things in the right places.
It was always a question, "How badly can we beat up our poor little turtle?"
This scene used to be longer and more violent, if you can imagine it.
But we just tried to balance, again,
the experience of being an animal in this foreign environment
and yet, keep it light enough to still be funny.
I say that as daggers are flying at an innocent animal's head.
My favorite visual gag here.
Just like every commuter with a coffee and cell phone in hand.
No, I can talk. I'm just driving.
The intro to Gladys, one of our villains.
We actually used to have a different character, Janice,
the woman who runs over or thinks she's run over,
Ozzie used to be driving the car,
but we decided it was an opportunity to get Gladys onscreen earlier.
Poor Verne.
And you wonder why sound drops out there.
That's a reel change and yes, these days you still have to have a silent moment
so that you can change projection reels in a movie theater.
...while we were hibernating. It was awful.
That line that Garry just did, that came really late, in January.
You know, "freaky pink primates."
He used to say, "I think it was humans."
And that presented all kinds of trouble, actually,
just in terms of, "Do they know what humans are, or don't they?"
And it posed too many questions and...
'Cause we always thought that humans were maybe something that they'd heard of
but never actually seen.
This is actually Karey's favorite sequence in the whole movie.
Almost. Right, Karey?
So Karey also did writing duties on the movie.
He rewrote it, like, maybe, I don't know, Karey...
- This sequence? - Forty times? No?
Not as many as I wrote the one that's coming up.
I might go to the bathroom now.
I was just saying this is your second-favorite sequence.
We'll revive Karey later in a moment where you'll hear him whimper in fear
as we watch a scene here.
No, it was just long.
There was so much information that we thought needed to be in this scene
because RJ used to do a whole rap about food and...
A lot of what was in the scene ended up being parsed out to other scenes
like the tour and so,
getting this down to its fighting weight of just the necessary information.
And then we took this out, the brochure,
but decided after we actually started doing trailers
that it was sort of something that we felt like it was needed.
That's right, we had it put it in, we put it back.
No, no, that's a good thing.
We forgot how we came up with the "You are here" thing.
You know, "You are here," and this little dot.
And they have to sort of realize that...
This is where Bruce Willis just shows in spades
exactly why we had to cast him.
He's able to be the friendly huckster here
and not come off as a real jerk
for taking advantage of these naive animals.
He's just got enough charisma in the way he approaches the character
that you kind of go along for the ride with RJ,
in spite of the fact that he's obviously the selfish guy.
Well, I think, again when we were structuring the movie for a while,
we didn't have that very opening scene with the bear in the cave,
and I think that was, to me, one of the biggest turning points storytelling-wise.
When we decided that we needed... In earlier versions, RJ just appeared.
And we kept not understanding what was going on with him.
It was a little bit too complex to explain in the time that we have.
But I think adding the prologue,
what we call the prologue, where RJ does steal from the bear,
helped smooth out the storytelling.
Give him a context, yeah.
This is not a birthmark.
But that idea has been around right there forever.
The birthmark idea.
- The tire tread across... - That's such a symbol
of what it's like to go to the suburbs there.
Not interested!
Okay. I get it.
I understand.
The special effects department just went nuts here.
And they would say, "Is this too much?"
And we'd say, "No, more."
They would do some more, more wind, more orange dust,
and then, finally, of course, our global catastrophe of nacho cheese nightmare...
That continues to get laughs.
I like the outline that gets left in the rock there.
We didn't think of this as a very special-effects intensive picture.
So we began with a very small special effects crew,
but as the storyboard artists and everybody got a hold of all the ideas,
we began to add more and more special effects
and gradually it actually became
one of the more intense special effects films DreamWorks has done.
I think everything in computer animation is an effect, right?
- Remember that. - That's the tricky thing.
They used to all gather outside the hedge,
and RJ's gonna come back,
and Verne's saying, "I don't think he's gonna show up."
RJ stands for really, just flaky and...
And RJ used to do a little reconnaissance first.
We had him straightening things up and preparing the way
for the animals to have a good experience.
- Wisely. - Lots of stuff on the cutting room floor.
Very wisely, actually.
I think one of the challenges is economical storytelling
with these types of films.
This was always patterned after the fountains at the Bellagio,
was how we always pitched this out,
was that Verne gets skirted around by these,
and RJ can turn them into a light show.
I mean, it's not like he can walk on water.
That was a hard joke to pull off, right? The "walk on water"?
Yeah. We shot this a few times.
It was shot a totally different way where he said, "Walk on water,"
and then we cut and then Jeff Snow, our head of story,
very wisely did a couple of drawings
where he thought the joke could be superimposed to be more effective.
- And this is... - Karey's favorite joke about the suburbs.
Well, it set the tone, actually.
- No, it did. - It was a...
It was the thing that I always was gonna say,
"This is the kind of commentary that we're gonna make about human beings
"from an animal's point of view, so..."
It went through a couple of rewrites.
It used to be longer.
It's always been what's onscreen, but there used to be a couple more lines.
Roll over and give your privates a good licking. They love it.
The homeowner's charter, which you signed...
I like the way Bruce just kind of throws away
some of these lines and that's just kind of his ad-lib.
We actually asked Bruce to slightly raise the pitch of his voice
from his really tough guy voice to just a little bit higher.
It makes RJ sound just a little more vulnerable, actually.
'Cause when Bruce goes tough, boy, he seems...
He's the guy who saves the world in every film he does,
and so getting him to be vulnerable,
getting RJ to have that level of, you know, he may not win,
allows you to go for the ride with him.
And this right here,
this was boarded by Alessandro.
He's also a great animator.
Who also sort of wrote it.
We knew basically what we wanted in this food montage, as we called it.
But Alessandro not only boarded it,
he really wrote the bulk of what's going on
and then we toned it up from there.
But this rap RJ does of all the different ways
in which food affects people's really, really...
Thank you, Alessandro, forgetting us out of the gate with that.
Food! Food!
Then they went and showed it in every trailer.
That's the hard thing about making these movies
is, of course, they wanna promote them with really funny, great visuals,
but all the stuff, you wanna save for an audience,
so you're always in a place as a filmmaker where you're...
You want people to know about your film and come see it,
but you don't want to give anything away.
They used this whole section pretty extensively in promoting the picture.
Sweet jeepers.
Tumbling garbage,
who would've thought that would be one of the hardest effects in the film.
But, you know, 20,000 individual pieces of garbage all have to collide and bump
- to make that shot work. - We boarded this sequence,
storyboarded this sequence a number of times,
a number of different artists took a stab at getting this.
But we always loved the cheese through the nose the best.
...or was I right?
And these things are just the scraps!
Wait'll you see what comes in the boxes, and packages and cans!
Coming up here is a great piece of animation
that gets a laugh that I never anticipated, actually.
But this, Tiger the cat...
I think it was Serguei who did this animation.
And just out of nowhere, Serguei would make him do this little up and down.
- And... - He's like a favorite character.
Well, Omid Djalili is a British comedian, but he is of Persian ancestry
and his accent is based, I'm sure, on his family.
