The Incredibles Commentary

The Incredibles commentary with Director Brad Bird and Producer John Walker.

Transcript

 * (music plays)
 * BRAD BIRD: This is Brad Bird, writer and director of The Incredibles.
 * JOHN WALKER: And John Walker, producer.
 * BIRD: Welcome to the audio commentary and right away I would like to comment that we had different music for the first time for the opening logos, the Disney and Pixar logo, written by Michael Giacchino. And we were concerned that if we had the usual Randy Newman music coming out of Boundin', we were not changing the mood as we wanted to. And Michael, I think, hit it right on the head.
 * WALKER: And how great to see such a wildly different short film in front, both coming out of the same studio.
 * BIRD: Right, different sensibilities, one studio.
 * WALKER: One brand name.
 * Helen: Do you have a secret identity?
 * Bob: Every superhero has one.
 * BIRD: This opening... I wanted to begin the film with something that was unexpected. And most superhero movies begin with the big "whammo-blammo" thing. And I thought it we started in this kind of strange... You know, the film's beat up and old and we're looking at them in some kind of personal documentary sense, that would put the emphasis on them being people. So, they're superheroes but you're seeing them being decidedly un-super here. They're just sitting around talking about being super. I thought that was already subverting the audience's expectations. And the interesting thing, or the thing I was going for, anyway, was the fact that they're talking about things that they think their future will involve. So, Frozone is the ladies man, even though we later see him married. Bob is talking about settling down, although later he has a problem with it. And Helen can't imagine settling down and she turns out to make the transition very well. So, that's a little comment about what we think our future is gonna be versus what it is.
 * WALKER: And at one time, we had Buddy Pine in there.
 * BIRD: That's right. We cut him because it felt like it was giving away something.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * (music playing)
 * (siren wailing)
 * BIRD: So, now we are into the "whammo-blammo". The idea here was that once everybody had settled down to this documentary thing, you hit them with a left, and launch them into outer space.
 * WALKER: The aspect ratio goes from 1.33 to 2.39.
 * BIRD: Suddenly the image clears up and the sound gets great.
 * WALKER: You don't have the sound coming out of one mono channel.
 * BIRD: This was showing the golden days. So, Janet Lucroy, who directed the lighting photography on all of this stuff, we talked about, with Lou Romano, about having this be more saturated in color and golden in hue to give the idea that everything was at its best in this time. This is more comic book-y kind of staging: Bigger and everything's kind of broader. The colors are broader and the poses are bigger and everything's... the superheroes the way we're used to seeing them.
 * WALKER: We certainly labored over design of the Incredi-bile which you only see in this sequence.
 * BIRD: Right. They did a great job on it. The amount of cheats to convert the car are relatively few, which is sort of amazing.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * BIRD: Because the car really does kind of change shape. So, we do all this work and then... it goes by in two seconds. You just kind of go, "Can we create another five sequences where the car converts? To get our money's worth?" But I think that's the aspect of these films that is delightful, is there is enough detail in them that they can stand up to multiple viewings. Certainly Pixar is well known for going the extra mile for the amount of detail. That's right.
 * WALKER: And nunace. We'd joked that it would be great to have the Incredi-bile scene later in the movie with a baby seat in the back with Jack-Jack, (LAUGHING) going to the grocery store.
 * BIRD (LAUGHS): Somehow he managed to hold on to that. Yeah, yeah.
 * WALKER: He had it in the back, just covered up.
 * BIRD: Yeah, in fact, Teddy Newton, who did character design with Tony Fucile for the film, did a fantastic drawing in the earliest days of all the family in... Actually, they were flying.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * BIRD: Everyone was... In my earliest version of The Incredibles, everyone could fly except Bob.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * BIRD: It was kind of a sore point with him, and... Teddy did this fantastic drawing of all the family flying and then Bob, like, underneath them in a car, a station wagon.
 * (ALL LAUGH)
 * WALKER: With his arm out the window, with the fist up, you know? Yeah.
 * BIRD: "To the rescue," it said.
 * WALKER: I had that drawing pasted to my door for the entire four years of the movie. "To the rescue." I always felt like Bob in the station wagon, with everybody flying above me.
 * Helen: ...survive.
 * Bob: Thanks, but I don't need any help.
 * Helen: Whatever happened to "ladies first"?
 * Bob: Whatever happened to equal treatment?
 * Mugger: Hey, look! Wait! Look, the lady got me first.
 * Helen: Well, we could share, you know.
 * Bob: I work alone.
 * Helen: Well, I think you need to be more...
 * BIRD: So, right here, we're watching some, I think, extraordinarily good animation by Dave Mullins and Kureha Yokoo on Elastigirl and some wonderful stuff on Bob. Everybody pitched into the stuff, so I'll never be able to keep up.
 * Bob: You just stay here. They usually pick up the garbage in an hour.
 * BIRD: Beautiful ice effects by Mach Kobayashi here. Under Sandy Karpman's supervision and beautifully designed by Ralph Eggleston, the art director. And here's some fantastic animation by Carlos Baena. For some reason, the animators from Spain, we have two of them on this film, and they shared a room, they could do the most extraordinarily, fantastic physical stuff. I mean, it's nuanced, it caricatured, it feels weighty and physical and it just... Uh, I got to the point where if I had something that was really hard to do, physically, I'd go, "We must go to Spain." You know? "Go to the Spaniards."
 * (music playing)
 * (bomb explosion)
 * BIRD: Here's our character, Bomb Voyage, who at one point was named "Bomb Perignon". But the Dom Perignon people didn't think that was too good of an idea, so we had to change it. Dominique Louis, who is a wonderful production designer here at Pixar, provided the voice for Bomb Voyage.
