Hi, this is Jon Favreau, and this is
the director's commentary for the 2019
version of The Lion King.
This title sequence here
for the Disney logo was actually created
for The Jungle Book.
There's one small difference, which is you'll see Tinker Bell
circles the top here.
This is actually hand-painted using the old multiplane techniques.
Rob Legato, a name that you'll be hearing a lot
during this commentary,
is our visual effects supervisor
and second unit director...
On both these projects.
And we thought a really low-tech beginning
to honor the Disney roots
was a clever way to go.
This shot here
is the only actually photographed shot in the entire film.
Of the 1,400 shots, we wanted to put one real one in.
Everything else is computer generated.
But that first sunrise shot is the mystery real shot.
All the rest of these were created, actually.
The environments were created by MPC,
which is the one vendor that worked on this film.
A lot of films use a lot of visual effects houses.
We used MPC.
And the visual effects supervisor from MPC, Adam Valdez,
who also was a visual effects supervisor
on Jungle Book, we met on that project and much of the same team.
Also, Andy Jones, the lead animator,
was also involved with that project.
Now, these environments were researched pretty exhaustively in Africa,
and we had done a lot of photography.
There had been a scout where we tried to find the locations
that inspired the locations from the original film
'cause that was pretty well documented.
And so James Chinlund, who is our production designer,
who is in charge of the whole look of the film...
Normally, production designers are designing and building sets.
In the case of a film where we're using virtual photography,
he was overseeing the building of these virtual environments that,
like this shot, pays homage to the original,
but yet grounds it, hopefully,
more in the reality of the topography of the real locations.
Now, this shot is interesting
'cause we wanted to make it look like a helicopter shot,
and we brought in some drone pilots that actually...
You know, we shrunk the set down and had the drone fly around it
like a helicopter shot. It turned out quite well.
And Audrey Ferrara is a name I should mention as well.
Her official title is
MPC DFX Supervisor,
but really her job is
designing the environments like an art director
and working with the teams of dozens
and actually hundreds of artists that worked on this to help create
this naturalism that we were going for.
And of course, every one of these characters is
designed also by the artists over there at MPC
and overseen by the production team working on the film.
Now, if you're familiar with the original Lion King,
you could see that this sequence here, the circle of life, is one
where we really tried to adhere as much as possible
to the original shots
to let the audience know,
who were fans of the original, that we really...
We're gonna take... We go to great efforts to honor the original.
Of course, there's a lot of shots in here
that are different, but we found that
transposing the 2D shots
to 3D and to photorealism
didn't always translate perfectly. And so there are things like
the fruit that gets broken open with the juice inside,
when we looked at what kind of fruit that was
and what was really inside of it,
it wasn't filled with
face paint. It was filled with,
you know,
a white fleshy fruit.
And so we didn't want to depart from reality more than we had to.
And so in that case, we switched it for pigments
that were in different plant life there
and things that you would really find in nature.
And we used that later when Rafiki's actually painting on the tree.
And so this Circle of Life sequence
ending with this big drum boom...
(DRUM BOOMS)
...that, by the way, I got to play
the big drum, the bass drum in Hans Zimmer's orchestra,
and I got to hit that drum.
That was my big contribution.
I might also add that
the singer who sang that song,
this version of the Circle of Life was Lindiwe Mkhize,
who had been with the London company
of the musical production for 20 years and had just retired.
And Hans had the idea to include her
as part of the legacy of the project
and bring some of the musical stage production feel to our film.
Now, this sequence here,
this is where we really depart from the original.
And we wanted to show,
using the techniques that I'll talk about later, a virtual camera,
that we could create something that felt more like a documentary.
We wanted this thing to feel not like an animated remake,
but like as though it were a live-action production,
even though clearly everything's animated here.
There's nothing live action.
The environments aren't, the characters aren't.
Everything is handmade, hand animated, hand created.
But everything was meant to
contribute to the live-action appearance of the film.
And so we studied a lot of the BBC documentaries
like Planet Earth II, I think,
which came out around the time we were planning this.
And we studied the way that they used their cameras,
the way they operated them, the way they edited, used music,
used speed changes,
all the ways that they brought emotion, anthropomorphic emotion
to these naturalistic animals,
these animals that didn't have any expression.
We wanted to limit the scope as much as we could
to the naturalism of the animals' behavior.
And so borrowing a lot and learning a lot
from the techniques that are used in documentaries,
we were able to, I think,
bring a lot of the emotion to the film that the original had
while not being tempted to make them act in too much of a cartoony fashion
and break the illusion that we were really photographing this.
There's John Oliver playing Zazu,
Chiwetel Ejiofor
playing Scar.
And here's
James Earl Jones returning.
And there's our Man for All Seasons shot.
Henry VIII, (CHUCKLES)
blocking the sun.
So, here we have one of those situations where
the scene kind of follows what was in the original,
though there was a lot more slapstick
between Zazu and Scar.
But yet I think we captured the spirit.
And it's an interesting scene, too, because here you have James Earl Jones,
who's the only person returning
with their voice to this production,
other than Lebo M,
whose voice is still, is singing throughout the piece.
But this is the only voice, and he's playing against Chiwetel.
And of course,
Chiwetel's a new voice, and Scar has a new look.
Because if you just followed what was originally there
with a, you know, very dark mane,
it would've seemed like
that's a sign of dominance in the animal kingdom among lions.
And so from certain angles, it looks dark, like here.
But, really, we found if we went with a black mane, it would look like
he would've been the dominant lion,
and part of the story is that Mufasa is the alpha.
And part of Scar's struggle is that he wants to be the king.
MUFASA: As long as I am king, that will never change.
Well, there's one in every family, sire.
I had a cousin who thought he was a woodpecker.
FAVREAU: Now, it should be said that right now,
I haven't seen this movie yet
with an audience of people
who weren't involved with making the movie.
So, the premiere is actually tomorrow.
It would be the first time I get to see it with a crowd,
so it's a little bit odd talking about this film
without knowing how it's going to be received.
But I know that a lot of people
worked very hard on it and that we cared very deeply about
honoring the legacy of the film.
And all the people that have worked on it
and contributed to it before we were ever even involved,
before this production was even launched,
the stage production and the original animated film.
And of course, all of the music and the culture that it reflects.
Here was a difficult conundrum,
because if you remember from the old film, he was painting.
And we felt Rafiki would very easily turn anthropomorphic,
and it would blow the illusion of him being a real primate
if we had him painting.
And so the idea of
these bugs magically kind of
coming together and him nudging them
to create some kind of a holdout
for blowing pigment onto the tree,
kind of like the old
cave paintings where
ancient humans would hold their hand up against the cave wall
and blow pigment against it
and remove their hand, and there would be the outline.
Here, this was inspired by time-lapse photography
that you would find in a documentary.
And now we transition out into
a very memorable scene from the original film.
The more memorable the scene,
the more we adhered to
what people would remember.
And we found that in certain scenes we could deviate quite a bit
and certain areas we had to hold very close
to what people's memories were.
If I'm not mistaken, all of this is
is pretty word-for-word
and shot-for-shot.
We found that Mufasa's dialogue
actually held up very well.
There are certain things that hold up over, you know,
25 years,
better than other things.
And the dialogue of Mufasa reflects
timeless truths
and lessons that one generation passes to the next.
Anything that addressed...
That was too colloquial or that was
comedy, was felt contemporary at all at the time,
that stuff didn't hold up as well, we found.
And then tonal things that didn't translate well
to live action also,
we found that we were better off exploring other possibilities there.
But this sequence here of,
"Everything the light touches is your kingdom,"
is definitely something that people remember.
And even getting the lion to sit like that,
that's not something you see in nature that often.
They do it from time to time, but people remember it more
from statues in front of museums... (CHUCKLES)
And less from the zoo.
But we felt that that was a very strong visual.
And now you start to see the camera movement.
And here, hopefully, you could see
the combination of things like lighting, the first simulations here,
which felt like something that you hadn't seen before.
The technology really took a big jump.
But these shots, these emulated helicopter shots
and these long lens shots and the camera movement, crane shots
were all created using a technique called virtual camera work
where we actually built
the animation, built the environments,
and instead of just rendering it for the film,
we brought it into a 3D virtual reality space.
And that's where we operated virtual cameras
with a live-action film crew within that virtual environment.
Often we'd all be wearing the headsets so that we could actually be there.
So, like, for a scene like this, I would be standing there
watching the lion walk past me with Caleb Deschanel,
and we would decide where we should put the camera.
This is some beautiful animation right here, using the slow motion.
See, their mouths aren't moving back there.
This is how you would cut a doc together.
And so we took certain leaps that
you wouldn't do necessarily in a live-action film,
but you would do in a documentary.
So, we're trying to put little clues in here
to subconsciously make you think you're seeing something
that was filmed in the wild.
But if you watch all these camera movements,
you'll see that they're a bit imprecise.
There's a lot of little adjustments going on,
because often times it would be Caleb Deschanel on the wheels,
operating a camera within a virtual space.
And we would generate dailies from those camera movements
and supply them to our editors,
Mark Livolsi, Adam Gerstel.