So his accent is flawless
and it's so fun to have music to the voices in animation,
and Omid just added another great instrument
in the whole range of sound.
Yeah, I think Omid has, maybe the...
What does he have, like, 15 lines in the whole movie?
- Every one of them... - He nails them.
You kids okay? Hon, you all right there?
I like this.
That's what I was talking...
Poor little Hammy runs off there.
This is another favorite piece of animation coming up.
...overreacted. No biggie.
And one of my favorite jokes
that got big laughs in the studio,
but not necessarily outside.
This thing right here
that Verne's about to do which is, "Look, maybe our little forest life..."
This is, again, Alessandro animated this.
Great piece of animation.
"To a guy with a bag."
Which I just thought was so great that Verne would pick on.
Yeah, why does he have a bag?
It's the only time we ever mentioned it.
It's the most sophisticated thing in the animal's existence.
This guy's actually got a suitcase.
We used to call it his, you know, Felix's bag of tricks.
Anything we needed,
RJ could just miraculously have in that bag.
And we defied physics several times in order to stuff what we needed in there.
Well, also, originally, we were basing some of the idea of RJ
on the Robert Preston character in The Music Man.
And he has a suitcase as well
- that he carries around... - It is that sort of
carpetbagger coming to town.
That's a good metaphor.
I love this music here, too, in this moment.
This again we added relatively late.
Yeah.
The Waltons moment.
The Waltons moment that we called it and also just to show...
This is... You know, RJ is kind of homeless, basically.
His bag is all he's got and this is how he sleeps,
and he's alone.
And the contrast to what Verne has with the family and togetherness.
And it was always a challenge just to keep the threat of the bear alive.
I think this was Nick's from his first session, and we kept this.
It may have been. He certainly nailed it.
That's one of those scenes that never worked in storyboard
because storyboards are pencil on paper,
and you can't really tell it's nighttime,
so that shocking transition
from nighttime nightmare to daylight safety
was something we had to wait for full production to really work.
This sequence is what we called the cookie heist,
was, I think, the first...
Isn't this the first sequence into animation?
Well, yeah, but there's another one that comes before.
Yeah, we've got this one first.
Which is this... It was called,
"RJ lures Hammy,"
is what this sequence was always called.
'Cause RJ looks down and sees that Hammy's the most vulnerable,
so it's like, "I'm gonna go get this guy to get my red wagon,"
and this has always been one of my favorite scenes
- in terms of... - Yeah, me too.
It's great 'cause it's not a big action scene.
It's not as outrageous as a lot of things we're doing,
but the characters are really true to themselves in this scene
and it's always fun to watch.
The animators did such a great job that even having seen it...
- Is that Kristof? - ...50,000 times and all that.
- Kristof Serrand. - Kristof Serrand, another one of our
animation leads.
He really got under Verne's shell, if I could extend that metaphor,
and really did some of the best Verne animation for us.
That's the first shot he did, I think.
I think so.
I gotta admit...
And just nailing that RJ's strutty walk and...
I'm here to help you with your... foraging thing.
I love that deadpan look.
Then we have one of the greatest pieces of animation...
Accompanied by Rupert's really funny elevator music.
This violin piece that pops in, it's so great.
It is literally the little violin that's playing,
the heartbreaking violin.
...loved ones, universal remote.
But then all that went away with...
The weed hacker incident.
Come here.
Yeah, that feels good, doesn't it?
Brother.
But this coming up, Steve Cunningham did this shot that's coming up with Hammy.
Huge laughs on this.
It was so short, but this little take that Hammy does right here,
it was so funny
- that we had to... - Extend the shot twice.
We added eight frames and then added another second to it or something.
And that right there is my favorite.
Little bad parenting moment gag there.
Don't hit when you're whacking your kid on the head.
"Stop shouting."
I'm afraid that's a page out of my parenting handbook.
However, we all know RJ is up to no good, I love it.
- Come here, ya big lug! - No.
I knew beneath this hard, crispy outside
there was a soft, nougat-y center in there.
Also it's a fun little voice process, and you can hear RJ's voice
echo in Verne's shell here.
Stuff like that, you know, you work on the picture,
it takes four years to make one of these.
And the last step is to do all of the final sound effects and music,
and so you get very used to your film without those kind of touches.
And it's just great.
It just adds a level to it that as a filmmaker...
What's great about the...
I like the cookie.
Highlight...
And Steve Carell improvised that, actually.
What's great about this whole thing is...
Like that last shot where he said,
"Wanna help me find my nuts?"
The line was initially, "Want me to show you what I do with my nuts?"
- Which was just a little bluer. - ...an out-and-out joke.
But the line that ended up being set up for the end.
When we figured out the ending, we said, "Maybe we'll go back
"and set it up here."
And we recorded that line with Steve Carell
in the middle of the set of The Office.
We brought one of our microphones over and set it up.
And he was shouting, "Wanna help me find my nuts?"
in the middle of the set of The Office.
- You with me, kid? - I... I... I...
Jason Reisig, another of our supervising animators, animated a lot of this scene,
which was the very first scene into production.
We just felt like this action moment was really working in storyboard,
and it was a safe one in spite of its complexity to go right in,
and Jason did a lot of the RJ shots.
Thom Enriquez boarded it and I thought it helped us really discover
who the character of Hammy was.
It was also a test of this idea of pushing things to a photographic look,
so things are very out of focus in this shot, the whites get very flared out
and the blacks go very dark.
It's a very different look for computer animation,
but it makes the animals feel like they're kind of human-sized
and the rest of the world feel enormous.
...not rabbit.
What?
Okay. So, first we're gonna muss the hair.
This was fun. This was Bill Diaz actually doing this.
It's great stuff, which again, gets laughs that we didn't anticipate.
Liking that a lot.
Used to go on much longer.
...wild look in your eye, boy. Come on!
Remember?
Tough special effects just to mat Hammy's fur like that.
You don't get anything for free in computer animation.
Sounds like you push some button and the computer does it,
but somebody has to rather painstakingly create
all that matted crazy-looking fur on Hammy.
And here's that bag of tricks.
The recurring boomerang motif.
Which you will see recurring on this DVD.
I think, again, what I like about this sequence
as a whole is I feel like it sort of
really sets the tone of the whole movie.
And again, I think we used it a lot at the beginning
to talk to people about what the feel of the whole film would be like,
as far as the humor and the action...
We talked a lot about how cartoony do we go,
how much do we play with gravity,
how outrageous is the motion, and this is the scene where we did it.
That last shot there where he's walking like Frankenstein,
that's the one that pushes the lighting for me as far...
With the blown-out sidewalk in the...
- No, no, no, no! No! - Take that!
Walk it off!
This is Bruce ad-libbing, right?
Yeah, "Walk it off." We told Bruce,
"You know what? This is sort of like you're a coach on the sidelines."
The minute we said that, he said, "Walk it off, walk it off."
I like that, "He's working."
This is Wilbert, one of our story artists,
with the street cleaner...
He added that.
That was from another sequence and I think we repurposed it into...
We had a whole street cleaner event at one point, so...
But that street cleaner, interestingly, was not fully built.
