Brad Bird Finds Himself On a New Mission
Brad Bird is an Academy Award winning film screenwriter and director known up until now for writing and directing animated films like Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and The Iron Giant. He stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to talk to Ron Bennington about his first live action film, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol which he also wrote and directed.
Ron Bennington: Congratulations on this big big film that is out now. This is the first live action film that you’ve ever done, and coming from animation I’m sure this is very surprising to a lot of people.
Brad Bird: It’s odd because people are not that surprised when it goes the other way. Like when a live action director like Gore Verbinski or Stephen Spielberg does animation, they don’t think it’s that weird. But when an animation guy does it, it’s strange.
Ron Bennington: It’s the fourth film in a franchise. You’ve got the biggest movie star in the world, so the pressure is on just to not screw that up, I’m sure. How do I not be the guy who ruins this.
Brad Bird: Well it’s not that different from being at Pixar. When I got to Pixar they had done like four hit movies in a row and it’s like, am I gonna be the guy that’s gonna bone Pixar?
Ron Bennington: I’m not that big of an action guy but when an action picture works, you’re like, oh yea, I love The Matrix, I love Jaws. So you’ve got this film that just works, not just for the masses, but you’re getting great reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has you at 93% and it’s just one of those films that has that flow.
Brad Bird: Yea, we’ve gotten a great response so far and I’m happy that I’m not the guy that screwed it up. I think the basic goal when you make a movie is to make a movie that you yourself would want to see. And you just hope that other people like it. And knock on wood, we’re doing alright.
Ron Bennington: Well you can see that it’s all about timing. You’re telling a story, almost moving. You’re moving this film all around the world. There’s fantastic locations. And there is this dialog, a lot of it technical but it never slows your film down.
Brad Bird: Well the trick with these films– you know they’re popcorn movies, they’re designed to move quickly– but you have to kind of hit this narrow sweet spot where people can’t predict what you’re going to do next, but you don’t get so far ahead of them that they start disengaging. You don’t ever want people to be confused and like “now who is that guy again?” You have to stay ahead of them, but only a little bit, and they’re not confused unless you want them to be confused.
Ron Bennington: And in this film you’ve got great locations but I think you’ve also got a piece that’s going to be shown forever, and that’s Tom Cruise– biggest building in the world. Whose idea was it to shoot in Dubai and pull off this stunt?
Brad Bird: J.J. Abrams who produced the film with Tom Cruise and Brian Burke and Jeffrey Chernoff– Brian and J.J. were in Dubai promoting Star Trek and they looked around and said, this is an amazing city, this is so cinematic. We have to make a movie here. And about a year later Tom came to them and said let’s do another Mission Impossible, and they said, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll have Ethan Hunt climbing the tallest building in the world. And so that was very much a part of this film when I signed on, and that was one of the things that made me want to do it.
Ron Bennington: So when you have Tom Cruise outside of that building, it is Tom Cruise. And you can see that it’s him. And at some point, do you think to yourself, I can’t lose Tom Cruise up here? This might not be the best idea.
Brad Bird: Yea, I wanted to complain to the producer, but the producer is Tom Cruise. So I didn’t get very far. Tom loves those kinds of challenges and he’s willing to put himself through all kinds of exertions, not only on the day, but months beforehand he trains for it. He believes in a very old-fashioned notion that I happen to agree with, that if your star is actually doing it, it takes on an added dimension that it wouldn’t if it were purely special effects. That goes back to Douglas Fairbanks doing all of his stunts, and it’s mesmerizing when it works.
Ron Bennington: I guess it’s like dance in a way- it has to be done perfectly.
