WILD ROBOT - Lupita Nyong'o, Chris Sanders, Kris Bowers Interview

up in US theaters on September 27th my name is Eric Davis I am thrilled to be here uh with some guests from the film we have writer director Chris Sanders playing uh rosm 7134 or RZ leita nongo and composer Chris Bowers it's great to have you all here uh just to say for a minute I was had the uh luxury of experiencing this film just a couple of days ago at its Toronto International Film Festival Premiere uh and just was blown away it is instantly among one of my favorite films of the year it is beautiful across the board and it has such an inspiring emotional story terrific performances and a score that is just Sensational so I am thrilled to be here with the three of you right now but let's jump right into questions uh and I have them here we're going to start with Chris Sanders the wild robot marks are return to directing and animated feature after making 2020s liveaction film The Call of the Wild how did the experience of directing a liveaction film change your approach to directing your first animated feature in 11 years uh you know I think it was the the the immediacy of the collaboration was really different uh animation happens slowly over such a long period of time and uh you're there on the day you have got to get everything and uh it's it's all about collaboration um particularly with the actors uh and uh yeah that was it's it's something I've done before but it's it's different there's there's I think there's it's it's more immediate I keep saying that word but you only have the day to get everything so um yeah there's there's a lot more interaction I think in in the best way possible great for Lea how did you you know this is a great question first of all because I was so taken by your performance here and the arc that you gave with Raz and just sort of the way that you layered in the emotion and really fueled those nuances uh and this question speaks to that how did you master the challenge of expressing such a wide array of emotions only through your voice and not just have a mechanical feel to it wow well thank you for the complimenting that question uh it was definitely uh I had an incredible partner here in Chris and and uh early on I asked him why he thought of me for the role of Ros and he mentioned that he liked the warmth of my voice so we knew that we were going to end up with a r that sounded more like me uh to kind of depict that Evolution she's gone through and then we kind of like reverse engineered I was inspired by the automated voices of Alexa Alexa and Siri and you know the voices on Tik Tok and Instagram and in looking at those uh What uh what was similar in all of them was this kind of like optimistic brightness so uh after a lot of trial and error okay we had many versions of RW and that's the beauty of doing it over two and a half years is that as the script um develops so does the does the voice uh so in the end we ended up with that sort of like programmed optimism to start her off and we had these markers in the script of when and how uh raz's um uh voice is evolving to show how she's adapting to her new environment and yeah it was all about just like dialing dialing it up uh and yeah it was wonderful to have such a uh you know just such a supportive and insightful partner in Chris well you did such a great job I'm I'm a sentimentalist so I my favorite kind of films are the films that you feel and like you feel this film and I love that in a lot of ways it's about the importance of saying I love you and and so much of how you feel this film I think is in your music Chris Bowers uh which the score is just incredible and this question is for you the wild robot is the first score you have done for an all animated film what was the fundamental difference between scoring an animated film vers a liveaction film and did you have any inspirations when it came to composing the score yeah definitely um I me thanks so much for the the kind words um yeah for me as far as inspiration I started this film um shortly after I became a dad uh I my daughter is only about maybe five months old when we had our first meeting um and by the time I was finishing she was in the terrible twos a very different experience um but you know in those couple of years just how much I was not only examining my own relationship with her and what it felt like to become a a parent and and how many things I and my wife felt you know similar to Roz's learning how to do that but also just looking at my appreciation for my own parents my my own mother and looking at that sacrifice at the sacrifice of my wife and and so so much of the emotion in this story that so palpable and and involuntary brings these involuntarily brings up these visceral emotions for me um we're just also mirroring so many things I was already thinking about so much in my own life um one sequence in particular I think about is the migration sequence and um there's a a queue that we worked on for a long time and my first pass at it um you know was was really bright and happy and and Chris reminded me about the fact that this is this really Bittersweet moment where where R is saying goodbye to Bri Bill and and they don't know if they're going to see each other ever again and and they're not saying you know I love you and they're not saying those things and what with that feel like and I hadn't even thought of the depth of that experience and what that would be like with my own daughter and Chris was reminding me of of what that experience might be like with my own daughter and and I just remember going back after that conversation with him and writing that piece of music and it just kind of coming out of me very naturally because of how much um the emotion was just kind of top top of uh of mind and so inspiration was definitely a lot of my own personal experiences and then the difference I would say is is starting that early starting mainly with black and white pencil sketches and the animatic of of the the animation and so you know having to rely so much on uh Chris's guidance as a director to understand what I'm scoring to to look at the concept art to realize what this is going to look like in terms of color and imagery um and use my imagination so if I have you know still images that I'm writing to I'm imagining it and it's fullest form so that I'm writing music that doesn't feel like it's it's uh held back at all wonderful work I I will say uh this is a question for everyone um and like I was saying before one of the things that I took away from the film is just the importance of saying I love you and making sure that that's uh part of uh my everyday but what would you say is the most important message you would like audiences to take away from experiences the experiencing the film there's a question for everyone uh Chris Sanders I'll start with you well friend Sanders the idea that um we're at some point going to have to change our programming to accomplish something um and that I think that we we're all creatures of habit we hate change and maybe you know I've thought a lot about this I think that sometimes we're afraid that if we if we change our programming we're going to lose ourselves somehow I if that makes sense and um and you're not going to uh you're you're going to become a more dimensional being and