They only built the front and the back rollers there,
- only what you see onscreen. - It's a prop.
Yeah.
But at least his shell is bright and shiny clean.
You had me scared. I was about to come out and beat you with a book myself.
You're all right, aren't ya? Of course, you are. You are Hammy!
The quality of light even on Verne's shell, it's just amazing
what you can do with these rendering computer lighting tools,
and they could give the look of translucency
to things like fabric or Verne's shell.
...amphibian thing.
- Reptile. - It's okay, girls. Go inside...
Coming up, it's one of my favorite Allison Janney lines from the movie.
Allison plays Gladys the...
- Allison's such a trouper, 'cause... - ...head of the homeowner's...
...we gave her all these mean lines
and she just sunk her teeth into it and had, really, a lot of fun.
She said it's fun to play a villain.
It's fun to play a bad guy.
I don't think she ever did, she'd never played a villain.
- And she's always wanted to. - Yeah.
I have a casserole in the oven. Gotta run.
Fine. You worry about your casserole...
Here it is.
...and I'll worry about the end of suburban peace and tranquility!
What's great is that Allison started in the theater.
That's what I love about the people who've worked the theater before,
- they'll just go wherever you want. - They'll go for it.
Absolutely. You know, like, get it to the back row.
I like this line. A lot of people love this sequence.
This scene used to be a little nothing of a scene,
but by the time we activate the porcupine kids with sugar...
Caffeine.
And that came up in dailies,
while watching animation, is the scene was just sitting there,
and we just decided, "You know what, let's go ahead,"
and then this obviously helped us to set up our ending.
- That was a late add. - Yeah.
That's right. Come on, dig in.
Because this, my friends, is just the beginning.
What?
This is the first song Ben did of the songs,
- called the heist montage. - Yeah.
- It was called The Long Arm of State Farm. - That's right.
Iron guy, there's a spinoff.
We'll make the iron guy TV program spun off on the lunch box there.
But boy, we played with this quite a bit,
which is a... You know, ever since,
Team America did the montage song, I have to...
It's hard to do a montage.
It's hard to do a montage where you're cramming a bunch of story,
but this is obviously about six days passing...
We had to actually make sure that we alternated night and day.
Our general rule was the heists took place in the daylight,
coming to the hedge was at twilight and then there was an evening sort of
celebration or time for RJ to bond with the animals,
like this wonderful scene where he's dancing with Heather.
I like that. Ben Rush did that animation.
But, boy, there were gags left on the cutting room floor here.
- I mean, there are tons. - Montage prop...
This probably has a dozen gags in there, easily 100 that were sort of
contemplated and played around with, so...
Challenge, of course, to balance the number of characters we had,
trying to feature several of them throughout.
But the storytelling here is RJ is not only being successful,
but he's also making friends for the first time,
so dancing with Heather or playing video games with the kids
is more than just a celebration,
it's a chance to show that he's really found a home.
And incurring the wrath of Gladys at the same time.
I said some of the basis of the story was the idea
that RJ created a problem where there sort of was none...
I mean, there wouldn't have been if it wasn't for him.
I love this bit, though.
Replacing Verne.
The blue cooler.
There are several examples of these long telephoto shots
where we had to write special software to throw focus.
This scene is actually...
This is a really long scene.
But a lot happens in it and this was the chance for us to get
what we always wanted.
Which was, we decided, if we're gonna have this possum,
who dies as a defense mechanism, let's have him die big and dramatically.
And our first thought was let's get Bill Shatner to play him.
And this was his chance to play.
Bill did about four or five-minute improv on this.
We didn't really have much written down,
it was just, "Bill, let's pretend you're on stage
"and you're desperately trying to keep everybody's eyes on you
"because otherwise your friends are discovered."
So he went for four minutes on this possum death,
and you're only hearing, gosh, 30 seconds of it in there.
What do you think he's doing?
Maybe we knocked his brains loose, or something.
I'm telling you, you went too far this time.
Let's get out of here and leave this...
Nice catch, Verne.
That used to go longer, too.
It used to go, "Let's get out of here and leave this. This, what is this?"
And they said, "Blue cooler."
"Why do we need a blue cooler?"
And Hammy said, "Because it keeps things garden fresh and crispy."
- Remember that used... - "We live in a garden."
Yeah.
All the gems on the cutting room floor.
"Rosebud."
- Yeah. - Big laugh by audiences.
This is great. My 3-year-old walking around the house saying "Rosebud."
He has no idea what he's talking about.
This is exactly why I called the exterminator.
We were sort of cautious with our sort of references and jokes.
We only have a couple in the picture.
It already takes place in contemporary US backyards
and we avoided otherwise, you know, too many contemporary jokes.
- And here comes... - Thomas Haden Church.
Thomas was the last cast member added to our main cast.
'Cause we were trying to find somebody who could...
He enters halfway through the picture here,
so he's gotta make a big entrance, he's gotta have a big voice.
Wanted him to be funny, though, to not compete with...
He could easily have been terrifying.
And so to get Thomas to do this really hysterical character...
And Thomas is the best improv guy we've ever worked with.
I mean, he really crafted the character by taking the written word
and going way off the page with it.
Terrifying but goofy.
- Who's the man? - And funny.
So this, for instance, this right here was an improv.
...more animals than you have.
Stand down, sister.
I personally guarantee
that there will not be a living thing at this party.
The Verminator is on the job.
Now this one comin' up here, the way the line was written was,
she says, "I think he's dead."
And the line was written, "Really? Are you the expert here, ma'am?"
And he invented the Vermtech Academy.
Really?
Do you, in fact, have an associates degree from Vermtech?
Now that one put us on the floor.
Good thing we were behind glass when he said that.
I like this one where the little porcupines fall off...
What's great about this is,
this is Kristof Serrand, who's from France, who animated that.
And I had this idea...
- Let's give a... - "Do this."
And I acted it out for him. He had no idea what I was doing.
And I said, "Trust me, trust me.
"This will be good." We had him watch Bull Durham, I think.
Yes, to get an idea of what a third-base coach signals.
...skunk, squirrel, raccoon...
Amphibian.
- Reptile. - No.
Reptile.
We debated, how are we gonna get Verne out of there?
So we just cheated.
We just cut and he's gone.
So much for being a slow turtle.
They were riveted, man. You were awesome!
I like this moment with Heather, too...
This whole Heather-Ozzie story, like, really turned out...
Somebody told me the other day that's their favorite,
the possums were their favorite characters.
But let's not forget our brilliant leadership,
RJ.
- RJ! - RJ!
Huggy Hammy.
Hugging drove our character effects folks crazy.
Sweet.
There's my son's first line. "Sweet."
- Sami Kirkpatrick. - Making his acting debut.
- Over here, this way. - RJ, come on!
Yeah, we wanna show you something. Come on, hurry!
Called this sequence "RJ gets a home."
Many iterations on this one, too.
Yeah, it doesn't say "home" too many times in there.
We kept adding more things that said "home" in it
to drop a brick on all of you to make sure we all understood
that RJ was getting something special he's never had before.
That's for me?
