Once you meet Garth Jennings its easy to understand how the creative mind behind the big screen version of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Son of Ranbow” found himself making an animated movie. He simply has an enthusiastic and upbeat nature that’s quite infectious. The British filmmaker didn’t plan on give three years of his life up to make Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment’s “Sing,” but the potential of directing an expected worldwide blockbuster, two Golden Globe nominations and the adoration of his family (more on that later) are certainly nice benefits.
“Sing” finds Buster, a live-show loving Koala voiced by Matthew McConaughey, putting on a huge talent competition to help save a believed, but dilapidated theater he owns. A throng of animals audition including the crooning mouse Mike (Seth MacFarlane), the overtaxed mom and Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), a punk porcupine (Scarlett Johansson), a shy Indian elephant (Grammy nominee Tori Kelly) and Johnny (“Kingsman: The Secret Service’s” Taron Egerton), a teenage gorilla trying to get out from under the shadow of his criminally inclined father. The movie’s creative twist begins at during the audition scenes as the sheer number of recognizable songs transforms the film into it’s own unique movie musical.
Jennings sat down with The Playlist a few weeks ago to chat about how he got involved in the project, securing the rights to a key Elton John classic and our mutual surprise over the vocal talents of Egerton.
The Playlist: I’m sorry for the obvious question at first, but where did the idea for this even come from?
Garth Jennings: It’s not an obvious question, it’s really good. It started with Chris Meledandri, and he’d seen a film I made called “Son of Rambow”.
Right. I love that movie.
Oh, thank you. Thanks very much. That’s a long time ago now. He had seen it and thought it had something about it that he thought would work with an idea he had, which was animals in some kind of team competition. He was going somewhere in Europe and he was coming through London just for the day to stop for something, and he asked if I could meet him for a cup of tea. I went to a hotel, some fancy-pantsy hotel, we sat in the foyer drinking a pot of tea, and in that sort of 45 minutes I’d been infected with his enthusiasm for this idea. It felt like the potential for a great story, do you know what I mean? The thing that we both got, right from the get-go, was: “What’s interesting is the characters and how their ordinary lives have changed.” I don’t want to make it about a TV show and the judges, because we see that every week. What’s interesting though, what’s always so compelling, is seeing a regular person kind of have to adjust their life in order to make something work, and how the ripple effect can be catastrophic in many cases, but thrilling too. Films like “The Commitments” where music was the escape for so many of the characters in the movie. Recently even though this wasn’t influenced at the start because it wasn’t made, but I saw the film “Sing Street.” It was a very similar thing that Chris and I love is those kind of stories. We felt that we could do that with animals. We could do it with animals who were like caricatures of people. I got excited about the idea of multiple storylines. That then became the hardest thing to manage. It’s like spinning plates. I’m glad we stuck with it. That’s sort of how it began. That was a very garbled, very. It wasn’t an elegant pitch at all, but that’s sort of how [it happened]. (Laughs.)
So wait, that was his pitch to you or your pitch back to him?
He pitched the animals in a singing competition idea. We both got excited about this potential of characters going back to real lives. Husbands and wives and children and how that stuff gets mashed up and mangled when you try and follow some dream of yours.
When you started working on the script did you think of the characters first without thinking of the animals or was it more like ”Oh, I think it would be cool if we had this koala bear.” How did that sort of happen?
The first thing I did was sort of write up a treatment of about twenty animals and their life stories and their situations. In that, some were literally there from the start, like Mike. I just had this nasty little mouse who was super talented, who was a crooner, and was irredeemably awful to people. Never any point does he redeem himself or change. That was there from the beginning. Mina was there in a form from the beginning, an elephant who had crippling stagefright. There were some of the bare bones personalities, and they were often based on just people. Even Rosita the pig is sort of based on my wife who wasn’t thrilled about the choice of pig. She was a designer, she had her own label, she’s a fashion designer. She quit that to raise these four kids for about ten years. As she tried to get back to that part of herself that sort of lay dormant, it was really tricky for her. We were obviously more supportive of her than Rosita’s husband, but they all started with sort of things I just felt were familiar. They just felt like people and issues like a dad wanting his son to be like him and being disappointed in him? That’s a pretty universal story. To exaggerate that, I could only see it as a Cockney British dad, because I grew up with those dads who would stand on the sidelines of football fields going “Come on, son, kick it in the goal!” Those dads you couldn’t shut up. Wouldn’t stop, and so wanted them to be a new, better version of them, and so on. That felt like, “Well, that’s got to be a gorilla”. It just has to be this great big bloody great guy that will get you in a headlock. Like Vinnie Jones, but as an animal. Those sort of things sort of came like having a teenager who is in a goth punk band and has much more of a brittle attitude toward things. She had to be a porcupine. Sounds obvious now…
At the time it didn’t feel obvious?