And they would take the dailies,
as they would in a live-action production,
they would cut it together into an assembly.
And so it was very much a pipeline of a live-action film
in the middle section.
So, in the beginning, we would prepare it as,
you know, animators always would,
which is pencil drawings in the story department
and little animatics or show reels,
as Disney Animation would do or Pixar.
But then at the point where we would go into layout,
that's when we built everything.
And Andy Jones oversaw all the animation
so that we had some simple versions of the animation
done in a game engine called Unity.
A company called Magnopus built essentially,
along with MPC, essentially a multi-player
virtual reality filmmaking game,
where we could all be in virtual reality together
as though we're on a real film set.
And here, you had a real crane.
You know, we had a crane that was in our facility,
and we would operate the crane in a big,
you know, room that looked like a motion capture room.
But instead of capturing the movements of the animals or performers,
we were instead capturing the movements of the cameras.
So, it was using similar techniques, new hardware, virtual reality hardware,
game engine technology and having a live-action crew operating cameras.
But the lions or the performers, none of them were ever in the room.
Those were all pre-animated.
And so we would have sequences like this bug sequence where
we would decide where the cameras...
We would walk around and observe it as though it were a rehearsal,
and then Caleb would decide,
the camera goes here, where we'd pull focus,
how it would move.
And so Andy Jones
was tasked with our little animation lab
to build very naturalistic performances.
It's very easy to exaggerate performances on a sequence like this.
But it would feel a little bit...
The physics would feel a little cartoony.
So I think there's a really good sense of weight,
how the characters move.
And again,
really no emotion in the face, which is counterintuitive
if you're doing a film like Lion King where
you want the animals to express a lot of emotion.
And so it fell upon the voice cast,
in this case it's JD McCrary and Chiwetel Ejiofor,
to bring a lot of performance through and emotion through their voices.
And also, the camera work.
So, you see a shot like this where you start off on a close-up of Simba,
and then you see the camera slowly move and the focus rack.
And so even though there's no expression on Scar's face,
you definitely read a lot (LAUGHS)
into what he feels about
his little nephew.
And look at that beautiful environment.
This is a shot that I am very proud and impressed with the team.
That's...
It might not be obvious to people, but that's probably
one of the most difficult shots in the movie,
to make a naturalistic environment where you could look at
everything at the same time, there's no camera movement,
and for it to appear to be photographed.
And then also a beautiful environment inside Scar's cave,
and look at the beautiful lighting in here.
I was so grateful to have Caleb Deschanel,
who, if you're unfamiliar with his work,
you should start with looking up his resume
and then just one by one start watching all of his films.
It's film school, just watching his work and how he's progressed
over so many different periods of filmmaking.
And now... He started off at a time when there was...
On films with very little visual effects and no CGI technology.
And here he is
operating cameras and being the cinematographer
on a very cutting-edge, technical film,
which is to show you that really the technology is just a tool
and it's the artist and the experience of the filmmakers,
be it cinematographers or camera operators,
performers,
people who design environments, lighting,
all of the people who are...
All the artists and filmmakers who are part of the team,
if the set of tools are presented in a way
that will allow them to take everything they've learned
from the old way of making movies, the more traditional way,
and if you could tap into that passion, that artistry
and that level of skill,
then you really get the best of both worlds.
You get to push the limits of what the tech could do,
but you also get
this lifetime of experience
that's often pushed to the side as new technologies emerge.
And so the effort that we were making
and Rob Legato was certainly a big part of this,
creating this little infrastructure
that we could hire people who didn't have experience in visual effects,
but you have a real dolly operator who's pulling the camera and reacting
to the movement of these characters
like they would if you were filming real performers.
And I think, although it's not obvious consciously to people,
I think the subconscious takeaway is that you feel like you're watching
something more real than an animated movie.
At least, that was our contention.
How we getting rid of the dodo?
Trust me, I got this.
Follow me to freedom.
ZAZU: Oh, how lovely it is...
FAVREAU: So, now we're about to enter into
the Can't Wait to be King number.
And this was a very challenging one because everybody remembers it.
It's a very upbeat number.
In the original film, it's extremely colorful.
It's like a Busby Berkeley
choreographed musical.
It has very colorful, surreal imagery.
If you remember, there's animals standing on top of each other's heads.
It's very...
It almost exists partially in the imagination of the characters,
and it's very much in the Disney tradition of the surreal,
you know, visually-beautiful,
semi-fantasy sequences that pop up,
you know, that have been popping up since Dumbo.
Now, we didn't want to depart at all from the reality of the film.
We didn't want to blow the illusion of real photography.
And so part of the challenge
with James Chinlund and Audrey and Elliot Newman
and the whole visual effects team and Andy was...
"How could we create the same feeling that you had from the old movie
"without going so stylistic?"
And so as you'll see, we start to embrace
a different color palette with the flamingos coming up.
We used the animals to create this
really cool environment,
because to these little cubs, those animals are the environment.
We, you know, use the animals to create architecture and color around them
to hopefully capture some of the same fun and energy
that the original production had.
ZAZU: Now, when I said that...
NALA: (SINGING) No one saying "be there"
ZAZU: What I meant was...
FAVREAU: And so you see the legs of the animals
almost become like forests
to these little characters.
I should mention also
that we have...
Shahadi Wright Joseph playing young Nala.
Of course, the older Nala is played by Beyoncé.
And we kept the lyrics the same here from the original.
And this sequence was
inspired by the original, but we had to depart.
And so Dave Lowery, I should mention,
who's our head of story,
was overseeing a very talented story department
that would come up with all these little gags
in much the same way
it would've been done in Walt Disney's time.
You know, we would have sessions where we'd review the storyboards.
We'd do little animatics to watch them play as pencil,
and we would lay them against the music.
And so when we're on the set "photographing,"
I say that in quotes. When we're actually capturing
the imagery in VR, using virtual cameras,
we would have usually Adam Gerstel on the set, the editor.
And he would cut in these shots
over the pencil drawings and have the music playing behind it.
And we would see if the shots worked,
and so we were kind of building a sequence like this
as we went, in real time.
You could also hear,
of course, Hans Zimmer is, you know, the beating heart of this film.
He really helped, not just helped give advice
about what Lion King was about and what the original experience was,
but musically, I mean, I think
it's really, truly an inspired work.
And, you know, he partnered up with Pharrell.
He's been working with Pharrell for a while,
and what's great in a song like this is
you could hear both of the influences,
that mixture of two different perspectives
but two people who really see eye-to-eye creatively,
but come from different traditions
that just collaborate on a level of just
trying to push the limits musically. So, here we are.
Hopefully, it feels just like the old song,
but, really, if you listen to this compared to...
The new one compared to the old one,
you'll see that there's quite a bit of difference.
But, again, tried to capture the essence and the spirit.
Now, a shot like this is very...
More challenging than it might seem.
You could see we're using long lenses, and we're using techniques
that you would find in a documentary.
So, here, we're going pretty natural. You're looking through foreground.
And here we have talking animals, you know, and that's...
One of the big challenges is, can you make animals talk
and not have it be distracting and have it not blow the illusion
of watching real animals in a real environment?
And part of it is how you photograph it,
not drawing too much attention to the talking,
but photographing them like they're really doing their thing
and having them behave like real animals.
We learned a lot on Jungle Book,
but we also learned a lot by watching other movies that did it right.
I mean, Babe, I still contend,
you know, those are just real animals
for the most part that they filmed in Babe.
It was a little bit of CG to make the mouths move,
but I feel tremendous connection emotionally to those characters.
So, you know, you got to look for people who have done it well before
and people that you want to emulate and things that you want to avoid.
That was certainly one that I've always...
I think holds up incredibly well.
So, here's James,
and his art department worked
very hard to figure out what should the elephant graveyard look like.
And Audrey, you know,
over the course of,
you know, once the original artwork was done,
each one of these shots had to be designed,
and the environment had to be designed.
How much do you have...
You didn't want to have, like, boiling green lava
like in the old one or the imagery of,
you know, that kind of Night on Bald Mountain look
that inspired the original, I think.
But we had to make it look like they are things that really exist
in the African landscape.
And so a lot of this was pulled from research.
And James Chinlund had, you know,
a lot of wonderful artists doing key frame illustrations,
trying to figure out what the look of this should be.
'Cause again, this is one of those areas if we just adhered
exactly to what was in the animated film or the stage production,
it would feel a bit out of place,
both with the characterization and with the environment,
and with the number Be Prepared,
that's gonna be coming up, I think, in the next reel.
So, this area here and the casting of this area
was something where we wanted to
tip the hat to the original, but we felt that this was an area where
we needed to give ourselves the freedom to depart
creatively from what was there
to help serve the story and this particular project better.
And so you have Keegan-Michael Key here
paired up with Eric André, two very funny improvisers who,
if you see behind-the-scenes on this, this is probably the only time
they ever said it like this...
(LAUGHING) And they did about 25 different versions of this.
I had them together with JD, I believe.
I certainly had them together recording.
I tried to get the actors together as much as I could
so that the performances would feel...
There'd be more organic chemistry between them.