I think, you know, pivotal moment in Act 2, of RJ sort of
getting a little sucked into the whole family thing.
I always liked on a story level that had he not gotten sucked into this,
he would've been home free.
And the fact that he let his guard down
and let his emotions get the best of him...
...in that old tree.
David Soren did the boarding on this, which I thought...
It stayed pretty close. We did a little bit of a twist on it
to make it work, but...
I think he sort of invented the idea of him watching television and...
Yeah, it used to be something different. We came up with this Dr. Bill...
This is nice, guys.
But this whole idea of turning on the TV
and every channel was a reminder of what a scoundrel he is.
Is an accusation...
We let you into our family, and you've deceived us.
RJ actually has a conscience.
He's starting to. It's getting born.
And again, great lighting. It's so fun to see the blue light from the TV.
This is another Alessandro Carloni, isn't it?
- The animation? - His animation.
- And... - People love this.
- That's... - "I'm a dirtbag."
...Joel McCrary doing that great imitation on TV,
which gets just a huge laugh every time we...
RJ having an anxiety attack.
RJ. What are you doing, man?
Really good animation there.
Really tough camera move, it's all one shot.
And the camera's gotta do all this adjust,
and then reveal the empty log in one.
Where's the food? Where's the food?
That was William Salazar doing that whole shot.
Another action scene.
It was easier to put the action scenes into production early
because they were sort of fixed in story
and you could work around them for the subtleties
of things you were changing in the storytelling.
But we put this, this conversation scene and the following chase in
fairly early into production.
It's another one that Thom Enriquez boarded, isn't it?
I think, is some of this one?
- The beginning of it. - A little bit.
The back and forth.
David did a lot of it.
- Yeah, Dave Lux did a lot. - Dave Lux did a lot of this.
I mean, this one was touched.
What's funny about this sequence is...
It started off, we had something really similar where this dog came out...
He used to swallow Verne whole.
Yeah.
And RJ had to Heimlich the dog to get Verne out of...
- And it was a giant poodle. - ...out of his stomach.
- It was a full-sized poodle named Waffles. - Waffles.
But now it's Nugent the Dog, voiced by Brian Stepanek.
Brian actually helped us out by reading with the other performers.
We never get our actors in the same room together,
but Brian's a very good performer.
He's amazing in a kind of cold reading.
He provided the voices of all the other animals and characters
for our stars to react to.
And then, of course, he gets the oft-repeated line.
Play!
"Play!"
But the dog used to pop out and growl, and then chase Verne around
as you would expect growling and made the scene incredibly scary.
Aggressive and scary.
- And then... - This is where
Jeffrey just pointed out to us... Jeffrey Katzenberg.
You know, fear of dogs is one of the biggest things
a young kid has to deal with, and he was right.
You don't wanna play into that.
I remember we sent the whole story team off to, like,
"All right, let's get some fun into this sequence
"and see how far we can take it."
And they came back with this pitch.
And then Gary did the boarding on this chase.
- Gary Graham. - Gary Graham.
Helped invent sort of the fun of what this was, I think.
It's sort of subtle, but of course,
the dirt there is because everything within Nugent's grasp
has been chewed down to bare earth.
We called it the "perimeter of destruction."
I don't know if we've ever actually counted how many fences
and backyards they go through, but they're motoring here.
- We edited it down, too, a little bit. - Yeah.
It was even more at one point, so...
Sucker Punch is the name of the juice.
That's what it's called. Sucker Punch.
Here's our guys who won the...
- The guy from The Apprentice. - The Apprentice.
Who won the contest.
Won the contest, he came, and he did one screen for us
- and his co-winner... - Right there.
"What was that?" He says, so...
- BBQ Barry and... - Thank you, guys.
But this is where when the story guys came up with this idea,
this was when we knew we really had something,
which was... They picked up this propane tank...
This was early on, when we were trying to decide what the tone of the movie was.
It's like, "Can a propane tank ignite and send them up like the space shuttle?"
- "Of course. Why not?" - It's like, yeah.
There was a little debate before we settled into it,
and once we embraced it, we got loopier, so...
I just love this
series of shots...
That was fun. I like this one right here.
That one.
And then coming over the airplane.
Verne, unhook the chain.
I think that was a Bruce ad-lib.
I can't remember, actually, but it was pretty funny.
And then this, there's a great...
William Salazar, another of our leads, did the animation of RJ,
and we'd always said RJ was sort of Gene Kelly,
and he captured that gracefulness of RJ calmly settling in next to Verne there.
And nobody asked, but why does the Spuddies can fall faster than...
- You know, cartoon physics. - Yeah.
Another place where we said, "More, more.
"Do we really want an explosion that big?"
- "Yeah." - Oh, yeah. Big.
I love this bit, though.
And again, more cartoon physics.
Not until you look down.
There you go.
- That's the... - "You're the devil," I think,
was from a different scene.
It was. It was from a different scene.
John Carr, our editor, popped it in there for us
and cracked us all up.
Everybody completely loves this, with RJ thinking he's gonna get his Spuddies back.
But no.
Really, really fun sequence to do.
No!
Verne, you all right there?
- Gimme a hand, Oz. - Sure, sure.
- What the heck happened? - What happened?
It's gone. The food!
I think Bruce is really great here.
I love this "Ask him!" thing that he does.
Ask him!
Verne?
It's amazing these guys can get some of those subtleties of their performance,
not sometimes knowing the scene.
I mean, that says a lot about what you guys have to deal with,
- in terms of the recording and... - The animators just...
How you have to explain to them what's going on.
The animator crew we have is so phenomenal
and such a seasoned set of vets that they...
Surprisingly even though we videotape the performers,
they seldom really look at it.
Only on occasion would Karey or I say,
"Why don't you go ahead and look at what Bruce Willis did here,
"the facial expression he had." For the most part, the voice was enough.
And they would really take all their inspiration
from listening in the headphones to the voice broken down to 24ths of a second
so they could animate all the lips, gestures, expressions.
...every time I get near him.
I think this was another scene that was...
Went through a few iterations to get the right emotion.
It was a big turning point as far as Verne and his story.
And it was actually... The shots of RJ here, listening and feeling guilty
were rather late in the game but really helped the storytelling.
If they listened to half the stuff you're telling them...
And we must've done the phrasing.
Karey must've rewritten this line 25 times.
...in taking advantage of them
because they're too stupid and naive to know any better.
It had to be harsh enough so that the animals would truly be shocked,
but not so harsh that it made Verne cruel.
Yeah, and so, gosh, I think I was the editor there
and Karey would come up and I'd go,
"Well, I don't know, that doesn't sound like they'd be shocked enough if they..."
And then he'd go away and come back, and I'd go, "God, that's... Now he's...
"He's too much of a jerk. That's too harsh. "And so,
finding something that felt organic that he could blurt out
and truly be guilty of insulting them, but forgivable at the same time.
I thought Steve did a great job on this reading, though.
Right here, just...
- Hammy... - I'm not stupid.
Bringing a real vulnerability to Hammy in addition to his...
That's why Steve's such a good performer, actually.