it's it's going to be okay um and that was that was something that was built into um the book by Peter Brown that that we identified and and it was a core it was a core like loadbearing uh theme in the story I really like I like the message that um kindness is a force I think often times kindness can be considered like I guess um a vulnerability and uh in this film we really show how R's Journey shows how it it is a force and it's a force to reckon with without a doubt yeah and ex and also I would say accepting you know people who are different than you or others that are different than you and and W welcoming that into your life without a doubt yeah being open to it yeah Chris for you uh you know I'd say all those things and maybe add to that just thanking the people that have sacrificed for you to be here and be who you are and remembering that you know whether it's our mothers or or whomever else is playing that role just that um there's so much that they are doing for us to to be able to thrive in this world and to remember that and remember to thank them and and say I love you when it when it uh when it makes sense uh my next question is for leita how was the recording experience and did you learn any lessons in the voice Booth H did I ever uh the experience I had a lot of fun uh you know we every time we we got to a a recording session it would start off with um me giving notes on the new pages and Chris was very receptive to that and uh it was really it was really awesome to be able to share a thought or like be struggling with something on the page share it with Chris and then he would take a beat and the booth would go silent I wouldn't be able to hear what was going on in the other room and then he would come back on the mic and he would have solved the the the problem or you know and it was a really wonderful symbiotic relationship I think we had working on this uh so it always I always felt valued and um additive so seeing the final product uh was just I just I swelled with gratitude for having been a part of it and to like see my fingerprints on it you know and then to see what everybody else brought to it uh so that was amazing I think finding the right creative chemistry is so important so for me that was something I already knew and then it was fortified in this experience and then I also learned uh to go easy on myself because I had a vocal accident in when I was uh working on the earlier part of Ras that voice was quite vocally athletic for me and I injured myself and I was rendered silent for 3 months so I learned a very important an lesson there to really pay attention to my limitations uh for Chris Sanders how did you visualize raz's Journey from being a Shipwrecked robot to becoming a vital part of the Island's ecosystem what were your key considerations in designing the island and its inhabitants keeping it um keeping it really chaotic I wanted to make sure that um we built Raz um with a lot of articulation uh we knew that she had to be like a humanoid because of the book and and and the role that she played in the story but we also wanted her to be surprising and interesting and we wanted to give the animators opportunities to move her in interesting ways um which by the way they exceeded uh at every turn they surprised me with what they were able to do with her rig um I was very insistent that the island be uneven that we never make things convenient for Raz we don't want these flat like you know these mysterious flat paths that were magically waiting for her um so that she could make her way easily through everything especially in the the beginning we wanted her to actually Bend and Duck and we wanted to be sure that the audience understood very very clearly this is not where she was supposed to be but she doesn't get it I think it's the one of the fun things about it um the the engineered optimism that Lupita was talking about she's walking through the forest and she's in a sense she's advertising she's looking she's looking for whoever bought her literally somebody out there ordered her so she's walking around and she's spinning around and she's kind of doing a promo with this music that Chris that Chris designed because he wanted to sort of futuristic he'll talk about that I want to talk more but yeah so this futuristic music is coming out of her and she's advertising and she's waiting for somebody to appear and go oh it was me you know I ordered you and I have something for you to do um it's kind of sad in a way uh okay so this is going to be our last question so I'm I'm looking for a good one um for Chris Bowers and Le did you recall any childhood memories while making this film for inspiration if so what were they Chris Bowers I'll start with you and then we'll end with Papa yeah I mean I definitely just thought a lot about when I first realized the power of of music to help tell story which was in early animation like when I was a kid I just watched cartoons most of the time and there were mostly those cartoons that didn't have any dialogue it was you know Tom and Jerry or Silly Symphonies or early Mickey cartoons or you know Loney tunes and um how much you're getting from the physical gestures of the characters and the music alone and how much you're not even thinking about whether or not there should be dialogue or confused about what's happening it's just all very very clear emotionally and so you know for Chris and I to talk a lot about uh his inspiration to have this be told so much with the visuals and and uh and the music and and to be able to to Really lean on that have moments where you know once I had a queue we even talked about or Chris would look at moments where take dialogue away and and that was so inspiring um and so for me it was just not only an honor to work on a project that utiliz music in that way but also uh wanting to pay homage to to those great composers that were able to um make us feel so many different things with with just you know music on the on the oral side well for me Ros is a very sophisticated robot right but when she lands on this island she's brand new she's like a child you know and I think that's what makes her such an endearing character because she's very childlike in her fresh eyes and naive on what life on a Wild Island can be like uh so I think the innocence of children is something that I thought of not necessarily for anything from my childhood but in interacting with children they say the darnest things so for example yes today a child we asked this child like what would you how would you look out for other people and she said with a telescope brilliant right and like an adult you just don't think that way so and but RZ does there's that sort of like literal way of looking at the world because she's brand new and keeping that innocence I guess is uh was um inspir remembering the innocence of babes m well I mean from the bottom of my heart and and I'm sure I speak for so many other people out there thank you so much for bringing us this film it is just a lovely experience uh I adore it uh Chris Sanders leitao nongo Chris Bowers my name is Eric Davis DreamWorks animations the wild robot opens in US theaters on September 27th tell all of your friends and family everyone needs to experience this film on the big screen thank you so much for joining us thank you thank you