Why Did Brad Bird Take ‘Ray Gunn’ to Skydance Instead of Pixar?

On a balmy April afternoon at London’s Abbey Road Studios, a 74-piece orchestra including violinists, cellists, flautists and even an organist gathers in Studio One. The iconic room, which has hosted music legends from Edward Elgar to Harry Styles, has been painted “Toy Story” blue; The color is fitting, considering the reason everyone is here today is to record the score for “Ray Gunn,” the new feature-length animation by Pixar legend Brad Bird, the mastermind behind “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.”

The film, which has been taking shape in Bird’s mind for three decades, is not a Pixar or Disney project (more on that later), but a Skydance Animation production that will premiere on Netflix on December 18 (it will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 10).

The orchestra at Abbey Road is conducted by Bird’s long-time collaborator, composer Michael Giacchino. “Ray Gunn” is the duo’s sixth project together since first teaming up for “The Incredibles” in 2004, and one that Giacchino (who won an Oscar for Pixar’s “Up” in 2010) has had more than two decades to prepare. “We talked about this movie during ‘The Incredibles,'” the composer said when we spoke a few months later. “I’ve known this for a very long time.”

Accordingly, given the key role of music in the film, Bird first conceived the idea for “Ray Gunn,” a noir detective adventure set in a “Jetsons”-style retro future, after hearing the B-52s’ “Planet Claire.” To Bird, the tune sounded like a cross between the theme song to the 1960s crime drama “Peter Gunn” and a “50s monster sci-fi movie,” Bird said in an interview the day before the film’s premiere. “And I said, ‘This isn’t ‘Peter Gunn.’ What’s this?’ Then I said, ‘This is Ray-Gun.’ Then I went,’Ray Gunn: It is a male name. “He’s a detective, but that’s in the future.”

But the idea was shelved when other projects came their way: Pixar’s sophomore project “Ratatouille” and its follow-up “Incredibles 2,” among them the live-action movie “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “Tomorrowland” and the abandonment of an attempt to adapt Will Eisner’s graphic novel “The Spirit.” Describing his mind as “one big workshop,” Bird would occasionally come back and “fix” “Ray Gunn” and bid his time to bring it to life (the film failed at other studios, including Warner Bros.).

It was “Mission: Impossible” that paved the way for the impossible, which eventually became Bird’s real-life mission. “It happened [Skydance’s] second movie, and everyone was happy with the outcome,” says Bird, adding that it was Tom Cruise’s turn to take over the franchise. So when the opportunity arose to pitch another idea to the studio, “Ray Gunn” was the obvious choice. (The move also reunited Bird with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, now president of Skydance Animation.)

“I never pitched it to Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t exactly in Pixar’s wheelhouse,” Bird explains, citing the studio’s reputation for appealing to younger audiences, unlike what it was aiming for with “Ray Gunn.” “If you put a Pixar label on it people will say, ‘Oh, it’s aimed at the same audience the other movies are aimed at,’ and inevitably some will say, ‘My little Jimmy wouldn’t be happy with that.’ says.

Bird expands further, noting that there are “10 billion animated movies” for children, even though they make up the majority of movie-going audiences, and far fewer for teens and adults. For them to make animated films “shouldn’t have been a controversial decision,” Bird says, “yet allocation ministers have always treated it that way. [at Pixar].” (He is returning to Pixar for his next project, the third “Incredibles” movie.)

Skydance had a different approach. “When my thought [they] “That’s what came into it, was that they moved with me in this slightly different audience,” says Bird. “So there it is.” Skydance CEO David Ellison, producer of ‘Ray Gunn’: was it just in name or in action? “Well, he was more involved in the early days,” Bird says. “But his… his plate is full.” The director indirectly stated that Ellison was working with Warner Bros. He talks about his latest fight to buy Discovery. Bird will remain undecided on whether he thinks Ellison will stick to the promise he made as part of his bid that Skydance would produce at least 30 feature films a year. “All of this is beyond my pay grade,” he says, dodging the question.

Even as Skydance has become the latest lightning rod for an increasingly polarized and repressed Hollywood, Bird is a pragmatist. Later in our conversation, he states that after shooting “Iron Giant”, he brought the newly emerged “Incredibles” idea to Pixar. “A lot of the ‘Iron Giant’ team was initially upset with me because they felt like they were hand-drawn. [animation] and I’m going for the new sexy CG,” Bird recalls. “And I said I didn’t really care about the technology part. “I’m going to Pixar because they preserve storytelling.”

Coincidentally, protecting art — rather than exploiting it — is one of the themes of “Ray Gunn,” as the eponymous private investigator (voiced by Sam Rockwell) uncovers a nefarious conspiracy involving superstar singer Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who has a big secret.

According to Giacchino, the trick to scoring a film this full of intrigue is to keep the audience guessing. “Probably the second most difficult thing was making sure everything was thematically coherent at all times so I didn’t give the audience something they shouldn’t be thinking about,” he notes. (In fact, he says the hardest thing was the intimate scene when Gunn and Nova first open up to each other. “He really had to hit every emotional beat in this perfect way,” he explains.)

Bird may have written “Ray Gunn” almost three decades ago, but its themes of art, technology and corporate greed resonate as much now as they did in the late 1990s. He says the script changes “less than you’d think” from the first draft until the film is finished.

“A lot of things people say [the film] Bird continues: “People are people and greed is greed, and the flaws of people make good material for movies. If that’s what drives the story, then the story won’t get old because it’s about eternal things rather than things that were in the news last week.”