And I encouraged a lot of improvisation, especially for the comedy sequences.
So I hired people who had a improv background,
a comedy background, writing background.
And Eric and Keegan-Michael Key were
very much,
you know, creative collaborators. And here is Florence Kasumba,
who's a wonderful voice and performer, and a lot of this we also filmed.
We would film rehearsals, essentially.
We'd record the voices, and we would have a little black box theater,
and we would mic all of the actors so that we could use the sound,
but we would shoot video reference on long lenses.
And we would just have them
like... As though it were a theater rehearsal,
we would have them actually walk around holding their scripts
and performing together
to get that interactive energy
that would also contribute to the live-action feel.
That's how you would film a movie.
You would rehearse together, and you would do a master,
and you would do coverage.
And so I wanted to capture that interactive quality
that animated films often don't have
because they'll record people separately, usually.
Here, we tried to just record them in the most natural environment we could.
And I was there to help direct and oversee
if we wanted to depart from the script or try things.
You know, we would have Jeff Nathanson,
who wrote this version of the script around,
and he would react and offer suggestions, too.
(HYENAS GROWLING)
FAVREAU: And so now we're kind of getting back to where...
What was in the original film, because now you're getting into areas
that fit better and are very memorable
and are plot points for character progression.
So, this appearance of Mufasa,
and the roar.
And of course, now you have Hans Zimmer's themes come in again.
And the one thing I learned was
all this effort we put into the visual effects
and the performances and the casting and the environments, you know,
and here we were, everybody was really working at the top of their game.
But when you heard the score being recorded,
you realized that
the real thing that pulls you in emotionally
on these Disney classics, especially this one, is the music.
These songs are...
Somehow connect.
They're so emotionally evocative,
and they bring back all the memories of how you felt
when you were younger watching this. There's something about music,
especially music that's
so beautifully conceived as this and performed
that just taps directly into memory emotion.
And, you know, some of the stuff you'll see later on
that's the most emotional, really is just landing on an image,
letting the audience look at the image, and then letting the music just fill
the theater.
I was very grateful to have this, you know, classic score,
and the songs, too, of course,
which, you know, they really blend into one another.
But you have the songs where you have Elton John, Tim Rice, Lebo M,
and all of them were involved, along with Hans Zimmer, with this production.
And I found that as I approached people
who were involved with the original productions,
they were very...
The original held such a big place in their hearts
that everybody was extremely generous,
whether it was people who worked on the original film,
whether it was people who worked on this film,
or people that I just reached out to, to ask about what the experience was like,
what was important, what they cared about,
and I was really
impressed with how much people cared and how generous they were
with offering their advice and thoughts on it
because they had all lived with this, and it meant a lot to them,
and they knew how important it was to people who grew up watching this.
And so there was a tremendous responsibility that we all felt
to make sure that we took into account,
you know, all the various perspectives of people who cared about the original
and about this one.
And so we found that we had to fulfill people's expectations
and not let them down, make them understand
that we really cared about this movie as much as they did,
but also to change things and surprise people wherever possible.
But you're not scared of anything.
I was today.
You were?
Yes. I thought I might lose you.
FAVREAU: But a sequence like this is one of those where
you kind of wanna play it like how it is on the album,
(CHUCKLES)
to borrow from music.
When you play this song live, you want it to sound like on the album.
You don't wanna change the solo here.
You wanna stick to the same guitar solo,
and the music and the imagery and the stars and the dialogue
and the performances and James Earl Jones' voice.
And how important this scene is, how it sets up
the sad moments to come, and then the emotional, happier moments
where he's remembering and realizing
that his father really does live in him.
And, you know, I think it's one of those scenes that we all relate to,
you know, as anybody who's been through, who's experienced loss.
And you think back on a time before that,
and you have very vivid memories of those people in your life.
And a conversation that might've just been a casual conversation
takes on greater importance when you look back on it.
And I think that the original film and the people involved,
the filmmakers and the people performing the music,
writing the music, all really captured that so well there,
and hopefully, we captured it as well.
And now we get into Be Prepared.
And this was a song that we really wrestled with,
because we knew we wanted to have something
that referenced the original, but we weren't sure, at first,
whether we could have a whole song that was sung,
because up until this point,
everything else felt kind of justified in the reality of the tone of this.
But to have Scar break into song and sing it, and if you look
at the original lyrics, it doesn't really fit
with the way we've conceived the story this time.
And then, certainly, the environment,
the choreography doesn't feel like it fits into a live action,
a film that appears to be live action.
As we were wrestling whether we would include the song or not,
we reached out to Tim Rice.
First, to Hans, which was like,
"Hans, is there a version of this song that we could do that fits into ours,
"but still feels like the old one,
"that still kinda honors people's expectations and the original story?"
And then, certainly, in the Disney...
When you're doing a Disney movie, a villain song is a big, important part.
It's really when they lay their cards on the table.
And so, first, it was a monologue that was written by Jeff.
And then we started to say, "Well, could we do this with the song?"
And remember, in the old one, he already was conspiring with them.
In this one, he's presenting a scenario,
and he's pitching them on allying with him
in a conspiracy against Mufasa.
So, we switched it up enough.
I mean, unless you know the original movie well,
that might've slid by you,
but it's a slightly different plot point.
And so the lyrics in the original
reflected a much different relationship between Scar and the hyenas.
And so this was the remnants of the original monologue,
and then Hans built a whole musical take on this song,
which you're seeing here.
And then we approached Tim Rice
and asked if he would be open to reconceiving the lyrics of this song.
And so we showed him the movie, what we had, 'cause it was developing.
A lot of this was still in pencil at the time,
but we showed him what we had,
and he could not have been more collaborative,
and so he came up with this beautiful poetry.
And so it feels like the old Be Prepared,
but if you look in the credits, you'll see it's actually
Be Prepared, 2019 version.
And so it feels like Be Prepared,
but it actually deviates quite a bit.
And of course, the visuals deviate quite a bit as well.
(SINGING) Decades of denial Is simply why I'll
Be king Undisputed
Respected Saluted
And seen for the wonder I am
Yes, my teeth and ambitions are bared
Be prepared
- HYENAS: Be prepared - Be prepared
FAVREAU: This is one of the last sequences to be finished.
I love this type of lighting, too.
I think they talk about Gustave Doré, the artist.
You have that very dark foreground
and bright, deep backgrounds that create a very graphic quality.
And there's the imagery that we wanted to capture from the original.
So, even though we deviated quite a bit, we wanted the end of it to feel similar,
with the sliver of a moon,
the dark, starless sky going into the sun.
And now this is the scene
where
people start to get uncomfortable,
because if they've seen the old movie, they know what's coming here.
And this is one of the first scenes...
I mean, this is some of the first shots we rendered.
This sequence, certainly, the stampede was...
Even in the original film, the stampede was the sequence that took
the longest time, because it was early visual effects,
early computer sims to get all the stampeding wildebeests
to come down the cliff.
If you look here, you could see in the coverage
Simba looks a little different than the rest of the film.
You see little things, like the shape of the eyes.
So, even though we had an approved design of the character,
the character evolved quite a bit.
Scar stayed pretty much the same,
'cause you're talking about three years to make the movie,
about two years from the first render to the last render.
So, here's a little sequence that actually, I think...
This is one of those areas that people really remember the original,
because it's so emotional, this whole sequence coming up.
So, I believe there was, I remember...
We were constantly referencing the old film.
Even if we departed from it,
we wanted to remind ourselves what they did the first time around,
because it really holds up quite well,
and we knew that it was a movie that people knew very well,
and we wanted to make sure that we understood it
as well as the audience did,
and if we were gonna depart from it, we wanted to do it for a reason.
So, here, now you're getting into...
Although the shots are slightly different,
each story point is the same.
And the idea of the vibration and the movement,
and, you know,
arriving on this image because it has to be different from the original,
'cause it was so extreme in the original,
but you still wanted to get that energy and the same feel.
And again, a lot was... Rob Legato had worked on Apollo 13,
and in that film, he had recreated the...
This is my favorite sound moment, as it goes through that virtual camera.
We normally wouldn't have the camera be quite that free or fly that freely,
because that's a bit of a tell that it's a CG camera move.
We tended to want to keep it very grounded
in operating it, as though it were a real camera platform.
But that's one of the moments where we let ourselves go a little,
have a little fun with it,
'cause it actually brings a lot of energy if you do it.
But, here, that's a real dolly track that we had, and real camera operators.
So, those moves were real, you know, a dolly grip, a camera operator.
It was done as you would in live action, these moves, too.
But as I was saying before, Rob Legato had worked on Apollo 13,
and they recreated the launch.
And they looked at all the old television footage of the launch,
and all the cameras that they had for the original launch of the Apollo.
And then they...
The trick was that they could deviate from it. But you want...
Sometimes, when you deviate from it,
you do it in a way where people remember it differently,
and a lot of people who had been involved with the original Apollo
had asked where they got certain footage from
that they hadn't seen before, and he was like, "No, we recreated it."
I believe a lot of it was in miniatures and early CG.
And so sometimes,
our memories are not as photographic as we think.
