Over the Hedge- Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis on Over the Hedge
“It’s the hardest theatrical experience I’ve ever attempted, really,” Willis said. “You take away all of the actor’s tools. There are no props, no other actor to work with. There is not even somebody, most of the time, reading the lines. You’re just doing your lines and they continually change. I can’t think of a difficult enough metaphor for how hard this was. It’s like standing there in your underwear. You’re just vulnerable. They take away all the tools. Normally you have the other actors in the room and there’s a give and take, especially in comedy.”
The sporadic schedule of recording an animated voice shook up Willis’s normal process, with 16-18 sessions spread out over two years, conducted in whichever city Willis was shooting a live action movie.
“It would take me sometimes almost an hour to re-find the character and, sometimes, if my voice was scratchy from the work that I was doing during the day on another film up in Toronto, I wasn’t able to even find that voice again. I was in such distress based on the fact that I didn’t think that I was getting to it. I didn’t think that I was getting to the comedy. I didn’t think that I was getting to the character. I was so relieved when I saw a rough cut of the film, not even that I saw it but that I heard people laughing. I heard kids laughing at certain times and heard adults laughing at certain times.”
One crutch Willis had was that the filmmakers asked him to tap into his David Addison persona from the Moonlighting days. “I completely ripped that character off. That wasn’t even my idea. I was hired and that was one of the first things they said to me. They said, ‘What do you think about doing it like David Addison?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it’s something. It’s a way in.’ It’s some of his attitude and some of that devil may care kind of stuff but there are differences too I think. The overriding emotion in the actual doing of this or the actual creating of the character was just feeling so vulnerable and so lost and wishing to God that I had one of the actors there that I was supposed to be in the scene with. And they said, ‘No, no, it works better if you just do it by yourself.’”
But Over the Hedge wasn’t Willis’s first voiceover role. Why was this so much harder than Look Who’s Talking? “The stakes were much lower on Look Who’s Talking. They just said, ‘Say whatever the F you want. And the stupider the better.’ They held the baby up to a pair of woman’s breasts and I went, ‘Lunch.’ And they went, ‘Aha, that’s great. That was good.’ That’s what that movie was and it got a film that was headed directly for video got worldwide renown. And I did another animated thing called Rugrats Go Wild but that character already existed. That dog already existed. He just didn’t talk and I tried to put my voice to that but after this experience, I would go back and redo all my work in Rugrats go Wild. I would completely change everything.”
Now that Willis has seen Over the Hedge and knows what all the parts add up to, he is up for the challenge of doing it again. “Now I’m okay. Now I’ve lived through the great death. I’ve seen the big fire and I go, ‘Oh, fire doesn’t scare me anymore.’”
Over the Hedge comes to theatres on May 19th, 2005.
For the trailers, movie stills, posters, more movie info and full synopsis,
go to the Over the
Hedge Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
|
Add to Heffee!
