Come meet Brad Bird, Director of Tomorrowland

“Exploring what it means to be alive, that’s what storytelling is all about.”

 ~ Brad Bird

 

You know when you meet someone and as you speak with them you are blown away with their creativity and insight into humanity? That somehow, their brains are working on a whole other level – kind of what it must of felt like to have meet Walt Disney!  Well, that is what I felt while talking with Brad Bird, the Director of Tomorrowland as part of the round table interviews we had at the Tomorrowland Disney Media Event September 21st.  You might have seen other movies he worked on such as The Incredibles (2004, Writer and Director) and Ratatouille (2004 Director and Screenwriter) as well his work on The Simpsons (1989, in several capacities). Our table was the last one of the day but he was ready for this group of moms!

 

The first question I blurted out (yes, blurted as he didn’t really have a chance to sit down) “was it was true (and I wasn’t sure as I had read it on Wikipedia) that the bad guy (Syndrome) in The Incredibles was modeled after him?”  He chuckled,  had a seat and told us:

 

“Unfortunately it’s the bad guy, right? Tony Fucelli and Teddy Newton were the character designers in the movie and I think they thought that was a good idea. The last person who can see yourself is yourself? We were well into production and the model had crazy hair everywhere.  I don’t have crazy hair.  And I don’t have delusions of taking over the world. So, I didn’t see it until it was too late and then I was like “yeah, you jerks, yeah. Very funny.”

We all got a laugh out of this and when you see the picture I took of him above and the one of Syndrome you can see the resemblance don’t you?!  And you understand how I couldn’t resist asking the question!

But what I found most fascinating about this talented director is how he approached Tomorrowland and how much thought he gave to the idea of how our future would look.  He spoke about how “we are prisoners of our own view of the future and that science fiction shows a fable about how a different future is a click away.” But he wanted to portray the message through the movie that we decide what the future will hold.  Not some fable that in all honesty, mostly shows a sort of dreary future.  Think of all of the dystopia movies and books these days as they tend to portray a world of desolation and despair.

While listening to Brad, I understood how much it meant to him as a storyteller to show the audience that they can decide what the future holds – for themselves and for our world.

 

When asked what the inspiration was behind Tomorrowland this is what he had to say:

 

“I was at the very end of Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol and we had tested very well, but there were some things in the story that I was not happy about. Fortunately we worked efficiently and we were still a little bit under budget. If we were really surgical and careful, we could fix the things that I wanted to fix. Damon Lindleoff came in to help me fix the writing in a couple of these things. Some of them were tricky because we had to use a lot of stuff that we’d already done and had to fit in but also solve some problems. I was working with him and we were having lunch and I asked him what he was doing next and he mentioned this project.

We fell into a conversation about how we viewed the future when we were kids.  The “popular vision of the future” versus “the vision of the future now.” When we were kids, the world was not a better place – there were race problems, there was Vietnam, there were assassinations, there was the Cold War… There were plenty of bad things going on. But somehow, people managed to hold up a positive vision of the future and that we were gonna solve all these problems  and get there. Somewhere in the intervening years, that vision got corroded into “it seems to be that the only credible vision of the future that people will take seriously now, is a dark vision of the future”, where resources are gone and the planet is ruined and that we’re all on a road to Apocalypse.

That seems to be the only version that people take seriously now. We wondered why did that change and could we make a sort of “fable” about asking that question? Is there another way to see the future and I think that we all have a hand in making that future. If we resign ourselves to this “other future” then it will happen. But if we say that “No, we, we’re actually in charge of the future, all of us, and that if we set our sights to something different we can get there.”

 

 

One of the moms asked if there was some anticipation about seeing what Tomorrowland’s going to look like.  Did you want to show more of Tomorrowland in a film?

 

“I think ideally you kind of want to because it’s a fun place. But the story that we were telling, was more of a road movie. In retrospect maybe the title shouldn’t have been Tomorrowland, but it’s a great title. I think that it led people to expect a movie that took place entirely in Tomorrowland and was just “fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.” And we kind of said, “What’s the problem? What’s the problem? It can’t just be fun, fun, fun in  Tomorrowland with people jumping on trampolines that shoot you a mile in the air,” and, a jet pack parties. There has to be an arc to the story and there has to be a resistance. We somehow have to get to the subject that intrigued us, which was “Why did the vision of the future change and can we make a fable about that?”

It always was a road movie, but we probably could’ve talked about that earlier. I didn’t want to say what the movie was, before people saw it. But I think in some ways the movie was a prisoner of its expectations about what people thought it was going to be, and then when it wasn’t that, about half actually, got angry. The other half was willing to take the journey that we laid out and see it for the movie that we meant it to be.

I’m interested to see the only critic who’s reliable 100% of the time. Time. I’m anxious to see how it is perceived when it’s free of the expectations of it.  When people just stumble across it like I’ve stumbled across some of my favorite movies, not knowing anything about it, and just say, “What’s the first scene? What, oh that’s interesting, where’s that going to lead?” And just lets the story be told. I wonder if it’ll be perceived differently.”

 

 

 

I do believe Tomorrowland will stand the test of time and those who did get upset about the movie not meeting their expectations might look at the movie with fresh eyes.  Our family really enjoyed Tomorrowland and I look forward to seeing what Brad Bird has up his sleeve in The Incredibles 2 which he said they are working on!  Yay Syndrome!

Note: We were provided accommodations and trip to Disneyland but this does not affect our opinion in any way.

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