And often, if you can capture the essence of what people remember
and the emotional memory,
you can actually take quite a bit of liberty with it
and still make it feel as though you're emulating, shot for shot,
what people are used to seeing.
So, again, this area should feel very close to shot for shot,
but if you actually ran it up against the other film,
you'd see we actually departed quite a bit
to help maintain
more of a plausibility.
I love the subtlety of all the performances, all the animators.
I think we lose sight often, because there's such a...
It's so fascinating to hear about the technology associated with this,
but you realize that these are handmade films,
where every single shot, you know, you have artists, dozens of artists,
whether it's environment designers or layout artists or animators,
technical directors overseeing the rendering,
people refining the lighting,
each of these is a handmade shot.
And this moment,
and just the human emotion in this sequence right here,
of the struggle to climb up the hill and how the rocks tumble down
and how the light, the backlight makes the fur glow,
and how the earth is colored there.
And how, you know, it's still graphic,
but still accurate to what is really there,
the way the camera is moving around, the emotion in the face of young Simba.
Even though he can't frown,
even though he can't make a face to see so much expression.
And of course, the music.
You realize that this is a really supremely human medium.
(GROWLS)
(ROARS)
Long live the king!
(MUFASA SCREAMING)
FAVREAU: And of course, because it's so photorealistic,
we wanted to capture the images people remember,
but also it's...
There's definitely a greater intensity to it,
that we wanted to make sure that we would capture the emotion
without being too graphic or seeing anything actually happen,
which is kind of a Disney tradition as well,
but we felt it was even more important here,
and so we were very careful about...
And this was the sequence coming up right here
that I was most concerned about.
And part of... One of the big reasons I wanted to hire Caleb is
I knew that with
such an accomplished and talented photographer,
you can have an image like this
that relies more on the lighting and composition.
And we actually stay very long on a long lens like this for a long time.
And of course, the music comes in
and really fills the whole thing out.
And when I took on this job,
I wasn't thinking about how much I would have to watch this sequence.
And it's not like it diminishes at all.
I love how the animators did this,
'cause there's no...
They didn't create a human performance on Simba's face,
yet you feel tremendous emotion.
And being in the recording studio at Sony with the full orchestra
and hearing them play this piece while the footage
played overhead on the screen was so powerful.
One of the things Hans Zimmer did,
because he wanted to differentiate this from the original recording,
where he felt...
At the time, when they were making the original Lion King,
it was not the classic that it is now.
There wasn't a lot of time or resources to get it right.
And so, often times, on a film like that,
you always feel like you're rushing at times,
or sometimes compromising what you'd like to explore
if you had more resources.
And so when they came together to do this,
Hans was like, "Let me really get in there and fill out the orchestra
"in the way that I didn't have the opportunity to do before
"and let me take everything I've learned
"in these last 25 years and apply it to this."
And one of the things that he had learned was that if you have a...
Because he's toured with an orchestra and done his scores on the road.
And it's a very powerful production,
if you ever have the opportunity to see one of Hans Zimmer's live shows.
Not only does he have so many...
I mean, Lion King is just one of his very prolific catalogue.
But hearing it played live with a band
that has rehearsed it is much different than...
It's a much different energy
than just an orchestra recording for the first time.
And so Hans Zimmer brought the whole orchestra together
and rehearsed them for close to a week,
and when we actually recorded the score,
he invited everybody who worked on the movie to come.
And we set up chairs,
and they were actually in the room with the musicians.
And so you had the musicians meeting the people who made the visual images
and the people who created the visual imagery able to be there,
while they handed this project off to the musicians,
and they got to be in the room.
And the orchestra played the entire score
with only short enough breaks to change reels,
and they had been rehearsing it.
And so we were seeing a live production of the score of The Lion King there,
and it was incredibly moving.
It's moving anyway, but being in the room,
where the air's moving around and the performers are there,
and you're seeing them actually play their instruments,
and it's just an experience I'll never forget.
And we were all very grateful to Hans Zimmer
for having the insight to create that,
and I think it's reflected in...
You could feel it, as you hear his recordings here,
how much he cared and how hard the musicians worked to rehearse,
and the energy and the heart that's in all of these musical performances.
Again, another theme. What's so wonderful about this score
is that here you have the theme played
in such a lonely, sad way with the flute,
but when played with the full orchestra, could feel extremely triumphant,
and each of the themes is really inspired,
and then the choirs that come in and support it,
and all of the voices, just so strong.
We have both American choirs and African choirs.
Lebo M recorded a lot of the choirs, both in South Africa and also here.
And Lebo was also just a wonderful person to collaborate with,
again giving insight into the story, what the words meant,
what it was like when they made the original.
It was around the time that Mandela...
There was a lot going on in South Africa.
Mandela was freed. There was a tremendous sense of hope.
And a lot of the music,
a lot of the energy of the music of the original Lion King,
as it was explained to me, was really an expression of a time
of positive transformation in that country.
And it was an expression of that.
And I think that the original film really captured
an intersection of so many different factors
that contributed to this thing that really feels timeless,
and the music and the introduction to those voices
was a big part of it.
The artistry of the filmmakers and the timeless story,
the way that the story came together that was a reflection
of not just Lion King, but of Hamlet, and stories,
even myths that came before.
It really hit it right.
And I think that as much as it's part of a Disney tradition,
it's also something that feels like it's...
That was part of something tapped into something even larger.
And that's part of why it holds up so well.
And of course, the stage production has been drawing audiences
and packing houses for decades now.
And that's also a huge legacy.
And what's interesting is the stage show is,
although it's Lion King, it's quite different.
It's quite different from the film,
and that's part of what gave us confidence that we might be able
to do something here, because the stage production is still seen as Lion King,
and we felt that if we could create something that felt like
it was yet another medium,
like a live-action documentary take on the film.
If we could emulate that feel,
it would feel like yet another interpretation of the story.
So, you see a simple shot like that is one where you have the technical,
like, all of the beautiful sand simulations, of blowing in the wind.
You have the flute player. You have Hans' score.
You have Andy Jones' animation.
Hans' interpretation of that cue.
And all of it just works together to make you feel something,
which is I think what people enjoy the most about Lion King,
is how much of an emotional ride they go on here.
And of course, here, there's our Lawrence of Arabia shot.
We looked at that.
That reflective sand.
I really like this sequence.
And this, whether it's in the movie or the play,
you're so ready for these guys to show up.
You got Billy Eichner, and you got Seth Rogen here.
Two of the hardest working people in show business.
Although we recorded them live,
we recorded them in the recording studio with Donald.
But they kept coming in, because I knew people who are comedy writers,
they don't like to put their pencils down.
(LAUGHS) They keep going.
And my thing was like, "I'll work on it as much as you want to,"
and so they would record. We would edit it down.
We would lay it up against pencils. They'd come back in.
They'd watch it.
Billy, especially, would be like, "I think I could...
"Let me take another crack at this."
And so I held off as much as I could into the animation of the mouths.
And eventually, you know, we finalized everything,
but we kept trying to beat what we had.
And that's what's great about hiring people who could improvise,
who could write and perform and sing, in this case, especially Billy.
Everybody was very impressed with what a beautiful voice Billy has.
You know, it's an important part of the movie,
and you got big shoes to fill with these characters,
and so I was really proud how they made it their own.
They didn't try to just emulate what had been done before.
As good as it was, they found their own interpretation.
That also worked with a less cartoony, physical performance,
'cause these are two characters
where the animators took a lot of liberty with their performances.
So, I just find these guys really funny.
But you know what you can change?
The future. That's our specialty.
Kind of our thing.
FAVREAU: And so the look of the film changes a little bit here.
We get that nice, sunny look and blue sky.
And I love all the little...
We knew that once we had the performances down vocally...
Then I worked with Andy Jones,
trying to figure out how could we embellish all the little things
without distracting from their dialogue.
And so you see it a lot with Timon.
You see him chasing that little bug around or picking lice out of his hair.
All these little things really add to the performance, I think.
And it's one of those situations where...
Like this little thing here. (LAUGHING)
I like the little guy bossing the big guy around.
And he tries to be pushy, but he's too little.
And also 'cause he's so little, it gives you permission
for him to be a little more aggressive and get away with something
that would bump a little more
if the bigger character was doing it.
(CHUCKLES) But this little guy, he's all tough.
He's a little powerhouse.
And there's the look, and this was inspired by James Chinlund,
felt that the cloud forests were...
He researched those and took a lot of photography on safari,
and we pulled a lot of photographic reference back in,
because this look felt like it fit with what's in the old movie,
but didn't break the reality of trying to keep it naturalistic.
This next little sequence I'm very proud of.
Here's where we could depart in a way that I thought was fun,
'cause I think they used the regular Pumbaa for the flashback.
We found a little...
On the Internet, there's a little picture
of a little baby warthog. (CHUCKLES)
It was the cutest thing, and I brought it in, and I was like,
"We gotta have this in the movie."
And I love a good flatulence joke.
I liked the little guy.
I liked him so much we brought him back at the end for the curtain call.
I like how they all run away. He's ashamed.
And that was based on some drawings that Dave Lowery,
our head of story, did.