 * WALKER: And Jason Lee is doing the voice for Buddy Pine, who also does the voice fo Syndrome. He's playing himself 15, 20 years younger.
 * BIRD: Yeah, we were worried that he wouldn't be... We would have to use a kid. And we thought it would be better if we could get Jason to sound like a kid because oftentimes they sound like different people. They don't sound like the same person. So, we had to do some experimentation both with having Jason raise his voice a little bit and change the speed and the way he says things, and then also pitching it up slightly in Pro Tools. And we found this blend of the two that worked very well. There's a lot of wonderful animation here by Andrew Gordon and Travis and all kinds of people getting in the flavor of this comic book moment where everything is kind of, you know: The guys face each other and they say "Bomb Voyage" and "Monsieur" and "incoroyable." But it's all meant to be done broadly. And yet, not in a way that mocks it. It's a fine line we're trying to tread here, but we don't want to do this in a campy way. We want to say that we believe in this world, but also kind of enjoy that it's really kind of absurd.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * BIRD: So, here I have this little shot that I had in from the very first pitch. It's the kind of thing you normally don't see in a superhero film. There's a very quick shot... you'd have to go back, home viewers. Bob kind of winces before the train hits him. And it's him preparing for the fact that this is gonna hurt a little bit. It's not gonna kill him...
 * WALKER: But it's a train. It's a train. It's gonna hurt.
 * BIRD: It's moving fast. So, I just thought, that's the kind of moment that we tried to get in the movie a lot. Part of my original feeling for this film was that we would always have those moments where superheroes have feelings too.
 * WALKER: That's right, and it hurts.
 * Police officer #1: Bomb Voyage.
 * Bob: Any other night, I'd go after him, but I gotta go. Don't worry.
 * WALKER: Check out the lighting. Isn't this great?
 * BIRD: Yeah, it's great. Janet Lucroy and company did a fantastic job.
 * WALKER: There's a beautiful exterior of a church that you never see again.
 * BIRD: Yeah, you gotta realize that for John and I here, this has been, like, a four-year journey and we're blasting through these four years. Because things that we had meetings over and fought over... Here's the reverend.
 * WALKER: Excellently voiced by...
 * BIRD: By our producer, John Walker.
 * WALKER: That's right. Let's go back and listen to him again.
 * BIRD: There are nuances aplenty there.
 * WALKER: Unbelievable.
 * BIRD: We watch these things and all of these battles and struggles that we had go by in an instant. And it's like watching your kids grow up, or something like that. Before your eyes.
 * Man: I pronounce this couple husband and wife.
 * (music playing)
 * Helen: As long as we both shall live.
 * BIRD: So, this is very sort of romantic lighting and it's kind of meant to emphasize the harshness of what's coming now, where the images are jittery and blown out and very gritty and grainy. And it's meant to be a sudden jolt. But unlike the opening, we're in full aperture ratio. So, it's like we're looking at 1.33 old Academy footage, but we've zoomed in on it so the grain is bigger and it's got that old, overcooked, you know, "dragged behind a car" feel.
 * Newsreel announcer: Five days later, another suit was filed by the victims of the el train accident. Incredible...
 * WALKER: And I love this use of courtroom sketches in there, as well as Teddy Newton, who's the fabulous narrator voice here.
 * BIRD: Oh, yeah. Our character designer and overall crazy genius.
 * WALKER: That's right.
 * BIRD: Teddy Newton does the narrator. For some reason, he has a knack for doing these old movie voice guys.
 * WALKER: Sort of industrial film-esque.
 * BIRD: Yeah, kind of "news on the march" guy. The courtroom sketches were done by Peter Sohn, who's an excellent guy that worked with us, as did Teddy, on The Iron Giant.
 * WALKER: And a shot that drove us crazy, with all of these miscellaneous humans.
 * BIRD: And the thing is you won't even know because if you do them right, nobody nieces them.
 * WALKER: It was just hard to do them so that no one would notice them.
 * Mrs. Hogenson: I don't understand. I have full coverage.
 * Bob: I'm sorry, but our liability...
 * BIRD: Here we cut to Bob's current life. And I wanted to take a very different approach on the way this stuff was presented. I talked with Lou and Janet about desaturating all the color here. So, it's almost like we've dialed down all the color that we saw in the prologue. It's kind of lost a lot of its life. It's kind of governed by Bob's feelings. The home has a little more color than the Insuricare stuff. And the other interesting thing that we did here that I think worked out well, is I actually pushed the camera back in 3D space and zoomed in on this stuff so that it was flat. If you pull the camera back in space and then zoom in on things the dimension gets lost and everything compresses and feels claustrophobic. So, all of these shots are compressed and they make the world feet tighter and flatter and the idea is to not move the camera very much when you get into Insuricare. And have everything feel compressed and claustrophobic.
 * Bob: ...but there's nothing I can do. Shh!
 * Mrs. Hogenson: Thank you.
 * Bob: I'm sorry, ma'am. I know...
 * WALKER: And Jean Sincere was playing Mrs. Hogenson.
 * (Mrs. Hogenson sobbing)
 * WALKER: Here's Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph.
 * BIRD: Yeah, kind of a strange thing on the movie was the very first voices that we recored were all writers. Wallace Shawn is a playwright, a really great playwright. Sarah Vowell is a wonderful author and essayist. They did our first voices.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * Woman on PA: Morning break is over. Morning break is over.
 * (pencil falls)
 * (door opening)
 * BIRD: Bernie, Dash's teacher, is voiced by Lou Romano who is our production designer. This was a sequence that was kind of in and out.
