Brad Bird Talks Long-Gestating Passion Project ‘Ray Gunn’ & Portraying “Characters Who Are Desperate” In Utopia — Contenders London

“It seems like the only way to look at the future these days is as dystopia,” said director Brad Bird at Deadline’s Contenders London this weekend. “And that’s fine. I love a lot of movies that take that thing, but there are other ways to look at the future too, and you can.”

Bird was talking about his new animated movie Ray Gunn, which features Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits in the voice cast. The Netflix and Skydance Animation production is set in Metropia, a gigantic city in the alternate future inhabited by aliens and humans as seen from a 1939 perspective. The story revolves around private eye Raymond Gunn (Rockwell), who is drawn into a case involving murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova, voiced by Johansson.

“What interested me was having utopia, but also showing that characters are desperate,” said Bird. “They’re still lying. They’re still murdered…all those things are there, but it’s a little more interesting if you set it in an idealized setting. So, buildings are over a mile high, and aliens and humans are coexisting, and that kind of thing became very interesting to me.”

Bird, who was joined on stage by the film’s composer Michael Giacchino, talked about the film’s long journey to screen. Ray Gunn is a 35-year passion project from The Incredibles and Ratatouille director Bird.

“The easiest mistake is to make is to think we were working on it for 35 years, which makes us really idiotic,” quipped Bird. “It was not that. We tried to get it made a long time ago and, for whatever reason, the financing didn’t follow us, so we had to set it down. Basically, it went into a file, dust gathered and we had to move on with our lives. I made The Iron Giant and we worked on The Incredibles and Ratatouille and time went by and the opportunity arose to pull it out of the deep freeze, and I always believed in it and eventually reality agreed with me.”

Giacchino talked about his approach to scoring the film and noted that New Zealand singer-songwriter Kimbra wrote and produced all of the original songs for the character Venus Nova.

“She was so good at what she does,” he said. “She writes incredible music and she came on and delivered a few songs for Venus, which are just incredible. So, my part was just creating the world beyond that and filling in everything else and creating textures and themes and character stuff and just making sure the movie fit the glove it needed to fit.”

Giacchino added that he and the team used a raft of “old recording techniques”.

“We got microphones from the 1920s and 30s that we used here in Abbey Road. We had an 80-piece orchestra, so there’s a really organic score, but there are a few things layered in there, like weird vintage synthesizers that I use…but that’s not the focus of it. That’s just the decoration on it because the real emotional thing that you need, it’s got to fit the story.”