He started little drawings with a little butterfly falling into the water.
And we had him sing "farted."
I thought that's one thing we could...
2019, we could say "farted."
Kids are ready. They're mature now.
With the Internet, they know what farting is.
And here's a really nice... This took a long time to get this reveal right,
'cause you had to catch them singing the end of this verse,
and then reverse and see it.
I love the way the mist flies.
That's a really nice water sim there, from the waterfall in the foreground.
And that little Garden of Eden, and all these great little characters.
There's Amy Sedaris.
That's Chance, Chance the Rapper in there.
- (GASPS) - TIMON: Here we go.
Uh, no, no, no, kid, we're fresh out of zebra.
Any antelope?
FAVREAU: Yeah, a lot of these are Chance, actually. (LAUGHS)
He's playing about 50 different animals.
And there's Josh. (CHUCKLES) That's JD's brother,
who was really good as the elephant shrew.
This was the last shot that was finished for the film, for trivia fans.
And there's the bugs. We never knew what the bugs were gonna be like.
Like, we're looking at all the turntables of the bug designs,
and we're like, "This could be really disgusting."
I like that. "They're local." I think that was an improv line.
And we just mixed and matched everything.
That's a really good little model.
That's great. I like how it's squirming around.
It really got it. It captured what was in the original.
It's fun. It's gross.
It's not too gross where it looks like...
Where it looks like, you know,
looks like a big
thing of maggots.
And it's very colorful.
And now, well, we had to get this shot.
And how do you get it?
I mean, look at this silhouette shot with the edge of the moon burning away.
And there we go. Oh, now I know I'm okay.
Whenever I'm watching a screening, I know when I hear Donald Glover
sing this, I know I'm good now,
because
he's got such a great energy, and the animators really captured it.
But I love hearing his voice, and he just is like...
After what everybody's been through emotionally in the movie,
and then you get to this part, and you hear Donald singing this,
and them just all frolicking in the forest together.
It's one of my... As a filmmaker,
I love when I get to this part of the movie,
'cause I know that the energy of the film is changing.
And this little improvised walk away is, of course,
cut and pasted from whatever dozen times we did that.
And now we get back to the drought,
echoing the shots from the original sequence.
The circle of life, it's like the shadow version of circle of life.
When you don't...
When you don't
participate responsibly.
When the king is not in tune with
the past and the future.
And when they over-hunt the lands.
And here's our introduction of Beyoncé.
Gave her a nice movie star reveal there, nice turn around and rack.
And here's Alfre Woodard.
Trouble with the... Even in the original film,
the lionesses are designed very similarly.
They don't have too many things that distinguish them from one another.
And so it's a good thing we have very distinct voices,
(LAUGHING) but there's a lot of
people saying each other's names when they talk to them
to try to help.
"Nala." "Yes, Sarabi."
People don't do that in real life,
but it's one of things where we do. Here's a nice little
slo-mo shot.
Again, something you would do in a...
Documentaries, they rarely go 24 frames.
Or, I guess, video it's 30.
But they rarely go 100% speed.
They usually slow things down a little bit
to help create more of an anthropomorphic look.
And so, close-ups, if you look closely at documentaries,
they're often slowed down a little bit just to give a little bit more
of a contemplative look and make it...
Their emotions feel a bit more human,
and so we snuck that in whenever we could.
We slightly did speed changes,
again, as you would do in a documentary to help
the lions feel a little bit... There's a little more subtext.
The king wishes to see you.
FAVREAU: So, this is not...
I don't think this scene exists in the original.
But it's a little bit... We wanted to fill out
the characters of Nala and Sarabi more.
Actually, there was a bit of a...
This was inspired by outtakes
from the original film and from what's in the show.
But in the show, he's... Scar is interested in Nala,
which we didn't want to pursue.
But instead felt that him pursuing Sarabi
felt like it was connected
a bit more to what's going on in Hamlet.
Which was often...
People draw inspiration...
People draw a connection between Lion King and Hamlet
for story inspiration.
And so as we were looking how to dimensionalize the story more
and these characters, the sense that Scar might be seeking out...
That he felt jealous of Sarabi,
that Sarabi had been Mufasa's queen, and that he's...
It added another emotional dimension that was much more specific.
And again, Nala escaped, I believe,
if I have this right, Nala escaped in the stage production
after Scar pursues her.
But in this case, we made it Sarabi
and it felt a bit more like Hamlet's storyline
with his mother and uncle and his father, who had been
murdered.
So, here we have Nala escapes.
And this is really interesting because it's a night shoot.
This, by the way, looks particularly good in extended dynamic range,
and in 3D. It's a very beautiful movie in 3D.
And so this was a sequence where,
again, there's not a lot of dialogue, so everything's about the animators
and about the virtual camera work
to get the camera moves just right. So this was a bit more of...
This area's sort of like
a thriller,
the tension.
Telling a story through movement of the cameras there, dolly moves.
And so this was... Again, the visual storytelling here
is more closely akin to what you would have in
just figuring out... Working out a scene on the set,
using the camera and the actors and telling the story through shots.
And this is something that...
This creative process really emulated what it felt like to be
on a live-action film set.
Even though, again, we were looking at pre-animated lions,
but the iterative process where we would
collaborate, try things, look at it,
you know, adjust it.
Because no matter how well a movie is scripted
or how much shots are planned,
sequences like this, where you're trying to tell a story visually,
you're kind of feeling your way through it together as a group.
And you can only plan so much, and this virtual camera arrangement
really allowed for us to have that kind of collaborative conversation,
whereas in a traditionally animated film
you'd have a director or somebody who's a layout artist
who would design all the camera moves ahead of time
and then put them all together,
and hopefully, they would work and maybe you would go back and adjust them.
Here, it felt more like we were
playing with a LEGO set, like it feels on a real movie.
Everybody's kind of rolling their sleeves up
and coming up with ideas and trying things.
The difference, of course, was that we would never run out
of daylight or night. (LAUGHS)
The sun would never come up and end our day.
We could always go back and work on it again.
And again here, so that we know,
(CHUCKLING) Sarabi has to say "Nala" so you know who left.
I was always concerned about that,
that you'd lose track.
'Cause I'm the worst when it comes to that stuff when I'm watching a movie.
(CHUCKLING) So I tried to make it a little easier for people like me
who can't keep track of everything.
So this is nice 'cause this should hopefully feel
like it's right out of a documentary.
And there we go, that long lens photography,
and then we break all that tension.
Simba! It's you! (SIGHS IN RELIEF)
Did you see that?
Man, that butterfly was right there!
I almost had him.
I thought it was a lion.
(STAMMERS) You know, the other kind of lion.
FAVREAU: Phil LaMarr.
Great voice actor.
Samurai Jack.
Actually,
Marvin from Pulp Fiction.
(CHUCKLES) Here's the whole circle of life.
They came up with this. This is, I think, a lot of this
was based on improvisation.
"It's not a circle, it's a line.
(LAUGHING)
"It's not a circle. What are you talking about, a circle?
"No circle, it's just a line."
So this really... A lot of this came out of, was inspired by stuff
when we had a scene written, but they...
So some of this was improv,
and then we would write it, and then we would go back
and do it again, and improv again.
And then all the visuals had to be designed by the story department, too.
So even though they're talking about these existential issues,
you have all the fun, more bugs.
'Cause we added more scenes, so we had to kind of...
If we added more scenes back, we wanted to expand
on the storyline of what's happening back in the Pride Lands,
then we had to add more stuff here, too.
Let me simplify this for you.
- Life is meaningless. - PUMBAA: Yes.
That's why you just gotta look out for yourself.
That's why you do you, Simba.
FAVREAU: So, this is really kind of a downbeat to the scene that follows,
which, I think, is from the original.
For sure, it's from the original 'cause they...
I think you cut to them
after they've eaten all the bugs.
And they're looking up at the stars and talking about
the balls of burning gas. That was definitely from the original production.
So, again, having really talented performers who could do...
Who could make it funny but also getting into some, you know...
Kind of what the theme of the movie is. Like, is it about...
Is it that you shouldn't worry?
You know, sometimes it is.
But sometimes, you could take that too far.
And the idea that Nala shows up and says, "Hey, we need you.
"You're more powerful than you think.
"We need you to be responsible.
"The rest of us need you."
And so it's sort of that balancing act,
where sometimes in life, things are too heavy.
And you gotta... You need people who can take your mind off of it,
but after a while, you gotta get back in it.
You can't check out.
We need you out here.
And so, right here, this is one of those memorable moments
where we kind of stuck to what was there.
It's interpreted by the performers,
and there's sort of a naturalism and casualness to it
and there might be a little bit of improv or rewrites here and there,
but it's essentially the same old scene.
'Cause it's so important thematically, he's remembering when the dad said,
"Hey, the kings are up there looking down on you."
And, you know, he's...
They're making fun of him because
it doesn't logically make sense, but in his heart he does feel that.
And so for the theme of the film, this is such an important scene.
That it isn't all meaningless,
and that there is... There is something bigger going on.
There's a circle of life that he has,
if he wants to be king, he has to protect and participate in.