 * WALKER: In and out, in and out, 'cause the movie was 107 minutes, the longest movie Pixar has ever made. This was a sequence that we really talked about just not doing to get the time down and to save money, essentially. But we decided in the end that it was...
 * BIRD: It never played as well without it. It was important to see everybody's normal life before you started getting outrageous with it. And seeing that it caused problems.
 * WALKER: It became too much of a story about Bob and at the beginning of the movie you didn't see the rest of the family enough if you cut this sequence and the one following it, which is Violet's introduction.
 * BIRD: Right.
 * WALKER: That was a note from John Lasseter, our executive producer. He said leave them in.
 * BIRD: John is very good about making decisions based on what works. Even though we were running a little bit long, he saw the value of keeping the sequence. He came to the defense of it. And I thought that was good.
 * WALKER: Absolutely. It just meant a little more work. I was glad to see it back.
 * BIRD: Yeah.
 * Bernie: ...do anything. No!
 * (car whirring)
 * Helen: Dash, this is the third time this year you've been sent to the office.
 * BIRD: This is a very subdued sort of scene, setting up that there's problems in the family that go with having these powers and never being able to use them. And the goal on this stuff was to show that Helen's trying to be a good mom and sticking to the rule book. But she, herself, doesn't really believe the stuff that she's saying. These kind of scenes are challenging in their own way for an animator because they're not particularly physical. They're confined scenes and it's all about expressions and timing, and keeping things animated but not making them too big.
 * Dash: ...same one.
 * (people cheering)
 * (school bell ringing)
 * BIRD: Here's our heartthrob.
 * WALKER: Tony Rydinger, who's been through a few designs. Tony almost made it into the film in a different incarnation. But at the last moment we decided he wasn't heartthrobby enough, and he got a last minute redesign.
 * BIRD: Yeah, I think the problem was these characters are very hard to build. They take a lot of time. They're like instruments that the animators are going to play. So, they have to be capable. It's like building a car for a race driver. Or a Stradivarius for a musician. And it takes a long time to build. So, we put all our juice on our main characters and there was kind of a gulf between our main characters and our secondary characters. We kind of had to just bite our lip and be okay with it. I was ready to be okay with it. And fortunately, again, our executive producer, John Lasseter, pulled the little... Stopped the train brake very late in the film, almost at the last minute, and said, "We gotta make these better." Everybody was really happy that he did because if John says fix it, then everybody can just go, "He says fix it." Of course, we all wanted to fix it, but we were running out of time and money and it was wonderful that John made the choice to get that picked up. It makes a huge difference and makes it feel like one world.
 * Dash: You're making weird faces again.
 * Helen: No, I'm not.
 * Bob: You make weird faces, honey.
 * Helen: Do you have to read at the table?
 * Bob: Yeah.
 * Helen: Smarter...
 * BIRD: So, here's the family life and Lou and Janet and I talked about warming things up a little bit because even though it's in Bob's more claustrophobic part of the movie, home is not a bad place, it's a nice place. And he's just really not engaging as much as he needs to.
 * Helen: ...attack on teacher's chair, Jerry.
 * BIRD: This had got a lot of wonderful opportunities for character stuff. And it reminds me of a million dinners that I was in when I was sort of Dash's age. And we used to have these very sort of crazy dinners dinners with my family. Now that I'm a father, you know... Dinner is still the place where you collect all the characters in the house and let them bounce off each other around the little square. And so, it's a wonderful opportunity to set up the family part of this film.
 * Helen: It is leftover night. We have steak, pasta... What are you hungry for?
 * Dash: Tony Rydinger.
 * Violet: Shut up.
 * Dash: Well, you are.
 * Violet: I said, shut up, you little insect.
 * Dash: She is.
 * Violet: Do not shout at the table.
 * WALKER: One of the hardest things to do in this scene was keeping track of all the stuff on the table.
 * BIRD: On my table.
 * WALKER: It was a nightmare, you know.
 * BIRD: And you know have these meetings, where they're going, like, "The broccoli has moved. The broccoli, there's no continuity on the broccoli." Or "The gravy..." Yeah, it was this thing that Nigel said at one point. Where everybody's at each other's throats, everybody's sick of dealing with digital food, you know. People are starting to yell a little bit at each other. Nigel raises his voice and says, "Can we get back to the issue of the gravy?"
 * (BOTH LAUGH)
 * BIRD: So, I kept coming back to him with that one. "Please, can we get back to the issue of the gravy?" But there was meat juice and gravy and "What about the peas?" and "Where's the broccoli? It's moving."
 * WALKER: "It's gone, it was there. Where did it go?"
 * BIRD: "Clearly, the broccoli is next to Dad in this angle and..."
 * WALKER: Finally, it's just, forget it.
 * BIRD: Nobody's gonna care. Throw it around, it doesn't matter. We worked somewhat to get it. We got it to the point where you shouldn't notice if you're a normal human being.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * BIRD: Um...
 * WALKER: If you want to, you can probably find some inconsistencies.
 * BIRD: You can find food continuity problems in this film.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * Frozone: Will do. Good night, Helen. Good night, kids.
 * (door closes)
 * Helen: Don't think you've avoided talking about the principal's office.
 * BIRD: You know, I would love to just stop at every instance and give each animator who did these scenes their proper due. In the first stuff that we did, and this is among the first stuff that we did, the film was broken up a little more, to give everybody something to do. So, it's changing from animator to animator somewhat quickly. Eli Fucile also did the voice of Jack-Jack right there, did this laugh, and we loved it so much, I wanted it to be in the movie. He's the son of one of our supervisors, supervising animator Tony Fucile.
 * Frozone: What does Baron Von Ruthless do?
