‘Frozen 2’ Director Jennifer Lee Has Not Seen ‘Olaf’s Frozen Adventure’ Yet [Interview]

Jennifer Lee is Disney’s secret star.  She’s one of the screenwriters of “Wreck-It Ralph,” she helped come up with the story for “Zootopia” and is the co-screenwriter and co-director of the Oscar-winning phenomenon “Frozen” which she is now helping shepherd to the Great White Way with “Frozen on Broadway.”  This weekend her first live action endeavor, “A Wrinkle In Time,” hits theaters and for Lee it the realization of a true passion project.

Paco Delgado on the costumes for “A Wrinkle in Time” and fitting Oprah

Directed by Ava DuVernay, this new adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic young adult novel centers on teenager Meg (Storm Reid) and her incredibly smart younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) as they search for their scientist father (Chris Pine) who has been missing for years.  They are assisted by three fantastical beings who need their help to fight the evil force IT: Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey). Along the way they get assistance from The Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis) and encounter the puppet looking Red (Michael Peña), known in the book as the Man with Red Eyes.

Late last month Lee sat down to talk about the difficulty in adapting “Wrinkle” to the screen and whether or not she’s seen the new “Frozen” short which didn’t go over well with moviegoers in front of “Coco” a  few months ago

Gregory Ellwood:  How are things going today?

Jennifer Lee:  Good.  Good.  It’s lovely to get to talk about this.  I’ve been off doing other things so when [the movie] locked I was doing my other stuff.  So, I’m like, “Ah, I can come back, yeah.”

Yeah.  So, let’s talk about it.  This is a project that people have tried to adapt it and turn into a movie for decades.

Yeah.

Where you were approached about this new attempt or did you pitch it?

I went after it.

How did that happen?

II had just finished “Frozen” and I heard they needed a new writer.  I love this book and I was just reading it with my daughter right at that moment anyway and I reread it again and I called and said, “Please let me come over, I have a take.”  I pitched the take of why I think it hadn’t been made.  What’s a challenge and what I would do to meet those challenges. What I saw and what I envisioned.  They said give it a whirl, but yeah.  I don’t think I was going to leave without them saying that though. (Laughs.) I was just like, “I wanted to do this.” If you could pick books in your life that you want to [tackle] I had “Lord of the Rings” [also] but then that was done. And I had “A Wrinkle in Time” and a couple of more adult things, but it was the thing I’ve been waiting for.

What do you think was the one thing that you said or convinced them, beyond the fact that you weren’t going to leave the room without the assignment?  What do you think got the studio excited?

I’m not 100% sure except to say there were two things.  I truly believed that everything had to revolve around Meg. Meg had to drive the story fully and in the book she’s guided through a lot and other people take over and I felt like every challenge should be just as big and just as many obstacles against her, but she has to drive this.  The relationship with the father has to be developed because in the book he’s more like a MacGuffin.  I said, “It has to be developed.”  We have to understand why he would do this [and] why he would leave his family. We have to fear that abandon.  We have to look at the choices as parents that you make.  And then I said, “Everything about this, the only way to anchor this is we have to free ourselves from the book literally, but take the same emotional journey. And we have to be as evocative as the book but not try to worry about what is the creature Mrs. Whatsit looks like. We have to say what does Muriel feel like.”  And the last thing that may have been just a coincidence is that [Walt Disney Studios President of Production] Sean Bailey‘s father is a physicist.  I love physics in the sense of theory. I love quantum physics. I love cosmology in the universe. And I was obsessed with the real science into the concept of tessering and so I had takes on how to ground it ‘c ause it’s so fantastical, so that there was still an anchor in real science for today.  So, I think it was a mix of those things where that’s not the usual take they would get.  Usually it’s not talking about the emotion and how to ground this thing. It’s like, “we do this and it’s more jumping into the fantastical.”  And I think that the story that we all remember as you’ve read it at any age is the journey of this girl, Meg, and all she’s gone through, and going to these worlds, but how each world triggered different feelings.  So, trying to capture that.

I’m gonna be brutally honest, I don’t remember ever reading the book.  I’ve only looked over the Wikipedia and seen the differences between the movie and the novel and it’s a pretty detailed. I’m curious, what made you, for example, drop the two brothers? And a follow up question is Zach Galifianakis’ character actually in the book?

He is, but he’s a woman in the book.   I can tell you those, too.  The twins, that was right from the [first iteration] script because I needed to develop the father story a lot more and the boys were really used as a way to [contrast] the kids who didn’t seem to have the same issues as Meg.  We were showing plenty of contrast with what was happening in high school. We really want to show the bullying.  What they were doing wasn’t as necessary.  And so just being honest we can build a whole group of people but where do we want to put the story telling?  And then so Zach’s character, The Happy Medium, is in the book but it’s a fortune teller with a crystal ball who’s a woman or female being in the universe.  Part of the reasons why it became a man and that was back in the script stage was because I was anchoring this in much more of the emotional journey she went on.  One of the things is I wanted someone who could really push on her to confess her greatest fear was that her father didn’t love her, abandoned her or didn’t want to be found.  That he’d abandoned his family.  And I felt like I didn’t want everyone in the universe to only be women.  I wanted it to be a mix, but really this character, I wanted to see a father figure speak to her about her father.   And so what Zach brought to it was far more than anything I wrote, I will say.   It was much more just about a guy who was resistant and didn’t like children who was generous at the end.  But he truly took that and he embraced the emotion.