Did you test any of these out on little kids?
Kris Pearn: Some of them actually came from kids. Whenever we would bring kids in here they would do foodimal drawings.
Cody Cameron: Did the Jellybees come from kids?
Kris Pearn: My kid came up with Jellybees. And then, one of our art directors kid’s had centipeas and we had llamabeans. Not all of them made it in the movie. But certainly, there’s a level of pun that is really achievable to five year-olds that I think it becomes interactive.
Cody Cameron: I think Lewis Carroll, I don’t know if he coined the term, but a portmanteau – where you take two words and combine them to make one word. A lot of these food-animal puns kinda come easily if you think about it. You’ve got a watermelon and an elephant, and you’ve got a watermelephant. And you think about, well it’s got a big body and it’s got a big trunk, so it could be the line. Stuff starts to fall in place in kinda a weird way.
Kris Pearn: I think that’s sorta where we started. We started with basically this movie as an extension of the first film. The first film was really a disaster film, so the characters were worried about what was going to hit them on the head and what was going to fall from the sky. We knew in this film we wanted to make it about monsters, what’s hiding in the shadows. As we began our story process, we organically knew we wanted to have these food creatures, so very quickly we started to make ourselves laugh with the puns. That kinda became the natural evolution just in our story room as we started bouncing ideas around.
Changing the subject a little, the guru guy – who did you base him off of?
Kris Pearn: Quite a few people. There’s definitely Richard Branson, skydiving with girls and all that kinda adventure stuff that he does. Definitely a bit of Steve Jobs and sorta his silhouette.
Cody Cameron: And also the technology. Lots of people on devices, and texting. And caffeine.
Kris Pearn: There’s a little bit of Richard Attenborough from Jurassic Park. That’s where the white beard came from. It’s sorta that idea that there’s these eccentric blue jean billionaires that like Walt Disney. He had a show on TV in the 80s. Carl Sagan is another one that we referenced, for anyone that grew up in the 80s and remembers The Cosmos.
We were kinda flirting with that world, kind of universal, eccentric people. That was an extension, once again, another idea that was in the first film that dropped out. We had Flint with his wall of achievement, and for a long time in the story he had a character named Vance LeFlour who he was trying to meet, and the whole movie was about him trying to meet this guy. We realized that as we went through the course of the first film that we didn’t have room for that storyline, so when we came back to do this one we liked the idea of graduating Flint and taking him into high school. The idea that he’s going to move on to a new social situation where he’s not the weirdo necessarily and how does that effect him. It gave us a lot of energy and just a great evolution for his character. Chester became that mentor.
Cody Cameron: I think that’s where the ‘V’ comes in with Chester V, for Vance LeFlour. A little remnant.
Do you continue to explore the relationship between Flint and his father?
Kris Pearn: Yes. At the end of the first film, Tim started to communicate with his son. So the idea here is that we’re taking Flint into emotional adolescence, so his dad is able to talk to him and he hugs him all the time, and now Flint’s kinda getting annoyed by his dad. They’re living in a one-bedroom apartment in San Franjose and he’s like ‘dad, you’re old, you can’t do things.’ He’s got that sorta teenager need to push away from his dad. When they get to the island, one of the big concepts of the island is that it’s like Flint’s head is cracked open and his creativity has spilled out everywhere. When Tim starts to bond with these pickles, it’s almost like a grandfather, grandson relationship. Tim almost needs Flint more in this movie than Flint needed his dad in the first one, and he goes through that arc.
Cody Cameron: And where Flint doesn’t like to fish, these pickles love sardines, and they love fishing, and it’s like it skipped a generation.
Kris Pearn: The other funny thing we do, that made Tim really happy, is they’re kinda like non-verbal little gurglers. The less they talk, the more Tim would talk. So we actually got to the point where he was singing songs to these pickles. That was like the natural evolution for Tim. This guy who doesn’t say anything is around people that don’t talk, he’s talking all the time. It gave us some place to go for him. Tim’s got a really fun story for this movie.
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