 * Bob: He starts monologuing.
 * Frozone: He starts monologuing.
 * BIRD: Anyway, I would love to stop at every instance and point out... Right here is wonderful animation by Mike Venturini and Mike Wu.
 * WALKER: "Wu-Dog."
 * BIRD: Mike Venturini did Frozone and Wu-Dog did Bob in this scene. And this is a very atypical scene for animation. You don't get too many times, a scene of two guys sitting in a car talking. If I were an animator, I would love to animate these. I tried to write something that would be interesting to animate. I think this is wonderfully contained animation. I think they hit it out of the park. I love this stuff. And beautiful lighting, too. People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, "The animation genre." It's not a genre. A Western is a genre. Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids' fairy tale. But it doesn't do one thing. And, next time I hear, "What's it like working in the animation genre?" I'm going to punch that person.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * (music playing)
 * WALKER: You're using depth of field, which you use all through the movie, moving, you know, foreground characters out of focus...
 * BIRD: Yeah, you know, a lot of people, when they do CG, want to take advantage of the fact that there's no light issues in CG, in terms of depth of field. You can make everything deep focus, like Citizen Kane. A lot of people go, "You can have infinite depth of field, why would you want it otherwise?" Well, I could see that for certain projects. Certainly, it works fantastically well in Citizen Kane. But in this film, I wanted to use the focal length to focus you on what to look at. Other Pixar films have varied the focal length, too. So, it's not like I'm saying that we're inventing it on this. I'm just saying that oftentimes it makes things a little trickier to do, because you're having to constantly pull the focus around, like an action-filled live action film. But to me, when you're dealing out this much information and the film has got a lot of fast-moving scenes in it, it's one more tool you can use to direct the audience's eye. And so, I wanted it in a lot of scenes.
 * WALKER: And you used it a lot. We did a lot.
 * BIRD: I did. And it was a pain in the butt. Because, you were having to send scenes back, to get the focal length right. Here is one, you know?
 * WALKER: Yeah, sure.
 * BIRD: We pulled the focal length on Frozone there.
 * Police officer: Now, I want you to do?
 * Frozone: I know, I know.
 * WALKER: That's a great effect on there.
 * (crashing)
 * BIRD: Yeah. Mark Andrews supervised all the storyboarding of the film. This was an idea that they had, that they kind of had to sell me on. You know, I was like, "Come on. A bullet's not gonna freeze in space. Come on, the amount of..." They were like, "It'll be cool." And they saw that I was kind of, you know, there was a crack definitely open in the door, and I folded.
 * WALKER: So you made the copsicle.
 * BIRD: Yeah, the copsicle. Yes. (LAUGHS) No, no, I had the idea of freezing the cop. I just didn't have the idea of the bullet frozen in space. And that was the one they had to sell me on.
 * (door closing)
 * (Bob humming)
 * WALKER: I love that he hums his own theme music here, as he comes in.
 * BIRD: Craig did a great job on that, too. This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
 * WALKER: Mine too.
 * BIRD: I think that Holly and Craig did a great job on the voices. I think that it's extraordinarily well animated. It starts out as Ron Zorman. Um, eating the cake. And then, it turns into Dave Mullins, for Helen busting Bob. Then it's Andy Schmidt, when they start to really argue. And then it's John Kahrs. Each one of them were given pretty long runs, once the argument starts, so they could control both characters, throughout the scene.
 * WALKER: That's a great scene.
 * BIRD: And this was a little bit, in the early days, a tough sell to Pixar, because this was one of the first scenes we did in storyboarding. And I think Pixar thought that, you know, we were intending to make an hour and a half long Bergman movie, showing marital conflict. But to everyone's credit, when they saw how it fit in with everything else, they came right around and went with this scene. This was an interesting scene to write, because when people argue, what they're fighting about is not what they say they're fighting about. To communicate one thing while saying another is a challenge.
 * Helen: ...anymore.
 * Bob: It's psychotic. But keep...
 * BIRD: I-I just think that it's really wonderful stuff. It is animated, it doesn't feel like it's simply reproducing live action. But it feels real, believable.
 * WALKER: She didn't stretch for a long time, at the end of the fight. He was too threatening to her.
 * BIRD: Yeah, people were uncomfortable with that moment. And then, when she says, "This is not about you," because Bob is bigger than Elastigirl. And it felt almost like, you know, spousal abuse or something like that. And I thought, well, wait a minute. I don't have to change the scene. I just have to make Mom... Mom is his equal. And so, if she just uses her stretching to become physically, you know, to kind of say, "I will stand up to you," then...
 * WALKER: And can tower over you, should I choose to.
 * BIRD: Right, once I did that, everyone was okay with the scene, and I didn't have to change a word.
 * WALKER: It really is an excellent... Because Mom doesn't like to use her powers, and she does it there for great effect.
 * (dog barking)
 * Computer on PA: Request claim on claim numbers 158183 you.
 * Mr. Huph on PA: Haven't you got him yet? Where is he?
 * Computer on PA: Mr. Huph would like to talk to you in his office.
 * Bob: Hmm. Now.
 * (BIRD LAUGHS)
 * WALKER: Poor Bob.
 * BIRD: Yeah.
 * WALKER: He's the only guy whose cube is filled with a giant pillar.
 * BIRD: Yeah, right.
 * WALKER: He can't fit through the door.
 * BIRD: That was an early idea that somebody came up with. It might have been Ted Blackman, somebody. I don't know whether it was Lou or... But the idea was that his cube is the only one with a support structure on it, to make it even more confining.
 * Mr. Huph: I'm not happy, Bob. Not happy.
