The T-shirts, then… When a crew finishes on a film, they design and make their own T-Shirts. I remember that on the set of Titanic, the crew apparently had different T-shirts every week, depending on how things were going. That was during the massive overruns I think. I never heard that! Oh my god. So were the crew coming out with ASCII versions of ‘I survived a Don Hall film’ or something? Can we talk about the post-credits sequence in Big Hero 6 too, then. Because as I understand it, it came very late in the day. You’d done one on your previous film, Winnie The Pooh… We did, yeah… Well, we had talked about it. And we got so busy finishing the film that it was way in the back of our heads. We just kind of forgot, actually. When we went to see Guardians Of The Galaxy, we got really scooped. It horrified us, that people were sat waiting for an end credits thing, because of the Marvel DNA. We didn’t want people to leave the movie disappointed. So we did a five minute brainstorm, and came up with the idea of [spoiler redacted], and then Chris wrote and storyboarded that scene. How long did that take then, start to finish? Because if you started that in July… No, no, no! August! August! So if you started it then, the film had to be locked by what, end of October? Yeah. We pushed it so to the wire anyway. It had to be done by the wrap party, and that was October. We had to score it too, so October somewhere. With Winnie The Pooh, it felt that our mandate wasn’t to make any original thing. To me it was restoring a beautiful old Victorian home, or something like that. One that had been… had some poor, tasteless remodelling done! It felt like we had to take it back to Bear Wood and really let A A Milne’s original stories inform us. And they were very deliberately paced. And it was true to what they were. Those characters don’t have big problems. To them, they’re big. But, you know, on the outside looking in, they’re not. So to me it just fit what we were trying to do with Winnie The Pooh, which was return it to its roots. This one, on the other hand, I was concerned. I think Chris was too. That we were being a bit too slow at the beginning of the film, and it was a long way to get through all of that story that we needed to tell. That’s just part of being a director though. When we tested it, and watched it with audiences, it felt like people were in it. They were buying into the characters. So the fact that we were able to take that time and set everybody up… there’s a lot of things we had to set up in that story! It’s a huge list, and it was really hard to get it all condensed into that screen time. The bot fight right at the start kicks the movie off not with a huge action sequence or anything like that, but with a fun bit of business. Generally every screening I’ve been in with audiences, when megabot wins and he jumps back down and takes the Iron Man pose, people applaud! As a filmmaker it’s great to know people laugh at that. And they’re buying in. And we’ve hooked them, like you might with an action scene in a Bond film. It was really gratifying to think we’ve hooked them here, now we can slow down and tell some story. Because it’s a lot, and it’s our act one! So do you get Robot Wars in America? I like to think that the BBC Two classic was an influence here! When Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck talked to us after Frozen had been released, I talked to them about the strangest audience reaction they’d had to their film. And they described a moment where, at the point Prince Hans reveals himself, a man stood up and applauded loudly. So then: have you had a screening where the reaction has gone wildly against what you’d expect? Absolutely. I screened the movie at CalArts, my alma mater. There’s a scene at the beginning of the film where Hiro is talking to Tadashi. And Tadashi says ‘what will mom and dad say”, and Hiro points out that “they’re gone, they died when I was three, remember?”. And I was wondering what the hell was going on. I did a Q&A afterwards, and I meant to bring it up there, but I forgot. It was clear that they’ve loved the movie, but I only found out later why they were laughing. And it was because they had an animation teacher, and that was his scene that he brought up to show them. So it was actually a laughter of recognition. Oh, that’s the scene… But for an hour and a half? I’m like dying! Why are they laughing? This is not funny! Big Hero 6 is released in the UK on January 30th. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
