During our round table discussions for the #TomorrowlandBlogger event that I have talked about this week we got to interview some pretty cool people. We interviewed Thomas Robinson and Raffey Cassidy about their roles in Tomorrowland. We also interviewed Charita Carter and Mike Goslin, two amazing minds behind Disney. Our table was able to interview Brad Bird first. He is the director of Tomorrowland and many other great films. His films include: The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Jurassic World, and he is working on Incredibles 2 which is coming out in 2019. So safe to say that he knows how to make audiences really feel something. He is amazingly talented.
Brad Bird was ready for our questions. He was rapid fire answering and doing wonderfully. I guess you get used to interviews when you are a famous director. He said he had been making drawings at the age of three but they were in sequence. So he was making little movies though he didn’t realize it at the time. And then he saw the Jungle Book and he said something snapped in him. He said he realized that it was someone’s job to decide how a stuffy panther would act.
It wasn’t just any animal. It was a cat. It wasn’t just any cat, it was a panther. It wasn’t just any panther, it was a stuffy panther, and somebody got paid to sit down and imagine that. And suddenly, the adult world which seemed kind of dull and boring to me seemed suddenly very exciting to me, and that that was somebody’s job. And I started to realize that there are a lot of cool jobs in the world.
That is cool to me that he just thought at a young age that he wanted to do this and then he did. He captured the essence of his ‘stuffy panther’ as the director of so many amazing films. He said some of the props like the jet pack were real. He said when he was a kid that a jet pack seemed so close to being made. So he imagined what type of materials young Frank would have. So much detail went into these props. On the blu-ray combo release he did ‘Production Diaries’ which I really liked listening to. I asked him about it and he said that he had done them for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and people like them.
“The director is in a unique position on those films, a vantage point that’s good and sometimes it’s a confined space, and it’s literally the only space where you can see everything. And so I just started shooting movies on there and a lot of them were used on the extra features of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. So, when it came time to do this movie, I thought, well, let’s continue it. I actually had a little steady cam for some of the shots. So, It gives it a professional veneer. It’s still just an iPhone, but the resolution’s getting good.”
We asked Brad Bird what he would want audiences to take away from Tomorrowland and he said he didn’t want it to sound like broccoli. He doesn’t want to say its good for them but he wants to say it will provide them with nutrition later. He wants them to be entertained but he also wants them to know that ‘The future is not set. It’s in our hands; it’s fluid; it’s made every day by the actions of everyone, and that, um, don’t resign yourself to the negative future; help build another one.”
He took a group shot with us when it was all over. I was right behind him in the pink. You can get Tomorrowland on the blu-ray combo pack which has a ton of cool bonus features.
You can also get Tomorrowland Activity Sheets and Printables right now!
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