 * BIRD: So, there's a little cactus over Bob's shoulder there, that is in the shape of Huph. And there's great art direction things here, with Lou Romano and company, where the chair kinds of looks like it's frowning. The desk is kind of pointing out at Bob. All the little pencil things are pointed in Bob's direction.
 * WALKER: Can you imagine a more uncomfortable chair than the one he's sitting in?
 * BIRD: Right. And I've been in that chair many times. I was fired out of two of first three jobs. So, I relate to this stuff, you know, where this very small guy is trying to tell you about life, and... (LAUGHS)
 * WALKER: And how you don't deserve to be in it.
 * (ALL LAUGH)
 * BIRD: Um... Yeah. So, this is an abstraction of all the tiny-thinking people in the world, and there are a lot of them, and we've all run into them. And, unfortunately, you know, they're often in positions of medium power. They're never in the top positions. They're always in middle management. But I like the idea of this big superhero having to listen to this little blowhard. And being powerless when every instinct in his body tells him to get out there and mix it up.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * Mr. Huph: Look at me when I'm talking to you, Parr.
 * Bob: That man out there needs help.
 * Mr. Huph: Do not change the subject, Bob. We're discuss...
 * BIRD: This is some wonderful animation by Tim Hittle.
 * Mr. Huph: Well, let's hope we don't cover him.
 * BIRD: Again, I apologize to all the animators I'm not mentioning. But everyone did an extraordinary job. This is interesting, at this point I wanted to go to wide-angle lenses. The minute that Bob started to move and be active again, I got the lenses away from being flat, and started moving the camera a bit, because I wanted to get just a taste of Mr. Incredible, again. And then we're back into the flat lenses, and the symmetrical compositions. I like the way the little files bounce when he hits them.
 * WALKER: (LAUGHS) There's a little Tony Fucile animation there.
 * BIRD: Yeah, yeah. Of Bob grabbing Huph. Tony... "I want that scene." I think Tony was working out some past issues in that scene.
 * (door closes)
 * BIRD: So here is another kind of, not typical scene, I think, for animation. It's just two guys walking down a hallway, talking about problems. There's some good animation on the orderlies there, that you don't normally notice. Rick Dicker, here, our poor government worker, is voiced by Bud Luckey, who's an old-time Pixar guy. I think was one of the principal designers of Woody in Toy Story, and directed Boundin', that is also on this DVD. He did a wonderful temp voice, and everybody liked it so much we just thought, well, let's use it in the film. So, it's Bud Luckey and Craig here, voicing this thing.
 * WALKER: We always wanted Rick Dicker to introduce Boundin'.
 * BIRD: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had this whole really abstract opening of Rick Dicker coming into his office late at night, pulling out a bottle of booze and...
 * WALKER: A banjo.
 * BIRD: A banjo.
 * WALKER: Starting in on Boundin'.
 * BIRD: Starting in on Boundin', and... I don't know why it wasn't done, yeah.
 * WALKER: I think it...
 * BIRD: Kind of a weird idea.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * Boy: ...again.
 * Bob: (sighs) Me, too, kid.
 * BIRD: At this point in the story, Bob is feeling like the world is tightening around him. He's a very defeated guy, so...
 * WALKER: And boy, talk about Pixar detail, in this sequence.
 * BIRD: There's a ton of it. This was our first sequence, really.
 * WALKER: All of the different posters and newspaper clippings...
 * BIRD: Mr. Incredible memorabilia.
 * WALKER: My favorite is, "Mr. Incredible Sings."
 * BIRD: That's his William Shatner album.
 * WALKER: That's right.
 * BIRD: Up on the wall, someplace. There's a really good graphic there. But yeah, the walls, you could definitely linger this camera around, and catch a lot of details about Bob's life. There are shots of him and Frozone at some benefit or something, you know, and they're in their superhero outfits.
 * Mirage: Hello, Mr. Incredible.
 * BIRD: There's a wonderful, subtle, little effect right here. You know, I wanted to imply that this was a 3D lenticular sort of image. So, Rick Sayre and a bunch of geniuses here at Pixar, figured out how to simulate sort of a lenticular effect. And I almost wish we used it a little more. I wish the camera angles showed you it a little more. It is there.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * BIRD: But the camera has to move in order for you to see it.
 * Bob: ...it was.
 * Helen: Dinner's ready.
 * Bob: Okay.
 * Mirage on PA: It is contained within an isolated area, it threatens to cause...
 * BIRD: So, here, I wanted the filmmaking to be jumpy and busy, and kind of moving around a lot, because I wanted it to reflect the fragmentary absorption of Bob, constantly trying to pay attention to this thing, get the details down, and being pulled out of it by Helen, who's wondering what's going on in there. And again, it's that juxtaposition which... It was so important in so many scenes in this, of the mundane and the fantastic. I mean, he's being given a chance to return to his old days, with this fantastic mission, and at the same time, Mom's outside the door, you know, telling him that dinner's ready.
 * (music playing)
 * WALKER: Here's this glorious music cue by Michael Giacchino, coming around, and Bob being able to see the possibilities of returning to his great life.
 * BIRD: Right. And we wanted to light this with this golden light, and have him really connecting with all the things that he loved about his old days, and feeling like it's within his grasp again.
 * (music playing)
 * (beeping)
 * BIRD: Again, we have the mundane and the fantastic here.
 * (explosion)
 * BIRD: This thing self-destructs, and starts all the sprinklers in the house. Of course, the family gets the sprinklers, too, and he has to deal with it. (LAUGHS) And then the aftermath of that is yo got to dry everything out.
 * WALKER: With a pink hair dryer, of course.
