This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Hollywood is full of frenemies, but Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof are a rare pair of mutual admirers. Director Bird always knew he'd love an episode of Lost whenever Lindelof, the show's cocrea-tor, was listed as writer in the opening credits. And Lindelof's adoration of Bird, which he describes as "Chris Farley–esque", goes all the way back to Family Dog, Bird's 1993 animated TV series. They finally met in 2008, at the premiere of Speed Racer -- introduced by composer Michael Giacchino, who had worked on Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille, as well as Lost. Their first film together, Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney and Britt Robertson, hits cinemas on May 22. Though it shares a name with a world at Disney-land and is financed by the studio, the idea for the film came from an original concept -- and it was an especially challenging project for the pair.
WIRED listens in while they talk about collaboration, the cold war, a vision for a non-dystopian future and the ultimate Imagineer, Walt Disney.
WIRED: What's the first project the pair of you worked on together? Bird: I was directing Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, and I got into a tight spot where we had filmed the movie but there were a few narrative things that were really bothering me. And Damon was available to come in for a month and do some uncredited screenwriting. Lindelof: I think what Brad is trying to say is, when you have clarity problems or you need questions answered, you get Lindelof. Bird: Yes, well, I like to go against type. Lindelof: Exactly. Bird: There was very little wiggle room in these scenes because they had to fit into all the stuff that had already been shot. It was a very elaborate Rubik's Cube. And Damon just made it happen. It really impressed me.
**So how did Tomorrowland come to be?**Lindelof: I was familiar with Brad's history at Disney as an animator and his love for Walt, having listened to a lot of his DVD commentaries on his movies. We talked a lot about [Disney's design and development arm] Imagineering over a lunch on Ghost Protocol. When I started talking about Tomorrowland, I said I'd love to make a project that recaptured that idea of an optimistic future, which has become completely and totally absent from the landscape. Bird: At one time the future was consistently presented as this bright thing where all these problems were going to be solved. I remember that feeling of, wow -- starvation will be solved and the air will be clean, weapons will be obsolete. And gradually that vision has just been nibbled away until it's basically not there. What's in its place is this very dark, negative version that everyone seems to have accepted. Damon and I kept looking at each other and asking, what changed it? And is it possible to get back to it?
How clearly had you visualised the world of the movie when you jumped into writing it? Bird: Damon had been working with a guy named Jeff Jensen to craft this whole history. Lindelof: We spent six months just building the world. A lot of it was based on actual research we were doing about the history of the Walt Disney Company and, in particular, Walt's futurism and the 1964 World's Fair. We started to wonder: what if there was something more to the World's Fairs? What if they were actually stealth conventions for the most creative artists and inventors and scientists that the world had to offer? Bird: I loved that idea that the dreamers get together, away from the politics that brought them together, and ask, "What do we actually think?" The movie would have been two days long if we tried to make it about all that stuff. But those conversations fuelled the movie.
Did you worry about the cynicism of today's audience who think every future involves children battling to the death and zombies? Bird: Well, you align yourself with the audience's view, the way you understand it, and then you take on the questions. So one of our lead characters is a 17-year-old girl who is very bright and is confronted with negativity on all sides. Lindelof: The movie has to acknowledge the dystopia you're talking about. And it has to acknowledge that we love it. In fact, I think you just inadvertently pitched the next progression. Bird: Can I pitch a title? The Hunger Brains. Lindelof: From Planet of the Apes to the Matrix movies, the future is something that happens to us. Brad and I wanted to have a character say, "I'm going to make the future happen -- I'm not going to let the future happen to me."
**Was there a moment when you thought, uh-oh, where is this story going?**Lindelof: The downside of having all this time to build the world is that you need to pack it into a two-hour story. Jeff and I did a lot of that early story work, but then Brad and I wrote the script together. And in any process with a degree of innovation, you make a lot of mistakes and you forget what it is you're trying to say. Bird: I've never had a project be so finicky. The line between too much information and not enough was razor thin. It was like, "too much... not enough... too much..." and then "oh there, don't move -- that's it." But look, original movies of any size are an endangered species. Familiarity is all the rage. So if you're doing something that doesn't have its rhythms pre-set, everybody's a little bit uncomfortable.
**Tomorrowland is a problematic world at Disneyland -- anything presented as "The Future" is immediately dated, right?**Bird: One of the last things Walt did was rebuild Tomorrowland; it reopened in 1967, six months after he died. And by design it was a pain in the ass: it was the only land that had to always be under construction, because the future is always shifting. Michael Eisner's answer to that was to put it all in Jules Verne's time, so it wouldn't have to change. So now people don't think of Tomorrowland as cool -- it's a future that's locked in stasis. One of my fantasies with this project is that it might inspire Disney to get re-excited about the idea of continually giving people who visit the park a glimpse of what could be around the corner. Lindelof: I think one of the real reasons for all these dystopian movies, TV shows and video games is that it's just easier to wreck things than it is to build something new. Bird: I see Walt Disney as the epitome of a dreamer. He was a very forward thinker. If we captured even a glimpse of that in this movie, we will have succeeded.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