It did sort of feel like, “Oh, that feels like a good fit”, but it was in terms of theory. This is before Eric Gillan, our designer, had taken what is a totally abstract concept, like, “Here’s a porcupine. Here’s a goth.” Then he would find a way to make it feel like, “Oh, yeah. That’s still a porcupine, but it’s humanized.”
You’re coming up with this whole concept and the storyline, but it takes place in Southern California?
Yeah. I’m always coming over here, because this is where Illumination Entertainment is based.
I feel like it takes place in San Diego.
Is it San Diego? It’s kind of a version of America. A bit of Miami color scheme. You can make things so realistic, that actually the realism somehow becomes almost a little bit oppressive, so you have to become a little more … What’s the word? Painterly, I suppose. Just to add a little more personality. A bit more inviting, in order to counter how real this thing is. You could literally make it look like the real thing. We have to sort of adjust that and not make it look too real. Colors and all that sort of stuff would help. It just felt like a great place to put it. The thing was that we wanted it to feel like a world that people recognized, and it wasn’t like some quirky world that we had invented. Not against that, in a movie, but it felt like this would only work if it felt like “Oh, this is our world. Those are the cars we drive. Those are the houses we live in. They just happen to be occupied by elephants or a crocodile or something”.
You could have set it up it up that the characters were singing original songs. When did the idea come to be like, “All right, let’s go through licensing hell and secure songs everyone would recognize”?
Let’s make Universal Music actually melt down.
Yeah.
That was from the start. Right from that cup of tea,it was like, “Oh, you could have the most broad range. If you follow all these characters, they would all have different sort of songs that fit.” Those songs would have to help tell their story. Even if they’re existing songs, they’ve got a feeling in harmony of where they’re going, so when he’s singing “I’m Still Standing” at the end, you know it’s not just a great song to showcase his vocal and piano skills. It’s a beautiful pop song that really is rousing, it also still is telling the story a little bit. We always knew we were going to have a lot of songs. We didn’t know at the start it would be that many. I mean, once I’d cut the first version of the audition sequence, we all loved it. We were like, “Wow, we just burned through more songs in that one sequence than most people would use in any one movie, by a long shot”. Chris, from the beginning, had made sure that not only had we got enough in the budget to cover it, we didn’t end up spending it all but we had a good safety net there. The smartest thing was bringing the music team on really, really [early]. It seemed like three years ago. They were working with us from the beginning. Half the problem is just the time it takes to clear things.
Yes, and getting people to say yes.
Getting people to say yes is the longest part of it. We were making choices years ago.
Was there anyone that you had to personally send a letter to or pitch in person?
Yes. There was. There was. I’m glad you asked that, because it was one of my most favorite meetings I’ve ever had. It was for “I’m Still Standing” and Elton’s company was saying, “No, no, no, we’re not, we can’t let this one go”. We didn’t know why, but for six months. We kept trying to find other songs that would fit, but the trouble is its like naming your baby. Once you’ve found one that just smashes it, you’re like, “I can’t fall in love with anything like we did with ‘I’m Still Standing.’” Six months of trying, finally [Elton’s husband and business partner] David Furnish agreed to a meeting with me. It was fantastic. I walked into his office, it was the greatest, and this is going to sound weird now, but it was such a beautiful smelling office. I’m not kidding you, my first gut reaction was to say quite loudly, “Wow, what is that smell?” I can tell you right now, if you’re ever going into a meeting with someone you don’t know, never open with that line. It’s not a cool thing to say at all, but it really was just like, “I wish my life smelled like this. It feels like nothing bad could happen if your life smelled like this.” He was fabulous and friendly and so open. By that time, he had worked out they weren’t going to use “I’m Still Standing” in their project, but they still wanted to see how the song was going to be used in our film, because while they loved the idea of Elton’s songs finding the audiences, living on, it’s all about “Are the people that are going to carry this going to be a safe pair of hands?” I had a laptop with not only a sort of pitch of the movie, but I showed the whole sequence in an animatic form, and he got it instantly. It was just so lovely, and there was this cool moment where there was a glass wall where this wall is right here, and there was just this and I turn around, and Elton’s like, waving back. Even if he’d denied the rights, it was worth going to the meeting for that moment. Wow, Elton John! Elton John!
Is this the last thing that got cleared before you were good to go?
No. It wasn’t the last one. We were clearing songs to the very end.
Was there any one specific song that you were literally up to the wire to clear?
I think because we’d given ourselves so much time that most of it was done in time. I don’t think we were in the mix. I think by the time we were mixing, doing the temp mix back in April, I think we were done.
Was there anything you wanted that didn’t get into the film?
No, it’s all in there.
Oh, wow.
Exactly. “Oh, wow” is exactly right. That doesn’t happen. I mean, it doesn’t happen. You assume at some point, “Oh, maybe Stevie Wonder will deny us the rights to ‘Don’t You Worry About A Thing.’” Then he’s like, “I love it”. Great, wow. You just keep going until somebody says no.