 * BIRD: Well, yeah. Because that would be Helen. Um... This is a wonderful sustained piece of character animation by Kureha. She did both characters in this incredibly long shot, without a cut. And if you can follow each individual character all the way through the shot, and they are absolutely as in the moment as any good live action performance, I think. You can feel them questioning things, and hearing things, and Bob's kind of tightening when he feels like Helen's getting suspicious. And he's not sure if ideas are gonna fly. It's a wonderful piece of sustained character animation. Very difficult because it's so long. She was on it for months.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * BIRD: And had to stay concentrating, from... for months.
 * (plane whirring)
 * (music playing)
 * Mirage: The only weird...
 * WALKER: The ride is really starting now. We're going to the island, he's suited up again, it's, you know... The movie starts to go down rails at this point.
 * BIRD: Some great graphics here, designed by Mark Holmes, and put it up on screen by Andy Jimenez, who's one of our directors of photography, who did a lot of the previous planning for the film. I like it because this screen is kind of between the two guys, and yet we're not highlighting it.
 * Mirage: Difficult to track, although we're pretty sure it's on the southern half of the island. One more thing. It represents a significant investment?
 * Bob: Shut it down without destroying it.
 * Mirage: You are Mr. Incredible.
 * BIRD: So, here we are, Bob's feeling very heroic. And once again, the mundane is raising its head.
 * WALKER: All right.
 * BIRD: And he's got to deal with stuff all of us middle-aged guys got to deal with.
 * (screeching)
 * WALKER: Here's Elizabeth Pena as Mirage. Fantastic performance.
 * BIRD: Yeah. She has a really great voice. And she was absolutely the first person I thought of, when we were looking for somebody to do this character.
 * (rocket whirring)
 * (bomb explosion)
 * BIRD: One of the biggest problems on this film was the problem of scale. For some reason the computer, it seems to me, wants to make everything look small. And so we had to think things through, to get things to look as big as they were supposed to be on screen. I often felt that the computer had an agenda, almost like HAL 9000 in 2001, you know. And the agenda was, it wanted everything to be small, weightless, plastic, rigid and clean. And we had a whole movie, where we needed things to be big, heavy, lots of textures, pliable and dirty. So we were fighting it every step of the way. And it was like, "Dave, Dave...
 * WALKER: "I like it clean."
 * BIRD: "I want things to be small and weightless, Dave. You're endangering the mission, Dave. I don't think you know how to direct this movie, Dave."
 * (Bob laughs)
 * (fly buzzing)
 * (bird chirping)
 * (Bob sighs)
 * BIRD: Nigel and everybody did a fantastic job dressing all this jungle stuff.
 * WALKER: Yeah, Tom Miller.
 * BIRD: Tom Miller was our King of the Jungle.
 * WALKER: Did a lot of that.
 * BIRD: And, you know, we had all this incredible amount of detail here, and all these leaves and things were designed. I mean, they didn't just happen.
 * (Bob cries)
 * Bob: Hyah!
 * BIRD: The idea is to show that this thing is threatening here, but that Bob has actually still got a lot of his chops. And it sets up that this world is threatening, and he can get hurt a little bit.
 * (music plays)
 * BIRD: We're doing a lot of stuff quickly.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * BIRD: And there's a lot of really terrific animation.
 * WALKER: And I remember you talking about Bob sneaking around, in this and in the subsequent scene, when he sneaks into the base. Movies don't have people sneaking around in them anymore.
 * BIRD: That's right.
 * WALKER: I want some sneaking around in my movie.
 * BIRD: Yeah. I think that people are in such a rush to get the action sequences going fast that they forget that there's pleasure to be had in the sneaking around part.
 * WALKER: Taking a look at where you are.
 * BIRD: So, I have a few sneaking around sequences in here. And I don't think they're a waste of time.
 * (Bob grunts)
 * BIRD: Once he jumps off the cliff there, at the, you know, about 20 seconds before this, it goes to Angus MacLane, who animated both the Omnidroid and Bob, for this whole section. And there is some wonderful effects animation. But this is really kid of a big, long, involved piece of animation, and Angus took it all on himself, which was pretty amazing, because it's a lot of stuff.
 * (Omnidroid fighting)
 * WALKER: And you get your classic fantastic and mundane. In the middle of the big action fight, he bellows his back out.
 * BIRD: Yeah, right.
 * WALKER: And the climax is, the chiropractic move that puts it back together, you know.
 * BIRD: Yeah. Yeah, I had that gag in from as long as I was pitching the movie. I pitched that gag as part of my original pitch. And the reason I would stop for a detail like that, is to try to keep reinforcing the idea that it's the mundane and the fantastic. There are a few of them that were all part of the original pitch, that showed up in the movie. And normally in a pitch, you're only doing the broad strokes. But every once in a while I would stop to point out a detail because I felt like it was important to know the tone that I was going for. There also, I think, is wonderful lighting in all of this stuff. And Lou did a wonderful job of orchestrating it going from sunlight down into the lava, you know, and into this dining room. And Lou and Janet and I really talked about, how the color moves from one thing to another.
 * (door opening)
 * (music playing)
 * (lava slams)
 * WALKER: Holy smokes, we go to a lot of different places in this movie. It's just one new set after another, and some of them you just never see again. And it was really challenging to get all of those things made.
 * BIRD: Right! When we were first talking about it, people were freaking out. People were saying... There were some people that were saying that it was impossible. Fortunately for us, there was also a number of people who said, "We can do that, but it ain't gonna be easy." And I think that we were able to pull it off without breaking the bank, simply by preplanning the daylights out of it, and then not deviating very much from our plans. Because a lot of these sets don't really work if you're not in exactly the positions that we preplanned.
