Brad Bird weathers 'Tomorrowland' turmoil
Some people really liked Tomorrowland. Some people really didn’t.
And even now, director Brad Bird is slightly amused about how down the middle reactions were for his very Disney sci-fi fairy tale since its theatrical release in May.
“Because we were secretive about it, suddenly that became ‘Oh they must have an M. Night Shyamalan twist in it!’ ” Bird says. "And then when there wasn’t a twist in it, they were like, ‘We were promised a twist!’ I don’t know what to do about that stuff. I’m just trying to tell a story.”
With Tomorrowland out now on digital platforms and Oct. 13 on Blu-ray and DVD, folks get another chance to check out the family-friendly movie, where young Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is teamed with a reclusive inventor (George Clooney) and recruited by a strange little girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) to save a parallel universe that once was a place for Earth’s greatest and brightest minds to work their magic.
Bird, whose remastered animated classic Iron Giant can be seen in select theaters this Sunday, discusses with USA TODAY Tomorrowland’s mixed reviews, the secretive role Athena plays and what he really thinks of apocalyptic films.
This extended scene we’re debuting exclusively here has Keegan-Michael Key’s store owner explaining to Casey what Tomorrowland is. Why did you end up cutting it down?
It felt like it was tapping the breaks a little bit and we had to lighten its load a little bit. Because we were dealing with a kind of complication notion of this secret society and the fact that it’d been around for 100 years — and in a parallel universe for a good chunk of that – it was easy to want to explain more and more about it. But the problem was, the more you explained, the more questions that came up and your movie was derailed. Getting the tone right and getting the balance between information and momentum, that was the hardest thing. And it was in the whole movie, not just part of it.
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That scene is great because you a store full of toys and things for children of the 1980s. What was your favorite piece of memorabilia?
It’s full of stuff that I like. I liked the Han Solo in carbonite. It was not only exploring all the movies that excited me like Star Wars and Close Encounters, but it was also being able to also stick in a few things I had a hand in or studios I was involved with. Zurg is in there — even though I didn’t work on Toy Story 2, it’s a Pixar thing. I have several Iron Giants and stuff from The Simpsons like The Comic Book Guy in a superhero outfit on a shelf prominently placed.
You guys didn’t talk about Athena at all in the run up to the movie, so she was one of the cooler surprises.
You know what, it’s like the movie itself. It was really good for half of the audience, and half of the audience was (mad) we didn’t say it. Why didn’t we show her and why didn’t we advertise her and all of that. But we felt there was no way to really advertise her and there be the surprise of her character. For better or for worse, we very carefully elected to not feature her until the movie was out.
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Was there something specific that influenced her character?
I was inspired by my favorite Disney animated film Pinocchio, in that Pinocchio is a thing that was made out of love and given life and is experiencing the world through a very unique set of eyes. (Athena is) a singular creation and very much done by someone who was imaginative and full of heart. In many instances, the love put into creating her actually created the doubt that existed within her about what life is and what her role in it is. The act of creating somebody to find and support dreamers is a loving act, and like a Stradivarius, the love existed in the thing itself.
When you see mixed reviews to your movie — one of the few original flicks this past summer — how do you react to that as a filmmaker?
Well, I don’t think you react any one way. Obviously it was disappointing to me, and even when the films were more universally received, I stopped reading criticism because I stopped feeling like I was learning anything from it. The gist of some comments that I did get was that some people felt we were wagging our finger at them if they liked apocalyptic movies. We like those movies as much as anyone else. I love Terminator 2 and The Road Warrior and Blade Runner. We were wondering why is there no other point of view about the future and does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we keep imagining that that’s the only future and we have no say in creating it. Our desire to show perhaps another way to look at it was either seen as false or trying to shame people who enjoy the stories that feature the apocalypse. Unfortunately I can’t go with every filmgoer to a film and go, "Oh no, that’s not what we meant. What we meant was this…”
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It almost seems like we’re not the dreamers we used to be.
I don’t know, maybe that’s a negative way to take it. (When) all of that stuff — expectations and whatever marketing does and whatever other movies are around that it’s "competing against" — goes away and the film just sits like a book on a book shelf … I feel good about people discovering us. Iron Giant has completely become what it is based on people bumping into it and then recommending it to other people to bump into. That’s the way that I choose to think about the history of this one. There were a lot of people who didn’t go to the theaters because the reviews were mixed and they saw it on an airplane. It’s kind of sad that they had to be a captive audience to encounter it, but I’ve got a lot of emails of people going, "Wow, I saw it and I love it and I’m going to buy it so I can see it again." You just do your best telling the story and then it’s like a child: It goes out into the world and does what it does.