But right now he's sort of...
Something in him is telling him that there's more to this
and his father's words, you know,
are there deep down, and they come out.
(CHUCKLES) And I like this little scene here.
This is sort of improvised,
but I like that it shows that they really care about him,
that they feel bad about laughing at him.
In the old movie they just laugh at him. Here, they actually feel bad.
Shows that they're good friends.
And in this sequence here...
So in the old movie, it was like there was a little bit of wisp
of something that came off of him and landed,
and I think Rafiki smells it.
And this was an opportunity to... 'Cause it wouldn't work as it was.
And so the idea came of maybe we could have something
that really leans into that kind of documentary-style exploration.
But also re-enforces that the circle of life
actually works in a way that
where there's some forces that are moving, that are...
That there's some hand of some divine spirit that's...
That helps the circle of life continue.
And the idea that all these little creatures and the wind
and the birds and the insects,
and all of it.
So, it's not just blowing in the wind, but there's some chain...
Some, like, bucket brigade
of all the citizens
of the circle of life are somehow magically getting there.
And just to be able... We didn't even know if this would work,
if you'd be able to follow this or people would understand it.
It's not from the old film.
But we drew it and we tried it,
and then the giraffe eats it.
And you think it's over.
But you can't stop the circle of life that easy.
Here... I think this was...
There's some great documentary stuff of dung beetles.
I think Microcosmos, I think that was one of the films that had it.
But could we visually, actually, make you see that in there
and connect visually that that's the same fur?
And we knew if it didn't work, we could always just cut it down
and make it that the fur flies, and then ends up
at Rafiki's tree, and it would be similar to what they had,
but we really wanted to try to make this work,
and it's one of the moments I really enjoy the most.
And I like when we showed the movie to Elton John, he...
Of course, I'm a life-long fan.
And that he picked this sequence out
after he'd seen the film.
Of all the things that he's worked on in it and everything,
for him to pick this out and say
that he really connected with it
made me very proud. That's when we knew we pulled it off.
'Cause here was somebody who didn't know that we were planning this
and watched it in the context of the film and felt that
it fit in with what he had...
What they had created 25 years ago,
that he felt that it fit
into the story that he was such a big part of.
And I love
just the eyes of that render of how Rafiki looks.
And then we're back in the old movie, how the old movie plays it out,
and there's the theme.
There's the theme, so triumphantly played and the choir singing it.
That's the same theme that's played on the flute
when Simba is alone, wandering off into the desert.
And I love the way that Hans Zimmer is able to
pull, make a theme sound triumphant
in one circumstance and one instrumentation,
and then feel really lonely and alone and isolated.
And I love this.
I love parrots. That's African grey parrots. Well done.
Here was another area we wanted to expand on what was there originally.
Which is, I think it's just a bit of a throwaway.
And when I saw it on stage and I saw it in the movie,
it's kind of like a laugh at first.
But then we wanted... It was an area where we could expand out.
And we give this to Pharrell.
Hans Zimmer brought Pharrell in.
It was one of the first things he worked on,
and so he developed a track for it and a take on it
and all the different animals chiming in.
And we had Chance. There's Chance the Rapper.
He was there, singing.
Little hooks. They put it all together.
I don't know how they do it. They're like alchemists,
putting it all together.
But I love the bopping along
and how it's sort of a little bit of a nod to Steamboat Willie.
That was the first thing that set Walt Disney's work apart,
was how they would coordinate. Look how, even today,
when you coordinate picture to the soundtrack,
when you lock those together, there's something really
fulfilling about it, there's something satisfying.
And then just as you get into it, boom, we go right into... (LAUGHING)
Now, this hopefully looks like just a straight-up documentary.
We looked at all the documentaries. We looked at Apocalypto.
I think that's a shot from Apocalypto there.
But just all that off-speed stuff, that slo-mo,
and of course, just throwing in Seth Rogen screaming, always good.
Never hurts.
And Billy Eichner screaming, too.
Pumbaa?
I'm gonna die! (YELLING)
FAVREAU: And this we shot with virtual cameras
and we picked a path, and then we built an environment around it.
Very technical. This was a very challenging sequence
and of course, to get all that lighting
to look naturalistic but still beautiful.
All that dapple in those environments.
No!
FAVREAU: And this. I think this works really well.
And this animation, I think, is fantastic.
'Cause this stuff's very hard to do right, to get the physics right
'cause your mind, you just know.
Your eye will tell you it's wrong, but by having this camera-work
and having these foreground elements moving around,
all of it work together to make it feel like you're watching real lions.
And of course, then we get back to the pinning him down moment
like they did when they were little.
And here's Simba and Nala reunited,
except now, it's Donald Glover and Beyoncé.
Nala, what're you doing? Oh, my...
NALA: I don't believe it!
SIMBA: Look at you!
FAVREAU: And then,
you let the funny guys do their thing.
We wrote them stuff, we pulled stuff in from the old one,
but they are super funny and so quick.
(LAUGHING) What fun!
FAVREAU: (LAUGHING) I love...
I don't know if people know... I mean, from this they'll know him.
I think he'll have a whole new audience,
but his kind of persona that he developed
from Billy on the Street,
which I was a fan of for a long time, makes me laugh,
and then to plug him in as this guy, I think it really worked well.
TIMON: King? Simba?
FAVREAU: And I love...
In this scene and especially in the scene
after Can You Feel the Love Tonight,
and this whole run with Beyoncé is like...
Really infuses the film with this whole other level.
Just the curiosity of people hearing
how they're gonna both interpret the song together 'cause everybody...
Their voices are so...
Everybody loves their music.
And to hear this old classic done and interpreted
by these talented singers
is part of what people love from, like...
When you hear somebody... Somebody's gonna do a...
Where they're gonna do a revival of a Broadway classic,
and then you hear who's gonna be in the cast,
and part of it is, "I want to hear how they interpret that role
"and those songs."
And so that's part of the fun for me of this area.
And it's one of the reasons that it feels like, you know...
The question is always why...
Is there room to do enough that you should do the movie again?
Is it time for another version of this? 'Cause the old one still is so good.
And sequences like this where it feels like
we're capturing the spirit of it, but there's a lot of difference.
And the imagery from the old film
was a very heightened reality.
You can't have them splashing and swimming at a swimming hole.
And if you look at it shot for shot, it doesn't translate well.
But there are a few moments like this
we could kind of capture it.
Part of what
made me confident that we could accomplish this in this way
was that a lot of the songs like this, they're not actually singing on screen
in the original. It's in the score.
And so you're not forced to have the mouths form the phonemes
and the shapes to have them singing throughout,
so you can go for a much more naturalistic sequence montage.
And then we knew we had to get...
We had to get the close-up of Nala here.
There you go.
And MPC really pulled off that waterfall.
I get scared of waterfalls as a director.
Whenever we say, "We're gonna make the waterfall look great,"
that's one of those things that takes a lot
of artistry and craftsmanship to do.
And you never know till the end if it's gonna work out.
And so, you know, we've worked together for so many years now.
I'm like, "Look, can we really pull this off?"
And Adam Valdez was like, "Yeah, I think we can pull it off.
"I think you're gonna like it."
And that's one of those things where you're looking at
a temp effect for two years. And then, finally,
something pops up, and you're like, "Okay,
"this is pretty good. You were right."
This is some of my... I don't know why this little shot
is some of my favorite animation in the whole film.
Something about Seth's voice and Billy's voice,
and then I love how he stretches out. I have pets,
and I got a dog that does this,
that little... (CHUCKLES) Move his little paw back.
I don't know. There's something about that that's fantastic,
and those water sims. Look how good those water sims are.
That's so good.
That sort of slow-moving brook.
That's not something that was able to be done that long ago.
That's really part of the magic.
And this is a great little scene here, man. I love this scene.
And I love the message of it.
If there's one scene that really captures the theme of the film,
and to have these two actors perform it like this
and bring so much feeling to it,
even though it's animals that aren't really giving you a lot visually,
as far as meaning and emotion.
You know, so it's the camerawork,
and it's the writing and it's the performance.
NALA: Scar told us that...
You wouldn't understand!
FAVREAU: And he doesn't want to face it.
What?
It's something I learned out here, okay?
You see, sometimes bad things happen,
and there's nothing you can do about it.
FAVREAU: I like her here. "Why worry?"
What happened to you?
You're not the Simba I remember.
FAVREAU: You know, and now I'm a parent.
I have three kids that are almost all grown up.
And, you know, as a parent, there's a balance.
You want to teach them not to worry too much
and you want to teach them that you gotta step up sometimes.
And, you know, "We need you."
And so this is a nice scene that sort of captures the conundrum
that we all face, of when do you...
When are you not acting 'cause you're scared or 'cause you're lazy?
When are you not doing it 'cause it's the right thing?
That's a very good story,
and I say the good story dating back to the original
that they really caught something and captured it.
And we just really tried to preserve it.
And I love that dropping down into the forest,
if you're going deep, deep, deep down into
your inner workings.
And you look at scenes like this, and we really wanted to
keep true to the tropes. You know, you think of, like,
Empire Strikes Back
and Dagobah,
you know, Yoda teaching Luke.