 * WALKER: There's a lot of virtual stagehands just off the edge of the frame, holding something up, you know.
 * BIRD: Yeah. It's literally like one of those back lots where just one foot to the right of the edge of the frame, it goes into...
 * WALKER: It falls apart.
 * BIRD: Some cement block or something. A lot of it was just trickery and being very specific.
 * (music playing)
 * WALKER: And this is great music here, this is just fantastic.
 * BIRD: Michael Giacchino did a wonderful job with the score. Again, back in my earliest pitches of the movie, I played this kind of early sixties music. I had a number of little bits of things that I played while I pitched, so that people could get the flavor. I wanted it to have the sound that I connect with a lot of action movies from the early sixties. Michael catches that flavor without being limited by it. It reminds you of those kind of scores. But, it's brand new.
 * WALKER: Yeah. It's just great.
 * BIRD: Yeah. And I think that the musicians had a wonderful time playing it.
 * (music playing)
 * BIRD: Oh, I got to mention this. This is the hardest stuff for a computer guy to do. And I know you're sitting there going, "What?" "What's so great about that?" But that fabric thing, where he works his hand through there, is like, one guy took... ...two, three months on it.
 * WALKER: And could it be done at all?
 * BIRD: And, "I don't know," and "We'll have to put our best men on it," "You got to put your hand through it?" Yeah, and then, "Is there any way he can just kind of hold it, and describe it?"
 * WALKER: "There's a hole in it?" "Look, there's a hole."
 * BIRD: "Can we do it with..."
 * WALKER: "That'll work."
 * BIRD: "Can we just cut to his face, and hear a sound of him moving his hand through it?" They so wanted to avoid that shot. And I said, no, the point of the story is he's torn his old suit, and he wants to fix it.
 * Edna: No complaints. But, you know, it is not the same.
 * WALKER: I guarantee you, there are about 15 people who, during this sequence, all they do is watch that suit that Bob is carrying in his hand. Because the simulation on that has been so difficult that it's like...
 * BIRD: Oh, yeah.
 * WALKER: "Look at that thing move, man."
 * BIRD: Yeah, and now and toward the end of the film, when this stuff had been figured out, it was a no-brainer to approve these scenes. But all this stuff of hair and fabric, not just the stuff in his hand, but the stuff he's wearing. E's hair. The fact that her lenses are slightly blowing up her eyes, and making them slightly larger, there's some magnification there. All that stuff has to be engineered and figured out, and this is another big scene.
 * WALKER: "Oh, my God, did you see that?"
 * (BOTH LAUGH)
 * BIRD: But it's really good. And it's so good that hopefully no one will notice it. From your side of the fence, being a producer that has to pay for this stuff, it's a no-win situation.
 * WALKER: That's right.
 * BIRD: Because if we do a fantastic job...
 * WALKER: A fantastic job, nobody notices.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * Edna: You push too had, darling. But I accept.
 * BIRD: I think we're overriding a lot of good work here, and we're not talking about these great sets that Lou Romano designed, along with a lot of members of the art team. This big frieze, taking up that whole wall, was painted by Paul Topolos. A beautiful job. And then it was displaced to look dimensional.
 * Edna: Nice man. Good with kids.
 * BIRD: E's place is a big elaborate set. It's tasteful, it's Bauhaus-y in its elements, but it also aggrandizes heroes. The frieze and the big sculpture outside, with the waterfall, is all about the heroes and the gods, that she wishes she was still designing for. It's wonderful that everything's big, too, because she's small, and yet her personality is big, so of course her place would be big.
 * WALKER: Right. I love the way the sound changes when they walk into this giant room.
 * BIRD: It sounds cavernous. (IMITATING EDNA)
 * Bob: E, I only need a patch job.
 * BIRD: Wonderful animation by Andrew Gordon on E, for a lot of that stuff. And Rob Russ did some animation, and there's some good Bob stuff in there. Listen, I could spend the entire commentary praising people. So I beg my crew's forgiveness if you're not mentioned. It's impossible to... you're going from one group of talented people to the next, every moment. (SNAPS FINGERS) All of you did a great job. So, I'll just say all of you and get myself off the hook.
 * (BIRD LAUGHS)
 * WALKER: Hundreds of people worked on this film, you know. So, it's...
 * BIRD: Yeah.
 * WALKER: Check the credits.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * BIRD: I thank you all. We thank you all.
 * Bob: Short notice but you know, duty calls.
 * BIRD: I think the animators, we really set a challenge for them in doing this stuff. Humans are notoriously difficult to animate, because everyone knows how they move. You don't simply want to reproduce reality, because there's nothing specific or interesting about that. But you want everything to be believable. You want to believe that these are living things that have feelings and pasts. Some wonderful animation by Dave DeVan in there, of Mom talking to Dad and you can see all this regret on her face.
 * Speaker: Would you care for more mimosa?
 * Bob: Don't mind if I do. Thanks.
 * Speaker: You're...
 * BIRD: The feeling is very different this time in the Manta jet. It's all about the sort of "high roller, welcome back to Vegas" Bob.
 * WALKER: Right.
 * BIRD: Please take our excellent presidential suite here, and feel free to order up anything you want. So, it's all about selling the sex and allure of this island paradise.
 * WALKER: We have some of our most beautiful shots in this sequence, I mean, just gorgeous stuff.
 * (music playing)
 * (ocean underwater)
 * (music playing)
 * Mirage: Hello, Mr. Incredible. Nice suit.
 * Bob: Thanks. Nice to be back.
