Gnomes are supposed to be good luck in a garden, protecting against pests and diseases. A mythic gatekeeper, in the way a Kitchen Witch is.
Kelly Asbury
I think what's universal about the story of 'Romeo and Juliet' is every one has grown up and done something that was rebellious against their parents' wishes, be it love or something else.
It happens a lot that a name actor will be signed on to a project in its germ stage.
Certainly in the case of 'Gnomeo & Juliet,' if it makes children or adults a little more interested in Shakespeare, there's nothing wrong with that!
In animation, there's not a medium I believe that's more collaborative. It is a team of people, of different disciplines, coming together. The decisions are made by consensus in many cases. My job as a director is to exercise the best judgement I can in terms of which decision is the best one to make for the movie.
Animation tends to have several different writers who serve different functions. I think, on a lot of animated features, there are a lot of writers who don't get credited. It's the policy at Disney, for instance, in deciding who gets credit. It depends on the writer's contract, so many things.
Films like 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Shrek' are hits because they hit on different levels with different age groups. Striking that balance is what I strive for. But I won't know if I've done it until the audience sees it.
The Smurfs - and they're this way in Peyo's comics as well - do have a rubbery indestructibility about them. They can get bruised & battered. But they then just sort of bounce back very quickly, like those classic cartoon characters Wiley Coyote and Tom & Jerry.
I want the audience to walk out of the theater feeling they got their money's worth. Every movie that I enjoy, I leave the theater with something to take with me.
There's a lot of movies, and I've made some of them that could be categorized this way, but there's definitely been a trend in animated features of all types to be a little bit cynical, if you will, to have a little bit of 'knowing' humor to them, kind of a wink to the audience.
I think Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet' is a work of genius.
I think 'West Side Story' is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, musicals ever put onscreen - or stage, for that matter. I, frankly, like Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet' very much, too. I grew up with that... I loved it. I loved the score; I loved the acting.
We are all rebellious teenagers. Sometimes we grow out of it, and sometimes we don't.
Shrek is the Mickey Mouse of DreamWorks.
I don't want to be the one accused of ruining the Smurfs.
I wish I had been a child when the Smurfs came on television.
The way I choose voice talent is I don't let them tell me who the actor is.
My favorite films left the camera rest, and the actors and characters have a stage to act. Move the camera when it's motivating.
Every animated film that I've worked on - whether it was as a story artist or as Head of Story or even as director - where we originally started out with our story and where we eventually ended up were often very different places.
Tim Burton, let's face it: he's into stitches.
On 'Shrek,' Eddie Murphy was locked in as the donkey before we'd even designed the donkey.
When you have a name actor, with a face that people recognise and a name that can go on posters or billboards and be able to appear on the talkshow circuit and tout the film, that's always a plus.
I look back at my childhood, and the films that I remember the most are things like 'Mary Poppins,' 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
I think a film should be appropriate to what it's trying to say or the characters in it.
I love all sorts of movies, whether made by Scorsese or Frank Capra. I love them all.
A lot of people say to me, 'Is this good, to do to a Shakespeare piece?' And I think, 'You know, 'West Side Story' did it very cleverly, in a different way.' But if you look at 'Bonnie and Clyde,' 'Titanic,' 'Avatar,' 'Grease,' 'Brokeback Mountain'... they're all 'Romeo and Juliet' stories.
Star-crossed lovers who have a destiny that isn't necessarily going to work in their favor - that's a universal story; that's an archetypal story.
What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?
I think Shakespeare, at his heart, was just the way all of us are that make movies: He wanted to entertain people.
I've seen animation features just languish until the right combination of things come along to keep it alive.
What I want to impart on any movie I work on is I want to make it entertaining. That's what I feel I do.
I'm in the entertainment business, and I make commercially entertaining animated features.
Smurfs must only eat Smurfberries. They can eat Smurfberry pie, they can have a Smurfberry sandwich, they can do whatever they want. But you can't have a Subway sandwich. It's got to be Smurfberries.
If you look at it, 'The Lion King' is very similar to 'Hamlet.'
I actually applied at Hanna-Barbera to work on 'The Smurfs' when I got laid off for a brief period of time from Disney. I didn't get the job. That was my first introduction to Smurfs.
I'm a lover of the great adventure films of the 1980s: 'Goonies,' 'E.T.,' 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' 'Star Wars.'
I wanted to create a world that presented the Smurfs with obstacles and challenges and really put them in a fish-out-of-water situation but also make them very active in getting out of their situation. Make them really the central characters.
I don't approach my movies with a target audience in mind. I try to make something that's true to the subject matter as much as possible, while still being entertaining and fun.