That's what he brought to Hammy that stopped Hammy
from being merely a cartoonish funny character,
but really gave him a ton of heart, so...
And then this.
You know, on the other two Ben Folds songs,
we went through a couple of iterations...
But he played this one for...
This was just right out of the park.
And the lyrics are beautiful.
In fact, the soundtrack to the motion picture
has an extended version of this and all of the lyrics.
Ben added a couple more verses in the longer version there.
They're a really great examination of how we're all sort of afraid of change
and it works well as the voice, in this case, of kind of both Verne and RJ,
but mostly Verne, who's thinking that his fears have created this problem
rather than his real, you know, suspicions of RJ.
I think this was, you know, having this song here
was a little bit of a tough sell.
I mean, in terms of...
Not only to ourselves, but I think our crew was sort of mixed.
We used them as a great sounding board,
but I think some people felt it was maybe a little sappy,
but we felt strongly that we needed some kind of real emotional moment here.
Especially after that big chase, it's nice to dial down a little bit
because we have a couple of huge action scenes coming in the third act,
so this allows us to enjoy the characters.
Ultimately it's a great lead-in
to what is gonna be leading into the climax of the movie,
which are the next couple of scenes that follow this.
We used to have dead meat, that little can, in the cooler heist,
but we thought it was funnier here when RJ truly thinks he's dead.
I think Bill Damaschke actually mentioned that to us at one point.
Our executive producer.
And then this scene actually used to be a standalone, kind of humorous...
Dwayne setting traps.
Remember Thomas' improv?
He was singing to himself as he set traps.
And he improved, "Animals are enemies from zebras to anemones."
He rhymed "anemone" in improv, which is sort of terrifying to me.
I thought you might.
'Cause we don't really say what the Depelter Turbo does, ever.
We use the classic film technique of cutting away.
Leave it to your imagination.
It does that, right there.
Whatever RJ sees happens quickly and is obviously rather violent.
Well, now we enter the place in which I will have to provide smelling salts
to my partner, Karey, as he begins to relive
the experience of writing this scene,
and I don't think I'm exaggerating, at least 40 times.
I'm trying to think who did... Did you do more rewrite versions,
or Jeff Snow did more reboard versions?
Probably pretty close, huh?
It was a battle I wouldn't wanna...
Jeff and I can discuss that overlong drinks somewhere.
But it was adding the little self-deprecating humor of Verne
that I think unlocked the scene in which it plays now,
which I think it plays great now.
Garry Shandling gave a nice read on those lines as well.
Yeah, the "places in my shell I've never been,"
or the line here about listening to his heart and his stomach...
- "Heart and tail." - Very revealing about Verne's character.
Well, they keep it very...
Karey, eventually, after 40 drafts, found something that kept it very in-character,
very true to who these guys are and a scene which could otherwise
just be slow, ends up being revealing.
- So, congratulations. - Yeah, thank you.
The problem was actually keeping it short.
Yeah, it was definitely a... It was a five-pager,
and it needed to be about a two-and-a-half-pager,
so it was challenging.
And there, that is the single most difficult special effect in the movie.
- Paper wad. - Crumpled paper.
Crumpling up paper.
Every single fold has to be done by hand by somebody on the computer, so...
Yes. Just to the right.
There are protective booties...
We just got the opportunity to open the picture in Moscow
and part of the trip was seeing these amazing palaces,
and to tour these amazing places in Russia,
at which they asked us to put on protective booties.
And so we were laughing the whole time, repeating Gladys' line about,
"Protective booties near the door for your shoes."
It's a big, long list. You can see that.
You're an organized little guy, aren't you?
- That's a full Garry ad-lib. - Yeah.
Garry really came to the rescue with the...
Well, throughout the picture,
he was always an amazing partner,
but he saw the picture late in the game, right around the holidays,
and in January, he and a team of writers he was familiar with got to work
and we all sat down and came up with another eight or 10 lines
that went in the picture and really, funny, interesting lines for Verne.
- We'll identify a couple of them... - I think it was more character revealing,
- which was kind of nice and needed. - Yes.
Garry really gets it.
Here's another one of my favorite gags in the movie.
This was Conrad Vernon, whom you might know from, co-directed Shrek 2.
Came and helped us out in a pinch when we needed some new and fresh ideas.
Yes, he came up with this gag, which I just loved.
I remember, in storyboards, I think it took up an entire board
and he did this for about five minutes.
It was one of those "repeat until funny..."
Just keep saying, "Here, here, here, here."
My sister sent me an email, Karey, and she said it's her favorite moment
- in the movie. - Yeah, really.
Well, it's really great.
And this is my favorite gag that Karey wrote,
which is the Monopoly gag.
There's just a classic, every family's experienced it,
the quiet palming of the car so you get to be the cool piece.
I used to play Monopoly with my cousin Jamie when I was 10.
And he always got to be the car, I ended up being the hat,
or something lame.
So...
Besides, I'm the car. I'm always the car.
There you go, that's...
That's my childhood right there.
You always talked about this whole section being sort of Ocean's Eleven with animals,
and the question is how much of the ruse to give away,
and we end up with just that little outline,
so RJ sets the stage so the audience can know basically what to expect
and then we get into the details of step one here with Tiger the cat.
And what? You think he's just gonna hand over his collar to you?
Not to me, my femme fatale. To you.
- Her? - Me?
Wanda Sykes was such a pleasure to work with.
She really, right from the moment we pitched the character Stella,
she really understood that this was not merely a comedic character,
but a character with a lot of heart and she, really, at least...
Maybe she was just being flattering,
but she said this was the first time she's ever had to act.
Usually people want her to come in and do her acerbic wit,
but we really needed Stella to have this real vulnerability, real heart
- that would be... - A true transformation.
Yeah, that would be changed and find romance in the picture.
Remember this? This actually used to be another montage
of all the things to get Stella to be...
It used to be a little more of a classic makeover.
I think at least a few of the story artists took passes at it.
Many, many. But then we decided,
"Let's do it like this little ER moment."
We were able to squeeze in the kids playing this video game.
And again Garry helped to stage it.
- That thing's final. - Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, our work here is done.
I think this is actually some of the stuff that I'm most proud of.
In the midst of all this comedy and action are these little character moments
where Stella has this real... First time you've ever seen Stella's eyes,
the first time she's actually looked at herself
as something that can be not off-putting.
It was important to us that for several of the minor characters
that they had more than just a comedic role,
but had a little arc, a little story, a little heart.
And so for Ozzie and Heather's relationship,
for Stella's relationship with Tiger,
we went a little further than the usual Greek chorus.
I think the other thing was that we also talked about RJ having
an almost like inadvertent effect on some of the characters.
That he, you know, was a little bit like the Wizard of Oz.
- He was a crook... - But he kind of touched them.
- ...but he managed to improve their lives. - Or improved them.
Here's another great Thomas line.
"Curse you, plastic moldsman."
Now this sequence here, this again used to be much more elaborate
with Hammy going over and getting confused.
- I think Bill Riling first... - Yeah, Bill Riling did a sequence,
which was really fun but actually was Hammy getting confused
with hanging upside down and the "On" button said "No."