 * BIRD: The effects guys, again, Sandy and her team, did a wonderful job on the jungle waterfall here, and that underwater shot where the Manta jet comes into the bay, another one that was incredibly difficult to execute. Water is a very tricky thing to do in CG, and again, when we showed the number of things to people, "Oh, yes, we're doing water, and we're in outer space, we're underwater..."
 * WALKER: "There's explosions."
 * BIRD: "There's explosions and fabric underwater and..."
 * WALKER: "Hair underwater."
 * BIRD: "Simulate hair, please." Just the volume of stuff just knocked people over. But the proof is in the pudding.
 * WALKER: Here's another set you see just once.
 * (music playing)
 * BIRD: So, here's Helen coming to the door. And she's just trying to vacuum the hallway. And she kind of lets her vacuum probe into the room a little bit.
 * WALKER: Big mistake.
 * BIRD: Yeah. And you hear all the schmaltz and things going in there. And she goes... Ugh, because she's got to do the whole room now. Like where you see some dishes in the sink, you come down thinking you're gonna be good, it's 11:00 at night, everybody's asleep. You wash two or three things and open the dishwasher, and the dishwasher is filled with clean stuff, that you now know you must unpack. And it's just... Ugh, so, it's that "no good deed goes unpunished" bit.
 * Helen: Yes, it's been a while. Listen, there's only one person Bob would trust to patch his suit...
 * BIRD: This is some of the first animation of the women in the film that we did. The Helen stuff is animated by Dave Mullins and the E stuff is animated by John Kahrs. They're both great scenes. What I like about Helen's scene is that, you know, she's completely thrown off by E. She's used to being in charge and E throws her off completely.
 * Edna: ...goodbye.
 * (wind howling)
 * (door opening)
 * BIRD: So now, Bob's back in the boardroom here and is surprised to find that the agenda has been changed.
 * (WALKER LAUGHS)
 * WALKER: "Guess I didn't get the memo."
 * (Bob gasps)
 * (Bob yells)
 * Syndrome: It's bigger! It's badder! Ladies and gentlemen, it's too much...
 * BIRD: This is the official entrance of our Syndrome character. We wanted to give him an entrance where he's in control, and Bob is kind of wondering, "What the heck is going on?"
 * WALKER: Who is this guy?
 * BIRD: Why is he wearing this costume?
 * Syndrome: After you trashed the last one, I had to make some major modifications. Sure, it was difficult, but you are worth it. After all...
 * BIRD: He gets a hint here, and is not made comfortable by the memory.
 * Syndrome: ...Buddy. And it's n to Incrediboy, either. That ship has sailed.
 * BIRD: The idea here is to have our villain be a little bit sympathetic. The roots of this problem go back. Bob made a mistake back then, not treating the kid a little more... ...with a little more grace. And the idea that I was trying to go for here was that, we don't often know how simple things, how big of an effect they can have.
 * Syndrome: ...whole countries who want respect. And they will pay through the nose to get it. How do you think I got rich? I invented weapons. Now I have a weapon only I can defeat. And when I unleash it.
 * (Bob grunts)
 * Syndrome: You sly dog! You got me monologuing. I can't believe it.
 * (Bob yells)
 * Syndrome: It's cool. Zero point...
 * BIRD: This is an idea that was... of the zero point energy, that I originally wrote for an opening that we didn't use, that you'll find on this DVD. And I was...
 * WALKER: I just love that he loses him. (LAUGHS)
 * BIRD: It's again, the mundane, yeah.
 * (splashes water)
 * BIRD: So, there's a fantastic water simulation here, by Martin Nguyen. What I as gonna say about the zero point energy is, I had some kind of corny name for the Immoba-ray, or something, that would have worked fine. But when I was researching it on the Internet, I found that there was actually a thing called zero point energy, that essentially does, in many respects, what is represented here. It makes heavy things weightless. It's something they're actually working on, which bends my mind.
 * (water explosion)
 * (Bob coughs)
 * (Bob sighing)
 * (Bob gasps)
 * (music playing)
 * Bob: Gazerbeam.
 * (music playing)
 * WALKER: That was a very difficult thing to get right, that Kronos shot.
 * BIRD: That Kronos shot. Yeah. The idea is that you can only read it from one angle.
 * WALKER: And we tried to resurrect some crabs from Finding Nemo to crawl all over.
 * BIRD: Right.
 * WALKER: But they... we couldn't get them.
 * BIRD: Right. The idea of Gazerbeam's skeleton being in the cave was... One of our story guys, Max Brace, suggested that. I had some other thing in there, and he suggested it. I thought that was a really great idea. We incorporated it into the film, and it ended up being a great little condensing thought.
 * (wind waterfall)
 * Edna: This project has completely confiscated my life, darling. Consumed me as only hero work can.
 * BIRD: Okay, here's another, I think, great two-person scene that Victor Navone animated, between Helen and E.
 * Edna: And it turned out so beautiful, I had to continue.
 * BIRD: We kind of had to send some of this stuff around a little bit. There's some great Dave DeVan animation right here. But, I feel like we all lined up in terms of how these characters move. We came to an agreement, what kind of walks they should have and how they carry themselves. And I think it's seamless, in terms of everyone always feeling consistent, even when they move from animator to animator. There's some wonderful design in this lab, too, I think. And very specific to E. And it's a nice contrast with the rest of her house.
 * WALKER: Yeah.
 * BIRD: There's amazing shading in here, by Bryn Imagire, and fabulous lighting by Janet Lucroy and the lighting crew. It has a lot of different surfaces on it and we're trying to have kind of a hushed mood in there. Again, it's slowing the film down, to take in this location, because it says something that E has this art gallery up top, but down below it's all...
 * WALKER: Like a UL lab, down below.