And here you have Rafiki,
John Kani, the great John Kani, South African actor, who...
While we were working together, he was in...
Black Panther came out as we were working on this,
and he's in that and plays...
He plays T'Challa's father and just was really good in that, too.
So, American audiences have gotten to know John Kani,
but he's been a real fixture
as a South African actor for a long time.
And here we have a mixture of Xhosa,
mixing the language with English.
He died a long time ago.
He's alive!
FAVREAU: And so John Kani would... We'd give him what we wrote,
and a lot of it was based on what was in the original film.
We definitely made him more of a mentor-type figure,
and he's comic relief to some extent,
but really wanted to give him more of a strong mentor presence.
And really good work here, this is one of the later scenes.
But getting this camerawork and these environments
using the tools that we had, the virtual camera tools,
a little bit tricky 'cause those environments aren't really there.
They're there on the screen,
but they're not there on the stage where we're moving the cameras around.
But I think that the balance between
Rob and Caleb and Adam and Andy,
I think it really feels still
like the camera's really moving through a real forest here.
And the music, of course, is great, the percussion.
And then, boom,
it's really cool.
And now here is the scene.
This is some of the last stuff to come in, and we had artwork,
and we had different interpretations.
How are we gonna make the father appear in the clouds?
We knew we needed it.
But these are two sight gags here,
one is the reflection changing, which we found that by changing lighting,
which is kind of an old trick that they did
in the old movies, when something would transform,
the old werewolf movies, sometimes would be a light cue.
So, allowed us to distinguish between
Simba and Mufasa,
and actually make it look like a transformation happens.
And then, of course, you have James Earl Jones' voice
and the music, which gets you most of the way there.
But then these cloud sims and the lightning,
and how literal would you make it?
And how much would you make it like you think you're seeing it?
And so there were some early drawings where you have
the internal illumination,
making out pieces of the eyes and the nose.
So, it's kind of there.
And it's more there as the scene goes on.
MUFASA: You must remember who you are.
The one true king.
FAVREAU: Again, hopefully capturing the spirit of the original
but not pushing it so far
'cause when you look at the original trying to draw inspiration,
it was really like glowing, you know,
a lion sitting up there with beams of light coming out of them.
I thought it felt too stylized for us.
And so I think it was done tastefully.
Anytime you're working with... You have animators
and people working on simulations like clouds,
it's always difficult because you're trying to coordinate
groups that work differently to try to tell one story.
And I think the lighting and the color of the sky really helps
and the dawn breaking and the stars going away.
And the clouds dissipating, him feeling alone
but yet feeling his father's with him.
And of course, what a wonderful message
that he lives in you.
And that's a song from the show
and from one of the inspired-by albums from the time.
He Lives In You. And in the end credits,
Lebo performs He Lives In You as the second end credit song.
And here is roaring, and here is the song Spirit,
performed by Beyoncé.
This is a song that wasn't in the original film.
There's Lebo singing, Lebo M bringing in the choir.
This is, I think, the only song in the film that wasn't in the original.
And it fits over this really beautiful montage,
and I think captures the emotion of the moment.
It's a little thing,
but that simulation of the dust, of the sand flying,
that backlit sand is so well done,
and it's those little details that we concentrate on
that actually contribute to the feeling of the movie.
It's those little details.
And of course, you lay the music over it and it brings it all to life.
And you think of classics like The Right Stuff
and Black Stallion that Caleb Deschanel lit.
You see that aesthetic.
It's so interesting watching him carry that aesthetic
over into a situation where he could move the sun wherever he wants it,
and you can manipulate the environment.
You're not just selecting from something that's there.
It's interesting watching that aesthetic carry through into this technology.
And here we go. We're back.
Now we're in the part of the movie where
the big fight's about to happen.
Again, taking an environment that was already designed,
trying to keep it photo-real,
but trying to make it look like it's desolate.
And so a little bit's the bones, a little bit's the dryness...
The color palette, the lighting, the skies.
If I don't fight for it, who will?
I will.
It's going to be dangerous.
Danger? Ha!
I laugh in the face of danger.
FAVREAU: And then we have Zazu coming back.
And I think this is all basically...
I mean, although the dialogue's a bit different,
I think it's the same story point as in the original.
Showing up, regrouping,
the comic relief, "the backup has arrived."
The backup has arrived!
What are you guys doing here?
- Um, we were not worried! - Um... No, not worried.
FAVREAU: Pay off the...
Even they've come around, see?
Even they don't believe in...
They believe in the circle of life, too.
I like it. They act like they don't care,
but really they're good friends.
And deep down they feel a sense of shared responsibility, too.
(CHUCKLING) I like that little piece of animation where he knocks him over.
Yes, Timon. This is my home.
Is it behind that terrifying rock?
FAVREAU: Yeah, that was it.
Improv line.
(CHUCKLES) I like that one.
This is an improv line, too.
"Puffin."
I figure a puffin would be good for the fans of Elf,
the arctic puffin.
I don't know. Maybe that's why I thought of saying "puffin."
That's a bonus question.
Here we go.
End of the reel.
End of the fifth reel,
slobbering guards.
This is basically from the original.
Live bait.
FAVREAU: These types of gags are so hard.
There, it's all timing.
The animators timing, Seth's timing,
the editing.
Why is everyone looking at me?
FAVREAU: And here's our...
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
FAVREAU: ...little tip of the hat to Beauty and the Beast.
I noticed in the stage show they poke fun at Frozen,
which was another Broadway production.
So, here, we give a little nod to Beauty and the Beast,
another classic animated film turned live action.
There we go.
Oh, now it's gonna happen.
Now, we couldn't have Rafiki walking around with a stick the whole time
because they just don't really do that.
It would have looked fake.
But he had to have a stick for the fight,
so we figured he kept it hidden.
I'm curious if people get that when we see it with an audience,
(LAUGHING) if people remember the stick.
It's like his lightsaber.
And so now we get back into...
Now we're getting back to the part of the movie
where everybody remembers every shot.
So, we had to be very careful when we deviated and for what reason.
I am ten times the king Mufasa was!
You are nothing compared to Mufasa!
(GROWLING)
FAVREAU: So, here's... Here comes Simba breaking up the fight,
and they have to mistake him for Mufasa at first.
It can't be.
Get away from my mother.
FAVREAU: That's a new line.
Then she recognizes him, too.
You're alive?
How can that be?
I'm here, Mother.
I'm home.
SCAR: Simba...
I'm so happy to see you.
FAVREAU: So, again, the themes are paying off now,
the musical themes.
You see...
they think I'm king.
FAVREAU: And now here is...
Beyoncé comes in.
Simba is the rightful king!
FAVREAU: So, all of this was inspired also
by seeing her performing live, and there's that call and response.
And just the way he or she...
The stage presence that Nala has
you know, all looking at Beyoncé as a performer,
just trying to carry some of that
energy into it.
And the idea that they're all behind her, all the lionesses.
So you haven't told them your little secret?
Well, Simba...
now's your chance to confess.
FAVREAU: And this gets into a part...
This is another little solve that we have
'cause he gets Scar to admit it,
that he... Like, confess to everything.
And we thought it might be fun if Sarabi figures it out
because he's... Even though he would tell Simba that just to mess with him.
Once Simba gets the upper hand,
instead of Scar admitting that he did it to everybody
that Sarabi would figure it out
by an inconsistency in his story,
which in this case is...
"You said you didn't get to the gorge in time.
"Then how did you see the look in his eye?"
And realizes that there's a gap in his alibi.
And this stuff was really hard, too, to get right for the animators
because you want that image of him hanging on.
But it takes a lot of doing to get the physics right
and it to feel natural without it feeling just like it's a cartoon
with a guy hanging from his nails from a branch or a tree.
And so the design of the surface and how it's covered
and how the animators performed it, the angles of the camera,
what you're seeing, what you're not seeing,
to feel like it's as precarious as it was for Mufasa at the canyon.
And I think this is really nice animation when he tells him.
There's a little bit of expression in the eyes.
And then the lighting with the fire light when he says, "I killed Mufasa."
Right there.
Look at the way
the eyelid picks up just slightly exposing the pupil and the iris.
It's really nice, subtle work.
And we flashback and then...
And using that bite to help justify why he's pulled out.
Now, the fires building up on the flashback.
We're able to cut to later.
All the sparks.
Rob Legato's big... 'Cause in 3D, the sparks look so good
moving around in The Volume.
That's true!
Then how did you see the look in Mufasa's eyes?
Murderer!
FAVREAU: Here we go.
Beyoncé calls in the cavalry here.
Boom.
Here's the...
Now, we're getting into
the territory where you want to have energy and power,
but you also don't want it to be too graphic.
And so the lighting helps. The silhouettes help. The energy helps.
There's a certain degree of intensity, but never...
You know, we avoid showing bloodshed,
keeping it more suggested than actually shown.
Here we go. That's J. Lee.
And we changed this one, too,
'cause "He called me Mr. Pigs,"
I think is the joke from the old one. It felt a little...