- Yeah, it got to be hard... - A little too complex.
But then Tom Owens just said...
Who actually does the laser beam trick with his cat.
Yeah, that's what he said.
The cat will race around his house
as he points a laser beam at various things.
He said, "It's kind of funny, I torture my cat with a laser beam.
"That could be funny."
- Pretty sure Hammy would fall for that. - Yeah.
So, we came up with this idea, this runner for this...
This cookie that RJ threw away that landed on the roof somehow.
We get a repeat of one of our favorite lines.
There it is.
You know, we re-recorded
'cause we wanted to have different versions of that line.
There's something about the way Steve did it when he first improved it.
Yeah.
And we used the same recording but just processed it like it was distant there.
And this is just such a simple idea but, man, this is a real crowd-pleaser.
You ever seen a cat or a dog chase it or if you've never seen it,
it's still really a simple, fun idea.
And that was great when the lighting department put the...
- Glow in his eyes? - The red in his eyes there.
That's it.
Also if you look at this dial closely,
there's a bear at the bottom, which is the full...
- It used to be a woolly mammoth. - A woolly mammoth.
That was my favorite Garry line.
"Thought we'd be dead by step two, so this is going great!"
That was an ad, as recently as January.
Yeah, that was one of the lines Garry came up with
after seeing the picture.
And my favorite Stella line.
"This better be one stupid cat."
Yeah, Chris Poché actually wrote that.
One of the many contributions he made on dialogue and...
We had some good writers, actually,
- along the way, Chris... - Yeah, well supported.
- Lorne and David and... - Lorne and David and Len...
- Starting us out. - Yeah.
You're a cat!
I mean, I'm a cat.
I love this thing that Omid does.
This.
That's it.
Somehow he just decided the character would do lots of...
Common strays? All right, you asked for it.
- Get the collar! - Gee, that's a nice collar you got on.
- Mind if I have a look? - No, no, no! Come no closer!
This is Stella's moment.
We used to have a very different... And there's a little vestige of it here.
- It used to be that he was... - Had allergies.
Had allergies and was allergic to cats.
So, the joke was he was allergic to himself and his own species,
and for some reason, he wasn't allergic to Stella.
So, the romance used to be based as much on his ability to be around her
because it was the first woman he wasn't allergic to.
But we simplified it, and I think to good effect here,
so that it's really the fact that
he's been inbred and his nose is tiny
that stops his sense of smell from getting in the way.
If you watch his eyes, they turn into cat eyes when he's angry,
and then back into human eyes when he's happy.
Well, believe me, there's more where that came from...
- Puffball. - All right, team...
Great Wanda performance there.
Boy, there are lots of fun conversations.
Karey and Chris Poché wrote a lot of great dialogue for Tiger.
Unfortunately, when he's not the main thrust of the story,
you just can't spend that much screen time.
Yeah, we had all this stuff about him
talking about his family and all of their names,
all the Persian names of his brothers and sisters
and how he was lifted from a box...
'Cause the story idea was that he's the guard.
He's like the security guard, and, you know, Stella is seducing him
or trying to get him, the femme fatale, getting him out of the way.
- It's kind of... - She's gotta keep him busy.
It's the classic heist movie, you know,
"Let her keep the guard busy while these guys go in."
I love the design of the kitchen back to the fantastic art department.
We always said the kitchen would be the size of a cathedral to these animals.
So, keeping the camera down low,
creating the effect of almost a Lord of the Rings-sized
gateway being opened when he opens the fridge.
We're always trying to really preserve their point of view
so that the kitchen feels this city street-sized kitchen.
No grip, no grip, no grip.
I love that.
Remember we worked forever
to get the sound of those toenails on the...
'Cause I just had a sound in mind of hearing a dog running on linoleum.
And we had Hammy with four feet, six feet and eight feet in the blur there.
What was that?
It... That's just the sound of my heart. Can't you hear it?
This way, this way!
Okay, okay, we're good. Go back to work.
I just love the lighting of the way this whole thing plays out,
as far as the look, it's very exciting to see it come to life.
It's a real challenge because it's nighttime
and you don't want it to be too dark...
It's the first time the animals have been indoors
so that's the first time we've had interior lighting in the film.
This sequence was really... It used to be very...
A lot longer, it took a lot of work to get this one down to link,
and it used to have a slightly different plot line.
We used to have Ozzie and Heather go upstairs
to keep Gladys from waking up.
They were casting shadows on her as the sun rose,
and it was various things to distract Gladys.
But this moment coming up was one that...
You know, everyone felt, probably more than you and me, Tim,
that this idea and this shot, actually, sold it for us,
which was this overhead shot...
The Hitchcock shot looking down at the island
and the animals rounding it, it's just... That's intense.
Having her come down and be in the midst of them
and that tension of almost finding them out.
- And this idea... - I like this.
Which was, "Okay, let me get my coffee." And there it is, there's the last thing...
This big moment where...
That was RJ's theme by Rupert, which I liked, where he just...
Yeah, which you'll hear played out through the movie,
but, you know, RJ has either a good idea or a bad idea.
Hear that music.
That little moment where RJ is like, "Let's go, the wagon's full."
And he could've gone and avoided all this stuff...
He can't.
His own hubris keeps him...
I think a lot of this dialogue with Bruce Willis
was recorded in the very first couple of days
of working with Bruce.
We actually pitched him the movie on a Monday, he loved it,
said, "Let's do it, I'm available Wednesday."
And we went right into the studio in the same week.
I think we recorded the whole movie once through...
- Almost. - Almost.
I mean, the movie at that time.
These lines, as he argues with Verne
and eventually confesses, are from that session.
I like this moment
when you know that everything is going to really go bad.
There were a lot of ways we storyboarded this.
It's so outrageous when she gets hit that you almost get a nervous laugh,
at least you did out of the crew.
When we showed it to the audiences, they really were afraid
that maybe Heather had gone too far.
I thought you were dead.
I learned from the best, Dad.
Bill improvised this line here.
I like that about Shatner,
Bill Shatner, is that he's funny,
but then he can do such heartfelt soulful performance, too.
- Nothing! - Well then, let's get out of here...
This is where RJ gets mean.
Yeah.
We have more than enough.
And Garry doing really...
He really had to work himself up into a frenzy there.
Poor Garry felt like all we asked him to do
in the whole picture was shout.
But, boy, he sure is good at it. He really is intense in this scene.
It's a throwaway shot, but all that glass and wine breaking is
a very tough thing for the effects crew to pull off.
The obligatory...
So, there's our second big movie reference.
But at least we're referencing a movie from over 50 years ago.
I bet people that don't know the movie laugh.
They're still fun, yeah.
Just 'cause I think Omid's performance is so good.
Skunk!
Yeah, that.
My daughter's favorite moment.
Fire in the hole!
It was a late idea to add the cork falling into the foreground.
You can actually see it flying through frame.
It shatters a window to get out of the house.
- That was our Casablanca moment. - I love this.
I love in the midst of all this skunk fog, they're having their...
Their moment.