Brad Bird: Yea and he was screwing around on the building when we first got there. He had been training for it. But when you’re actually on the building there’s wind up there and all these factors that you can’t pre-imagine. It was towards the end of the day and he was just getting comfortable with being out there on a wire. And I kind of forgot about it, I was talking with somebody and the sun was going down and all of a sudden I hear, “whoooooo” and I see this body arching around out the windows and it goes out of here and all of a sudden I hear this (mimics crash sound) and I thought, “my god I’ve lost my star before we’ve even started to film!” and then I hear this laughing and he was just getting used to how it felt, because he does this thing in the movie where he has to arc his body around, and make a landing from one side of the building to the other and he was just getting comfortable with it. For him it was like a big adventure.
Ron Bennington: What is it about Cruise? He’s been the biggest movie star in the world for about twenty-five years. At his age he can still go out and work with no shirt on….
Brad Bird: I don’t think he’s been out of shape a day in his life. I think his body would probably hemorrhage if it had any fat on it. He’s just an incredibly disciplined guy.
Ron Bennington: And its twenty-four hours a day discipline, not just in acting, but in knowing how show business works. It seems like he has always made those decisions to stay a movie star. I don’t think that most people realize that you can screw up the movie star thing pretty quickly.
Brad Bird: Oh yea, and you don’t have to look around much to see with a lot of talent who ruined it for themself. There’s a lot of stories of people having it all, flaming out, losing it, gaining humility and coming back. It’s really rare to have somebody who has never torched themself. He’s still in great shape, he’s still got it. And that takes amazing concentration and discipline. He loves the medium of film though. He loves doing his job and he has an appreciation for the entire body of film work. I met him right after one of The Incredibles and one of the reasons we hit it off so well was that I could talk to him about the different filmmakers. There are a lot of people in the movie business now whose knowledge only goes back maybe fifteen years. To have somebody that has actually looked at silent films and has an appreciation for them is rare.
Ron Bennington: And the public is the same way. If they’re going to pick the greatest movie of all time, it will normally be something ten fifteen years old, and you have this one hundred year art form and people start to kind of kill it off right behind itself.
Brad Bird: They do but it’s actually still alive. I’m astonished that if you just expose people to it and don’t make it like they’re eating asparagus or something like that. And the same is true if you show them a great silent movie. You have to give them like five minutes to be okay with the fact that it’s not going to have sound, it’s just gonna have music, and it’s black and white. But funny is funny. When you see that and that it still has power, I think it reaffirms your faith in the art form because good is good.
Ron Bennington: It’s almost like every generation has its own pacing though. If you watch a lot of old westerns where they’re just riding horses sometimes for five, ten minutes….
Brad Bird: Well we can be thankful to the French New Wave for jump cuts.
Ron Bennington: But the danger of doing an action film now, is that it does have to keep moving all the time.
Brad Bird: Yes but, our editor on the film is Paul Hirsch who did the first Mission Impossible. He has this saying that I really agree with. He says length is a function of interest. You can have a film that’s 80 minutes long that’s a bore. And then you can have a film like Godfather that is over three hours long and you’re just mesmerized every second. I think a lot of action films make the mistake of thinking they have to move so fast that their pace almost becomes like a metronome. It’s a fast metronome but you start to tune out when anything is that regular. The trick is constantly accelerating or slowing down, just a little bit, so the audiences never settle in to one rhythm.
Ron Bennington: It will happen a lot in CGI films where you’ll get fifteen minutes of explosions and you’ll start to shut down. That’s why I go back to going, wow I really don’t like an action film, until you find one that you like.
Brad Bird: You actually really like a real action film. And that’s the one that doesn’t make that mistake. If you play Die Hard now, there are a lot of slow moments in Die Hard and yet there isn’t anything that’s wasted in that film.
Ron Bennington: And I don’t think any guy has ever turned off Die Hard. You stay on that film.
Brad Bird: If you’re across the room and you put it on, you’ll find yourself standing there for a minute or two, and then you’ll move up five feet, and then you’ll find the closest place to sit down, and suddenly you’ll be at the end of the movie and Alan Rickman will be hanging on out of a building.
Ron Bennington: A lot of people are going to see this. It’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Thanks so much for stopping in.
Brad Bird: It’s been a pleasure.
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