It didn't feel contemporary. (CHUCKLES)
But I also like the idea
of him standing up after he doesn't want to be shamed.
That he's proud.
He doesn't want to be bullied around. It's a good message.
(FAVREAU CHUCKLES)
That was something, we were coming up with different versions of that.
And we gave that one to Seth. I said, "Try this one,"
and he came up with the wording of it.
But...
He was like, "It's a good thing to say, man.
"I wish I said it when I was little." (LAUGHING)
And I love here that she's standing up to Shenzi,
that Nala when she was getting picked on when she was little.
Now she's not little anymore.
I got him! I got him!
FAVREAU: When you're little, you're scared of things.
You get older, you realize you're not so little anymore.
- KAMARI: Get that bird! - (ZAZU GRUNTS)
FAVREAU: Oh, this.
Here we go, and now we got...
So Rafiki in the old one did a lot of martial arts here.
We couldn't quite go that far,
but we figured you give him the stick back.
He could at least... More like 2001 than The Matrix.
But I think it does the job.
(HYENAS WHINING)
(GRUNTS, YELLS)
That never gets old!
(BOTH GRUNTING)
FAVREAU: And that sort of curtain of fire behind them
is something that was very much inspired by the animated film.
As she takes care of...
Hopefully, you know it's Shenzi.
Again, tough in the dark to tell the different animals,
which character is which.
But that's Scar,
and now they're being chased off the rock there.
They've vanquished the hyenas.
And there we go.
Now we all know. We all know where this is going.
This is, again, very memorable from the old film.
So we wanted to try
to capture a lot of the same images.
We even tried some of the stuttery slow motion
when he's fighting Scar 'cause that's what they had in the original.
It just didn't feel right.
But we tried it. We rendered it that way.
That kind of, like, the stutter frames.
It was a nice reference back, but it didn't feel right in the movie.
But we kept the sparks being kicked up in his face.
Wherever we could, we tried to really stay
as close to these moments as we could.
This is one of those memorable sequences where people
remember them clashing.
No, Scar.
I'm not like you.
FAVREAU: And this whole sequence here, this fight,
so we decided that we were gonna use a Steadicam,
and we had built tools that would be fake Steadicams,
but none of them had the right feel,
and we actually brought in a Steadicam operator
who used his full Steadicam rig,
like, weighted as though it was a real camera,
even though we didn't need a camera.
We just had a positional data puck on top
that we could read the position of.
So all we needed was one little thing that weighs three ounces
to track the movement.
But to get the proper feeling of a Steadicam,
we weighted it and actually were in The Volume
in our offices,
in our warehouse.
And he would watch the screen,
and we would have the movement choreographed.
And so...
And Caleb would direct him.
And so all of these shots, that's why they're not perfect.
They're like a Steadicam,
where you get good movement and you rehearse it,
and you try to get the good part of the shot,
but there's always a little bit of sloppiness to it.
And that helps it, I think, bring energy to it,
and there he is falling down.
Again, like in Jungle Book,
(CHUCKLING) we borrow a lot of this from Jungle Book
before I ever knew I was gonna be doing Lion King.
So, like, the stampede
and Shere Khan falling down into the fire
was very similar to what we have here.
And this is really nice. Again, tricky to do.
It's hard to understand, but having that fire light motivating it,
having that look and that environment,
I think this all came together well.
It sort of has a spooky, Hitchcock-type look here,
especially with the twisting camera going into Shenzi's push-in coming up.
This little one here coming out of the smoke,
this little one.
And then this,
how you tilt up off of him onto the shadow onto the wall.
Again, easy to do in a cartoon,
but a lot of work for the animators and people lighting to get that look.
And then we go up to the rain coming back down.
And then, of course, the amazing music.
And I'll take this moment to mention Hans Zimmer,
although he's credited as, I think,
executive music producer and composer involved.
But he was involved with so much of this production,
certainly in helping bring together all the people collaborating on the music.
And he had, of course, relationships with Lebo,
with Elton, Tim, Pharrell.
But all the actors and making everybody,
even, like, Seth and Billy, everybody feel comfortable.
And he's got his workshop in Santa Monica,
and that became like our hub.
We listened to music there. We'd record music there.
He'd mix it, produce it,
and would bring in all these great musicians,
and he's just a...
And then, not only does he have so much talent,
great person to coordinate with everybody,
but also cares deeply about storytelling
and was, you know, if I was ever wrestling with something
or should I do this or that, he was always somebody who I would go to
because he was somebody who was there for the original,
but he's not afraid of change
and not afraid of the future.
And he was just a tremendous collaborator
throughout the whole process. I'd known him before.
I had worked in Remote Control back when we did...
I was working with Ramin Djawadi on Iron Man
and the score for Iron Man over at his workshop there.
And he was part of that process,
but this was the first time he'd ever scored for me,
and he was just...
Gee, I don't know how I would've done this without him.
He was so insightful in so many ways.
And here we go. Here's the mouse from the beginning of the movie
that got away from Scar.
And he outlasted Scar. How do you like that?
If that's not a lesson, kids, I don't know what is.
He made it. Scar didn't.
And I love all the little children.
I made sure that we had babies for every species.
(LAUGHING) There's the little ostrich babies.
I love all the little kids.
Actually, we just passed by a northern white rhino.
We had that.
Unfortunately, that species had gone extinct
while we were prepping the film, very sad,
and we wanted to at least memorialize the memory of that species,
and this is why it's so important, hopefully next generation...
Look at that little hippo there.
Hopefully, the next generation... (CHUCKLES) There's the little warthog,
all the little characters that get a curtain call.
Hopefully, this develops a relationship
as kids come up seeing this as something that's just a fun movie,
something that's entertaining emotionally,
you know, fun sometimes, emotionally, too, but certainly memorable.
It's an emotional ride.
But hopefully, if they feel connected to this film,
it'll make them seek out what's really out there in the real world
and help protect what's still there.
And this might be somebody's first exposure
to all of these species and all of these parts of the world,
and, you know, just like the circle of life,
it's our job to keep it going for those that come after us.
So, and there's...
There you go.
There's Elton John singing and Lebo
pulled the choir together for that.
And of course, Tim Rice, lyricist.
So, again, collaborating like on the old one.
This is an original song that was written for this.
And what a treat for me
to be able to collaborate with Elton John.
I'm of the generation that we...
My whole childhood was informed by his music.
And to get to work with him on this was a huge honor, huge treat.
And of course, Tim Rice,
great to collaborate with, you know, genius from musical theater, lyricist.
Again, all of them, what was so fun is now they all have kids and families,
and those kids either are or have grown up with the original.
(CHUCKLING) And so it really felt like a family picnic where it wasn't just...
You wouldn't just have the person you collaborate with,
but their kids were coming by and everybody...
And my kids were coming by.
And it really felt like... Everybody knew what it was.
You didn't have to explain it. It's The Lion King.
You showed them the visuals. They got it.
Everybody was kind of, you know, wanted to see it turn out well
and wanted to be around it while it was happening.
It was a real treat
to be able to carry the torch on this for the three years we worked on it,
knowing how many people had worked so hard before
and how much people care about the movie
and people who worked on it, people who just love it
and feel it's part of their lives
'cause they've seen it so many times growing up.
So, hopefully, we did our job.
And we've written another chapter in the book of Lion King
and pass it onto the next generation.
And there, we see it's based on Lion King.
And those are the original writers.
And also the filmmakers...
Because although we put a lot of work into it,
we really were just building on what the filmmakers, writers,
and everybody involved with the theater production,
we're just building on something that they had already made
and bringing new technology to bear,
new performers interpreting the music and the roles,
but really trying to honor the original as much as we could.
And that's about it.
We got coming up...
(CHUCKLES) Like a DJ, "Coming up is He Lives In You, performed by Lebo M."
And then Lebo also performs at the end, Mbube,
which I thought was a really, really great way to end the credits
because that's the original song
written by Solomon Linda in South Africa back in the '20s or '30s,
which was the tune that inspired The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Many people don't know that actually comes from a South African song.
It was thought to be a traditional
back when Pete Seeger recorded it, called Wimoweh.
And it actually goes back to Solomon Linda, who performed it.
And the tune from The Lion Sleeps Tonight
that everybody thinks, most people think is just a doo-wop song from New York,
you know, from the doo-wop scene,
was actually a tune that was rediscovered
for a third time for that version.
But the original, we have Lebo M performing the original, Mbube,
which is the lion
and trying to pay honor to Solomon Linda
who wrote and performed it originally, getting back to the earliest...
Getting back to the roots of what inspired all this.
So, thank you for your patience (LAUGHS) as I talk through the whole thing.
There's so much to talk about. So much went into this.
But just looking at the list of names,
people collaborating on this
from Africa, America, Europe, and Asia.
Everybody contributing to this production,
and you could see how many people it takes
to bring this to life
and hopefully make all the work look invisible.
There's no brush strokes.
It should just look like
hopefully you're looking at real animals doing their thing.
But this was quite an adventure,
and I'm very proud to have been a part of it,
to get the opportunity to collaborate with all these great people
and learn so much in the process
and hopefully do justice to the legacy of this story.
Thank you.