Her "You can't smell really 'cause I love you."
- Plus, here, RJ decides he's gonna... - Yeah.
To the door! Go, go, go, go, go, go!
Gonna leave him hanging.
The choreography here would prove to be really tough.
You wanted RJ to ditch them,
but not necessarily doom them to being caught.
So, as far as RJ is concerned, the animals escape,
and he's merely stealing all the food.
Run, that way. Outside!
Love that shot. That's a Jeff Snow idea, I'm pretty sure.
- Hitting the glass. - Hitting the glass, yeah.
Buenos días, reptile.
And again Thomas just decided Spanish, maybe.
He should speak Spanish.
It's funny, you do get used to your movie and even, dare I say, sick of it,
but to see the animals in the cages after you've spent time developing them,
working on them,
it's almost offensive to see them
'cause they really are little people, not animals,
and so to see them treated like beasts is hard,
even as a filmmaker, to watch this scene.
Inhumanely as possible.
We actually toned Gladys down.
She used to say more there. "As inhumanely as possible.
"Drown them, skin them," as she marched off.
Toned her down a bit.
In crafting...
How about the guy in the preview that said...
My favorite remark.
- "Harsh." - "Harsh."
- RJ is walking away, "Harsh, dude." - "Harsh, dude."
Yeah.
- What's he gonna do to us, Mama? - I don't know, baby.
I don't wanna die, Dad.
Again, this is Shatner being really heartfelt.
We'll be okay.
Hammy and Stella holding hands.
You were right about him, Verne.
We shoulda listened.
This next beat, we had to really... We turned out all the lights in the studio
to get Garry into that place where
we could just really be quiet and intimate
and get the delivery on that line just right.
If you remember this scene, actually...
For the longest time, we used to have RJ going back to the cave.
All the way.
He returned the food and there was always a geographical problem,
which is knowing how we had it in the picture.
So, the idea was that Vincent woke up,
ambled down and then meets him halfway.
Sort of makes sense with our timeline since the sun clearly has risen.
- Yeah. - So, the logistics worked out.
...deceitful, self-serving thing I've ever seen.
Rupert's music here, again, it's so narrative, it really tracks
the sadness of RJ's discovery and then the growing realization
that he wants to be a different guy.
He did a great job with this track.
And then Nick calls him out to be the creep here...
Really, Vincent calls him out to be the creep that he really is.
But when he says this... I love this performance by Bruce, too,
which is, "But I already had that."
But I already had that.
He used to say something else.
A lot of it is what he doesn't say, RJ in this scene, which I like.
Yeah, but what Vincent used to say was, "You know, you're just like me.
"We're both scavengers. You know, that's how we live."
But we went back later on
and just called back that line from the beginning,
which was, "You said it yourself, you're a family of one, and you always will be."
Just like him.
So, that idea of
Vincent wanting to protect the fact that he's a loner
or there's some comfort in the fact that RJ is just as miserable as he is.
They really need me.
So, I really need this!
RJ!
I think Nick recorded that "RJ!" once and we used it about five times.
The whole studio quotes it, "RJ!"
What the...
I'm not gonna ask how RJ survives
a 50-mile-per-hour collision into a windshield,
- but... - It's a cartoon.
Yeah, you got a problem with that,
but not the fact that he fell out of the sky earlier
and landed next to a cooler.
That little moment between Verne and RJ
where Verne's clearly the only one who understands
RJ really has given up his food and maybe his life to save them.
- Bear! - Hair?
- Bear! - Dare?
There's a reflection, you have to watch for a while there,
as Vincent comes up in the reflection.
Now this scene, we always had a problem with.
"No, not another straight-ahead car chase scene."
But I think in one of our early test screenings of this,
Bill Damaschke pointed out that it's like...
You know what really helps to make this fresh is the fact that
the kids think it's a video game and you can get a little commentary.
So we had a couple of things with the kids driving.
But after Bill made that observation,
we really went back through and built a few more
of the high score and other jokes into it, so...
And then to use the GPS.
Yeah, we all love the voice on the GPS system.
- Hammy! Let me in! - Not listening to RJ.
Lose that bear!
What weapons do we have?
- We've got a hammer. - Cool.
I think Gary Graham was the one who did the boarding of this.
He boarded this.
He did help us board this.
It's a lot of...
I love that. We always called that the mosh pit gag.
Ozzie!
He's just trying to help us. Just let him in.
That "ring-tailed charlatan" line actually existed somewhere else.
- Transplanted it there. - It's the amazing editing
that happens in this process.
No fighting while we're driving.
We will turn this van around, mister.
- Madison. - Madison did a great job.
I think she relished saying that.
She probably gives it to her parents now all the time.
And Shane Baumel, who does Spike's voice.
We really...
Together with Sami, the three of them were phenomenal.
Yeah, it was really fun.
Thank you, thank you.
That's one strong bear.
This is an early idea, too, I think, of having Penny
- knock him with the porcupine quills. - Defend the kids with the quills, yeah.
I think it actually happens to dogs a lot if they get out.
They get with the porcupines.
They're cute little roly-poly critters,
but, boy, you don't want to tangle with those
- one-way quills, so... - They'll hurt you.
Another "RJ!"
RJ!
Good old Nick.
- Look out. - High score.
No, no, no, no!
Again, we kept asking ourselves, we kept telling our crew,
you know, "You push it and we'll tell you if you went too far."
This is where we were showing the movie, we get a huge applause and laughter
at the screening in Cannes for people, a car crashing into the house.
- Destroy a suburban home. - They laughed, they love that.
Make the French laugh.
You have arrived.
Well, that's great.
We used to have another line. We used to have "Game over" from the kids,
but "You have arrived" is the slightly better gag to go with there.
That's April.
The old jazz dance injury.
From our production crew, did the voice of the GPS system.
The gag that's been around for a long time.
That they run out the door, but that's all that's standing there.
This is a...
- I personally... - Tim fears clowns.
I have a deep-seated problem with clowns,
so this is my little homage to my own fears maybe.
Look out!
So, I'm just gonna say the inversion of the movie was hotly debated
as to how, a couple of different versions,
but our story team felt passionately that this was the way to go, I think,
- headed by Jeff and his gang. - We had a whole new version.
Yeah, we had a whole thing where RJ was doing a different sort of sacrifice,
but it works much more simply to have him be in the title character, the hedge.
And offer to distract and let the family go to safety.
Yeah, to have all three of our villains
on either side and for them to be legitimately stuck in this.
With a family movie, we were legitimately concerned about how intense to be here.
So what we did is, in the soundtrack, make sure we didn't get too terrifying
with growls and tasers and scary stuff.
I have to say that Randy Thom and his team up at Skywalker
- did a phenomenal job. - They did a phenomenal job.
And this was call back the fireflies.
So, the whole "Hammy-time" thing started as just a story panel
where Hammy drank some caffeine in an action scene,
disappeared and reappeared with a Viking helmet and a sword,
and when people said, "Where did you go?" He said, "I really don't know."
We loved the idea that caffeine would have
this absolutely radical physics on Hammy's metabolism
and decided to take it all the way to the nth degree here.
