A couple years back we interviewed Chris McKay about the then-soon-to-be-released animated phenomenon that was The LEGO Movie. McKay was credited as animation director on that mega-hit, and now ascends to the directorial throne for this Bat-centric effort that he joined Steve Newall to natter about the other day.
FLICKS: The last time we talked was around the previous LEGO film. And at that point, we had a good chat about things like interpreting [The LEGO Movie directors] Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s ideas and bringing them to life. Obviously here you’re working from a template that you yourself helped set – that must be a bit of a different experience.
CHRIS McKAY: Well, Phil and Chris very generously allowed me to direct the movie and Warner Brothers agreed that I could do it. They liked working with me on the first one and gave me this opportunity. But yeah, it’s different when you’re the main guy in charge. And also having The LEGO Movie be as successful as it was, you know those guys are a hard act to follow. It was quite a challenge to follow up the first LEGO movie. And so the point of view that we took on this thing was that this is a spin-off in the LEGO universe, but isn’t directly a sequel to The LEGO Movie. This is a movie that’s about Batman, about Gotham City. The thing I pitched for the studio that I wanted to do, is I said that I wanted to direct, basically, a Jerry Maguire as directed by Michael Mann, with a lot of jokes in it. That that was sort of the take I had on the movie. And they agreed and let me do it.
Yes, you’ve got a lot to live up to. But I think some of the choices that are made with this film, in particular, it being a story about Batman and not trying to necessarily emulate the larger universe aspects of the previous film, is really smart.
There’s a lot of Batman stuff out there in the world but no film, especially no live-action film, can sort of take the point of view that we want to, make a movie about Batman trying to fix his main problem. Trying to get over this thing that happened to him when he was a kid. And that’s what we look for when we’re making these LEGO movies, is “what’s a really unique way in that no other film can do?” You’ve got a lot of flexibility with an animated movie, and especially one that’s animated with toys. We take that responsibility seriously, that we can do stuff that other people can’t do that can be maybe more original or offbeat. And that’s sort of what we want all of the LEGO movies to be, those are the watch words that we want to develop all the LEGO movies by.
It really does preserve the sense of the license that’s afforded to a child – or childish adult – to play with toys in ways that wouldn’t be allowed otherwise. Is it a different situation when you’re taking such a well-known and valuable and protected character and putting him at the center of a film, as opposed to making a hilarious, but brief, cameo?
You run that risk of sort of overexposing the character, maybe. Besides Jerry Maguire, there’s a lot of models for movies like this: About a Boy, The Life Aquatic, Scrooged, A Christmas Carol. You know, these stories of people who are full of themselves, not very self-aware, are cut off from the rest of the world, from their own emotions. And it just felt like Batman, out of all the characters that we were working with, has a very clear second and third act, because we could play in this world and do something that maybe no other filmmakers have done – or maybe that they’ve only approached in The Killing Joke or something like that.
We can do stuff. We can kind of explore and have fun and so to be able to be given that license, to me feels really liberating. Like, at least we’re trying for something different and unique. It’s the kind of thing I would like to see live action movies do, too. I mean, I think at a certain point you can do that kind of thing once they’ve maybe established these characters and universes and then try for different stuff, follow different models. I think that’s what’s interesting, when they sort of take a movie and they kind of have a genre approach to a superhero movie. I find those movies really fascinating and interesting and fun. So I’m hoping we can do more stuff like that.
Well in that sense, ‘Lego Batman’ arrives at a time when the possibilities of that approach with ‘Logan’ are becoming apparent. It’s kind of funny that it takes a LEGO form to make that argument in a way.
What I found working at Robot Chicken is that in doing animation with toys, you can get away with more stuff than you could in live action or even another forms of animation where you’re trying to be more representational or something. We can be a little bit more on the cutting edge of what you can do with this sort of thing because I think people accept the tonal shifts a little bit more readily. You can go from earnest to silly and absurd on a dime. That’s exciting for me. I love playing. I’m a cinephile. I study movies. I love every aspect of making movies. I get super nerdy about turning the story and developing the story and how you can play with big ideas in an interesting way. I’m a big B-movie filmmaker fan. Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher. I like these movies that sort of smuggled in other ideas in sort of a genre wrapping. That’s what interests me about making movies is movies that operate on multiple levels. That’s what I like about movies.
One luxury you’ve definitely got in this situation is that a live-action filmmaker, perhaps especially Christopher Nolan, would never dream of casting Doug Benson as a supporting villain.
[Laughs] Yes, that’s where Christopher Nolan and I differ, is that I would cast Doug Benson! Obviously, you must know that he does the Bane voice on his podcast. And when I used to travel back and forth between downtown Sydney and AMA Logic, I used to walk occasionally to work. It was a good sort of healthy walk and got to see Sydney and just kind of have a little breather before and after work. And I used to listen to podcasts on the way in and so Doug Benson’s Doug Loves Movies was one of my favorites. And he was also a fan of the first LEGO movie, so I thought we should cast him. Especially because I wanted to do that thing where it’s the Tom Hardy voice in this character.
I’m curious, since you helped set the template for the first film, whether you’d sort of gone, “Oh shit, why did I make that decision last time,” and whether you’d found yourself painted into any kind of a corner at any point as a result.
It’s one of these things where everyone has a point of view on what made that movie work, like everyone, whether it’s at LEGO or the studio or Chris, Phil, and Dan. And I think that people took different things, in success they sort of took different things from that first movie and thought that, well, “it’s got to have a live action thing, that’s what people want”. Or “well it’s got to have multiple characters from other worlds, that’s what makes it a LEGO movie”; “There’s got to be LEGO building as a theme”. I think those were the corners that we painted ourselves into and those were the things I tried to dance around with this movie. But for me again, at the end of the day I just kept going, if it isn’t about Batman and the emotional story that he’s dealing with, if it doesn’t service that, then it has to kind of go away, because that’s the movie that I think people are going want to watch.
‘The LEGO Batman Movie’ 3D session times & 2D times
