WGTC: What were some of the plot changes from when the story was introduced to you to the final cut of the movie?
Jimmy Hayward: I think every time you make one of these movies, the initial premise kind of remains and everything else changes. The changes are massive. It’s a sense of discovery as you go along and develop the characters and learn who they are and you figure out how they move. It’s a medium based on physical comedy and visual comedy and, you know, physical idiosyncracies that you learn while developing the animation for the characters that kind of define them. When I made Horton Hears a Who!, it was the same sort of thing. Once I got working with Jim Carrey and I got him going and we really started to develop the character, you have to go back and fit that all into the movie. It’s quite a process.
There was a time [in Free Birds] where Reggie’s father was in the movie. I mean, whole characters get taken out. One of the things we’ve tried to do is really simplify the story down to Reggie’s changes. Reggie evolves. It’s easy to fall into the trap of giving every single character a huge arc… but at the end of the day, you have to figure our whose movie it is. And it’s Reggie and Jake’s movie.
WGTC: How did you decide on which voice actors to use for some of the major parts?
Jimmy Hayward: The initial idea for this movie kind of came together from the guy who owns Reel FX, Tom K, and his relationship with Woody [Harrelson] and Owen [Wilson]. Those guys are all from Dallas and they’re all friends. And there was a great natural suggestion that Owen and Woody play those characters. There was a natural relationship with everybody. With Amy [Poehler], Amy and I have worked together before and we’ve had a great time working together. That was a natural one for me, too. People like Dan Fogler I work with again and again, so the cast held together very naturally.
WGTC: What about George Takei?
Jimmy Hayward: George Takei was a suggestion that was made by our executive producer Aron Warner. Scott and I were both struggling on who to make S.T.E.V.E [the navigating voice of the time machine] and we tried all these people out. We were given a list of about 15 different names. And both of us were immediately like, ‘George Takei! I can’t believe we didn’t think of George Takei!’ He’s so witty and funny and has such a distinctive voice. You know, I’m happy to call that guy my friend now. He’s such a pleasure to work with and he’s so funny. He works really hard. The direction I gave to him, because I didn’t want to make him sound like a GPS voice or Siri on your iPhone or something. The more I worked with George, the more I felt that if you humanize S.T.E.V.E., the better it was. So he kind of becomes Reggie’s spirit guide along the way. And right from the first time we did a test screening of the movie, instantly people gravitated toward his character. He was very important.
WGTC: I read that you do a lot of the voices for the storyboard process, and some of those voices become part of the movie itself. What is your experience with voice acting?
Jimmy Hayward: I’ve been doing it a long time in shows and movies that I’ve worked on. I always do cameos in everything that I do. For Horton Hears a Who, I’ll do a bunch of voices that I don’t take credit for. I’ve done it for a long time. I do scratch for a great many number of the characters. Scott [Mosier] voices the pizza guy [in Free Birds] and my head of story and myself are the Hazmats. It’s one of those things where I don’t intend to do so many voices. I only got credit for four, but I did quite a few.
It’s one of those things where I don’t want to make that choice as a director. I really rely on my producers with that. What’ll happen is I‘ll do the voices in scratch and then we’ll try replacing it with another actor. Or if I do it in scratch and it tests really well with an audience and everyone’s laughing at it, we’ll just leave it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s not like I set out to play everything. It’s one of those things that comes from a very natural process. I play Ranger in the film. Woody and I were working together on the characters because they’re each other’s nemesis in the film. It just naturally worked when we were working together in the studio.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Jimmy for talking with us. Be sure to check out Free Birds when it hits theatres this Friday.
