How To Train Your Dragon - Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois interview

CHRIS Sanders and Dean DeBlois talk about some of the challenges of directing DreamWorks Animation’s hit movie How To Train Your Dragon, especially since they came onto the project at such a late stage. They were speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. The 3D animation is incredible, as are the flying sequences. Were they the toughest to get right?

Dean DeBlois: Strangely, 3D as a process has been integrated into the studio so well that it’s not something we have to spend a whole lot of time integrating on a scene by scene basis. There are a group of people whose sole dedication it is to see to that. It’s almost seamless in our process. Really, the only question we had at the beginning was whether we wanted to be saddled with it. Were there certain 3D concerns that would dictate a pace or length of shot?

Very early on into the process, as soon as [cinematographer] Roger Deakins became involved in our film we all went to see Coraline, because we’d heard that it was a really tasteful use of the technology. Sure enough, when we watched it and saw that you can have soft focus, or you could pick your shots and compositions, or dial the 3D up and down according to what works story-wise, and never let it be gimmicky, we were able to decide that 3D wouldn’t be the cart that leads the horse… rather we’d use it to amplify emotional moments, dial up the dynamics of, say, the flying sequences but never to go a gimmicky route.

Q. How come you decided to go for Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson as Scottish Vikings?

Chris Sanders: [Laughs] OK, here’s the deal! We’re not the first directors to have been on this project. Of all the people in the room, we’re the last ones to come to the project [in the October before last]. I was working on a different DreamWorks film, in fact, before being asked to come onto this one. They wanted to change direction and they were really under the gun. The casting, except for Craig Ferguson, was already done. So, we kind of went with Gerard Butler… we didn’t want him to put on another accent and asked him to be him. We let the Scottish accent be out there and that kind of helped us to decide that Craig Ferguson would be a great addition because we hadn’t quite yet cast Gobber. So, we cast Craig and it seemed to fit. We thought the adult Vikings could then Scottish accents and the younger Vikings – being a younger generation who might have lost their accent a little bit – could be American. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense [laughs]!

Q. Were there discussions about how you were going to depict violent events? There is a lot of peril in the film?

Dean DeBlois: That came from the very day we started on the film. Part of the reason that Jeffrey Katzenburg had brought us into the mix was because the project had kind of spun its wheels a little bit trying to adapt Cressida’s plotline, which is very whimsical and great… but what Jeffrey wanted out of the world wasn’t necessarily satisfied by the plot of that first book. He just wanted something that had more breadth, more action, more adventure and so when we can onto the project he said: “Look at it with a fresh eye, keep the spirit of what’s going on… the world, absolutely, but take the fact that you have multiple breeds of dragons, big burly Vikings and this larger than life world and give us something that has scale, peril, jeopardy and real-world stakes and animalistic behaviours that you’d see in what we’d consider to be the best of the fantasy adventure films out there.”

So, that was our mandate from the start. He wanted a father-son relationship, he wanted a David Vs Goliath ending, which was present in the book… but he wanted to take it and expand it. So, we decided from the beginning that we should stick to something like ranchers and wolves… to have two very distinct clans being at odds with each other for ages and it the story of the one who bridges that divide by taking a chance and befriending a wounded enemy. In doing so, he steps beyond the line that any of his clan would have ever done and changes the world. That gave us real world stakes… and it means that if you get blasted by fire, you will die. This is not a cartoon universe. It elevated it to a sense of reality that colours the entire film, especially when added to Roger Deakins’ cinematography.

Q. Did you deliberately go for a feline quality to the main dragon?

Dean DeBlois: The dragons in general were exciting and really, really fun. Those characteristics we were able to give all of them came out of the book. The unique thing about this story, as far as the dragons are concerned, is that any other dragon movie or story that I’ve ever seen either has one dragon or most of the dragons built off that one model. In this world, we have different species. So, from the get-go everyone was inspired by that. We actually wrote these detailed descriptions of them, so each dragon has a unique set of characteristics. Toothless is actually animated by an animator who didn’t know he was a cat person until he bought a cat. He actually loves his cat and observes it very closely. So, there are a few moments in there where he’s very, very cat-like – but there are also a few moments when he’s also very dog-like and also some where he’s a little more like a horse. But those were all deliberate.

Chris Sanders: The Toothless design was also based partially on a black panther. We decided early on to go for something a little more mammalian because we had very reptilian dragons in the rest of the cast. So, this one was a little tougher, smaller, blacker, faster… the ghost of the Viking world.

Q. Did you ever feel under a lot of pressure given the time constraints placed upon you when you came on board? You both seem very relaxed…

Dean DeBlois: It was really cool. There’s some upsides to being on that kind of a schedule actually, because you make decisions and you move on. We only had time to make it one more time, so the entire studio knew the game we were in. As a result, everyone was really on their game and we made those decisions and moved forward. Yeah, it was a lot of hours… but the upside was that it seems like it went so fast. But we had a lot of great elements to begin from. We also benefited from a crew that had done an amazing amount of work on this before we even came on. Most of the characters were made, the environments were created… we made some adjustments per the changes we made on the story. But the crew really, really brought it home. So, it was a lot to worry about but that made it easier in a way because it meant we just worried about the story. We didn’t worry about the animation, which relieved us of a huge amount of development work. We just jumped into the story and the characters and it leapt off the ground pretty fast.

Q. Are we talking franchise? There are eight books… so how close have you stayed to those?

Chris Sanders: Well, certainly the movie departs from the book… in Cressida’s book the dragon can speak, or at least Hiccup can speak to the dragons and he has both feet! There are several points of departure. I don’t think we can be so presumptuous as to assume this will be a hit… but if it is, there will be more.