We had to defend this one, actually, quite a bit.
- Because we were told... - It kind of doesn't work with storyboard.
It was so extreme.
Yeah, it doesn't work 'cause everything stands still,
and there was some fear that maybe kids wouldn't get this idea.
Karey, remember when we did our press tour,
a bunch of kids had seen it
and a little 7-year-old in the front row stood up,
and we said, "What's your favorite part?" and she stood up
and completely explained exactly what happened.
- Word for word. - You know when you drink
so much caffeine that you go so fast
that time actually appears to be standing still.
She goes, "That's my favorite scene."
The kids are actually explaining it to the adults.
Exactly.
Kids are like, "Dad, clearly his metabolism accelerated."
- Paying off the cookie. - I like the cookie.
I mean, I wanted to keep going.
We used to have another gag, too, where the Easter bunny was out hiding eggs
and said to Hammy...
We got a little metaphysical with it for a while.
We could've gone many, many places, but...
Yeah, it was a scene you had to take a leap of faith
'cause you always look at these things in storyboards, but...
Well, there's Verne's butt again.
Storyboards are already frozen so they don't really tell the story.
That always reminds me of that shot of Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2.
- When he ejects, flying up in the air. - Yeah, in the ejector seat.
And you finally see the Depelter here, which was designed to actually function
by our art department.
Yes, Patrick.
There's a bit of demonic energy in the design of this thing.
Prepare for a lot of stinging.
That was an improv by Thomas. "Prepare for a lot of stinging,"
- and then... - I love how they
all have the glasses on. It's so funny.
Now, we actually went one further in this sequence.
That's right.
We actually had the laser beam pass Mars
and several little six-footed aliens look at it and go,
"Hey, that must be a Depelter Turbo."
Yes.
I love all these gags.
Popcorn.
- This was just... - Audiences love the popcorn.
This was just storyboard artists having a great time.
There's that great sound in the background.
Yeah, pull out all the great sounds for the Depelter Turbo.
Richard Anderson did a great job with that.
- Yeah, Richard and crew. - Our sound effects.
Now, we did sort of tan the animals just for this shot.
Look at that purple belch.
Hammy's such a great burper.
They did it because the drink,
the little sort of Red Bull-ish drink, that he drinks is purple.
Here we go.
The depleting.
Now, you do realize that was a Depelter Turbo?
That's Sean Bishop, one of our story artists, doing his Chicago cop there.
This has nothing to do with me.
But it was Jeff Snow who did the flying elbow.
Yes, cop tackle.
Yay, Jeff.
It made us laugh in the storyboards,
and then it was almost too much in the animation that we...
- The smackdown. - The smackdown.
It's Dwayne's saying "Get her" that is so marvelous.
But he gets his comeuppance with our buddy, Nugent.
Here we go.
- Play? - No!
No, no! No, no!
That's a pretty vicious crunch, isn't it?
It worked! It worked!
We did it!
Verne and RJ and Hammy are the characters that are actually surviving
from the inspiration for the film,
the comic strip Over the Hedge drawn by T. Lewis and written by Mike Fry.
And those characters and the others that we invented
were still done in consultation and with a lot of drawing
and input from those guys.
Just invaluable.
Just for the record,
if you had told us that all that food you were trying to get...
Garry Shandling, really nice performance here,
a nice wink in his voice as he advises RJ this all could've been avoided.
I think this last line was one that I just tossed in as a throwaway.
It came out of the writing session with Garry and at the very, very end.
The "That's what families do" line.
- Yeah, we may have... - "Bad communication."
Well, it helps take the air out of a moment
that's getting almost too precious.
I mean, you want this moment, that's what the film's about,
is this guy becoming a member of the family.
But it's nice to have a little smile while you're doing it.
I do.
Never anticipated that it'd get the response that it did.
Now there's...
There are as many versions of the very ending of the movie
as there were of the scene at the hedge here.
Yeah, there was a time when it just ended with RJ and Verne
walking over the hill.
But I'm really happy with this.
We also had a version where the kids actually had stolen Gladys' credit card
and had phoned in for pizza and takeout.
- Yeah, it was a little much. - That was not good.
Simply letting him find his nuts proved to be the most satisfying way to get out.
There's my favorite part of the movie.
That's mine.
Boy, we sure wanted to do even more in the end credits,
but as you might expect, the end credits were done last
- and so the little bits of animation... - We ran out of time.
It's wonderful to have what we do have
with the little bits of animation for the characters
to make their appearances in the credits.
And Ben Folds did these new lyrics to an existing song,
Rockin' the Suburbs.
And these lyrics are hysterical. He did a great job of
taking what was originally there and extending it to something
that felt more compatible with our movie, this ironic look at suburban life.
Anyone who can work in "fescue" into a song...
He's amazing.
Pretty good.
It's nice to see all these people that worked really hard
and some of them as long as you and I, the three of us, yeah.
- Four years. - Four years on the movie.
And incredible team and just shows you
how it takes a village to get these things done.
If you actually watch all the credits, you'll see that there's almost 500 people
that touched the movie in some way or another.
Then there's a whole support group of people at DreamWorks as well
that are listed here.
But when you work on one of these, you really are conducting
an orchestra of three, four, 500 people to all
work together to make the same picture.
They were our support team and our buddies
and our critics and everything else in-between
and helped us really make a great movie.
I think what we should do now is read all of these names out loud.
I was hoping you'd sing them.
- I could burp them. - Yes, you could.
But it's a very small studio we are recording in.
We'll let the credit roll play out and thank you
for making the journey with us,
thank you for enjoying and watching our motion picture.
If you had as much fun watching as we had making it,
- we know you had a good experience. - That's what I say. Hear, hear.
I don't want it to end.
You guys leave, I'm just gonna stay and talk to myself.
We all had a good time.
- Thanks, everybody. Bye, bye. - Bye.
That, my friends, is the object of all human attention and devotion.
- And they call it a TV. - Wicked cool!
Humans feel an inner need to connect with the world around them.
That is super-duper.
They also feel a need to sit on their fat butts.
Watching TV fulfills both needs at the same time.
Wow. Interesting.
Come on, kids. Family time there, in front of the TV.
Got your snack food?
Buy a vowel. Buy a vowel!
Buy a "Y". Please buy a "Y".
- I can't find the remote. - Hey, Spikey, race ya!
- Has anybody seen the remote? - Dad, chill.
I could do a little TV.
I think, today's the day we find out if the baby is gifted,
or if Saxon is really an alien.
Like Khan in Star Trek II!
The Genesis Project was in the hands of the Enterprise,
but Khan had his plan to steal the invention of renewable life!
Well, that was specific.
I saw it on TNT, a retrospective.
- Gummi Worm, anybody? - Let me have one.
Bucky, pass this to Lou.
- Taste this. - Don't you take that.
- This is the perfect food. - Fat-free cookies?
You might as well just be eating dirt.
I've had dirt. I don't like dirt. It tastes like dirt.
The show is starting.
Hang on a minute.
I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait.
Yes! Here we go.
- Kind of anticlimactic. - Shoot!