AVC: You’ve talked in the past about how rare it is to see a film with a director’s stamp on it that hasn’t gotten overruled by a studio. Was this any easier to get by the studio without interference because it isn’t full of sex, gore, and full-frontal male nudity? Was it harder because people are more cautious with children’s movies?
ZS: The hardest part of it wasn’t really even the content. It was the procedural way to make an animated movie. The problem is, when you’re making an animated movie, the studio has an illusion in their minds—and it’s really not true—that because it’s a drawing, it can be changed at any time. It would drive me crazy. They’d be like, “You know what’d be cool?” And I’d say, “Agghh!” I was constantly fighting them. Things that weren’t broken, clearly not broken, where they’d go, “You know, you should try another angle. Maybe they’re not owls. Maybe it’s fish.” Not that bad, but you could imagine that they felt like there was some crazy attitude of “Oh, you can just change it at any time.” And really, it’s millions of dollars of animation that could be at stake. And I’d have to fight to make sure they didn’t lose their minds and want to do that.
So, the biggest struggle was just me not understanding how to protect the movie from the process itself. Like, if I was to make another animated movie, the studio would see a lot less of the movie than they did, until it was closer to being done. Because they’d have less ability to change it. I felt the changes they wanted, or ended up making at the end, never really manifested themselves, other than fucking us up in the process. [Laughs.]
