Happy Feet
Interview: Geoge Miller On Happy Feet
“We were about to start doing [Mad Max 4] when George Bush and Tony Blair decided to go into Iraq,” said Miller. “The American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar, and we lost 25 per cent of our budget. But that's not a reason to
lament. Warner brothers had the script to Happy Feet. They said, ‘Come on, wecan't wait too much longer. So we started on this and I'm happy to have done it. It meant that I spent time in my home city and was able to take my kids to school
and stuff like that, and had an incredible learning experience. There's not been a film I learned so much on. I had no idea there were so man y mysteries to unravel about story telling, particularly working in the digital realm. I got a taste of it on the Babe films, but I never realized just how much there was to learn about filmmaking when you take on a film like this.”
Miller produced both Babes and directed the second one. At least with Happy Feet’s penguins, he didn’t have to train birds to keep the right mouth position. “It's obviously a lot easier working with computer-generated animals, but a lot slower. Look, animal trainers, particularly the ones we had on the Babe films, were really, really, surprisingly a lot easier to work with animals than one would normally think. But of course working with computer-generated creatures is just a matter of really painstaking work. But obviously you can get the creatures to do whatever you want. And when we first decided to do this movie, we realized we weren't ever going to be able to train penguins. They're not domestic animals. You can't go to Antarctica and screw around with their environment. It's a very delicate environment so this was the only way to do it.”
Happy Feet follows Mumble, a penguin with rhythm instead of song, as he’s cast out from his home. Though he grows in his quest, Miller never wanted to lose the childlike quality he had as a baby.
“Because we follow him from childhood to young adulthood, it was a question of getting used to the character, one way or the other. We considered having Mumble fully adult at the end of the movie, but the honest truth was I fell in love with him. Normally, you get sick of your characters when you work so long on a movie, but kept falling in love with the character and how he looked. I thought we spent so much time seeing him one way, it helped differentiate him from the other characters, where everyone looks the same. Plus, there was a kid at school, I went to an all-boys school, typically sports played a lot. And there was this kid that Mumble reminded me of, he matured very late, he didn't develop until a lot of the others were giant footballers and so on. I always remember that kid. He was very feisty. Deep down beneath that soft exterior, there's a lot of steel. His name was Butch. Somehow, there's a little bit of Butch in Mumble as well. I sort of like the idea of somebody being different. It was just a question of differentiating from everybody else. Also, he has six million feathers on him. The computing power is huge to do that and once we got him, I didn't want to lose that. So there were a lot of influences for keeping him that way.”
Happy Feet opens to theatres this Friday, November 17th.
For trailers, stills, more interviews, posters and movie info, go to the Happy
Feet Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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