Interview: The Man Behind "Puss in Boots" Is A Dog Person!

Monty and PussMonty meows and leaps up on the chair beside me. Cats always know when something is up. In this case, what's up is a phone call to Chris Miller the director of Puss in Boots, who is still reeling from his first Oscar nomination last month when Puss in Boots won itself a slot in the Best Animated Feature race. "Oh my god, it's insanity," Miller admits. "That day is a blur. I've never been through this before so I was pretty overwhelmed at the scope of it."

Monty does a little spin and settles in. If my cat understood any words beyond "treat", "Monty" and "no"*, he might be incensed by Miller's next confession when I ask him about his own pet situation. "Technically I'm more of a dog person. I can't lie about that."

* There is still some debate about whether or not Monty understand this word.

Miller is sadly pet free himself at the moment, still in mourning for the loss of a beloved pug. But this past year in cinema has been a dog person's dream and Miller is enjoying it. Martin Scorsese's plea for a write-in vote for "Blackie" at the inaugural Golden Collar Awards made him laugh and, like the rest of the world, Miller is crazy about "Uggie" from The Artist. He sheepishly admits that the main reason he attended a recent screening and Q&A of Oscar's frontrunning film was Uggie-related. "I thought 'I wonder if Uggie will be there. Oh I hope the dog shows up' I'm being totally honest!"

He was surprised and thrilled about Antonio Banderas open letter which added to the Golden Collar fuss by speaking out about Puss's snub. Puss in Boots, the character, has been in Miller's life for nearly ten years and it's the one cat he loves as much as dogs. "That cat was my favorite from the onset," he says recalling his years with the Shrek franchise. He loved Puss' intrigue. "He came with some history already. Or at least you knew he had some incredibly history. "

"Fear me. If you dare!

NATHANIEL: I'm curious about the career track for animation directors. You've done a lot of voicework and story art? How did you graduate to directing?

CHRIS MILLER: I was involved in story early on in my career and the writing end of it. With Antz and the Shrek movies we were given a lot of latitude to come up with material, characters and dialogue.
A lot of times we'd be sort of given an idea and sent off to come up with something. You share it with the producers and the directors and you sell it a bit. In doing that you get a little taste of everything in cinema. You're writing, you're composing shots, you're blocking out scenes, coming up with character interaction. You're really getting a first crack at visualizing a sequence. Looking back it was a great training ground for direction.

[Improvisation, Oscar madness, and moviemaking from your bedroom after the jump]

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Monologue: Megan & the Dolphin

Have you missed Monologue Mondays? I know I have. So let's start again and try to do this weekly.

Though Bridesmaids' Melissa McCarthy probably won her Oscar nomination for a variety of reasons, you almost always need one Oscar "clip" to make the lineup. You know the kind. It's an instant fix of the performance, which works in the way soundbites do for politicians or catchphrases do for sitcom stars. It's something they can play at the Oscars or at awards shows that will a) remind people why they loved the performance b) remind them why they liked the movie and c) pack a mini dramatic punch that justifies the nomination for the millions who might not have seen it yet. This can be true even if the person is nominated for a broadly comic role, as rare as those nominations are.

 

I think you're ready to hear a little story about a girl named Megan, a girl named Megan that didn't have a very good time in high school. I'm referring to myself when I say 'Megan'. It's me Megan.

Now the Oscars don't always select clips this way. Continued after the jump...

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Best in Show

At first I liked Uggie (The Artist) best but I'm starting to lean Arthur (Beginners). Less manic, more soulful!

God loves a terrier
yes he does
God loves a terrier
that's because
brown sturdy bright and true
they give their hearts to you

God didn't miss a stitch
be it dog or be it bitch
when he made the Norwich merrier
with his cute little 'derrier'
yes God loves a terrier!

-"Best in Show"

And may 2012 be the year of the cat! They need a good cinematic year.

It's National Bird Day ~ Best Birds on Film!

It totally is! Every 5th of January as it so happens.

There's no reason to post about it other than that I actually threw on this Finding Nemo seagull t-shirt this morning "MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE" ... before I knew! [insert eery music]

It's a sign that silly list-making is required of me. 

Though this year in cinema was definitely the Year of the Dog, we did get at least one memorable bird in Lord Shen, the villain of Kung Fu Panda 2. There were also feathers flying everywhere in Rio but I can't seem to bring myself to watch the screener because it never shows up in "Best Animated Film" nominations. Not that you should trust those when Cars 2 does ferchrissakes.

Favorite Feathered Film Things!

18 Ben Foster as Angel in Let Us Not Speak of That Movie or that guy from Barbarella I forget his name.
17 Kevin in Up (2009)
16 Lord Shen in Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)
15 Camilla from The Muppets 
14 Those ostrich costumes in Priscilla Queen of the Desert
13 The vultures from The Jungle Book

12 Maleficent's crow in Sleeping Beauty
11 The Crow (1994)
10 The mariachi owls from Rango
09 those seagulls "mine mine mine mine mine mine"
08 Natalie's final pirouette transformation in Black Swan
07 Matthew Barney's flock in Cremaster 5 (1997)

Cremaster 5

06 Björk at the Oscars
05 Babs in Chicken Run (2000). Remember her?
04 The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
03 Pixar's For the Birds
02 The Birds (1963)
01 Michelle Pfeiffer as Ladyhawke (1985)

P.S. Tweety-bird and Road Runner are assholes.

P.P. S. images that came up this morning when I searched for "Ben Foster Angel Screencaps"

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Best of Year Pt 1: I Am Thirty-Two Flavors

I tossed. I turned. I Excel'ed. I Worded. I laughed at myself. I laughed at everyone else and their equally crazy assertions during top ten season. I worried what y'all might think. I worried about how I do think! And then I cast it all aside and just started typing and getting real with myself. You see, in earlier drafts of this Hugo and The Tree of Life, for example, were much higher but you know what? This is not consensus. This is me. Year End "Best" naming rituals are meant to be personal even though they're communal. Gather 'round my fire. There are plenty of places to keep warm, this being just one of them. (If you must skip ahead a few pages The Tree of Life dropped a few notches and Hugo no longer appears at all; I do not miss it all and, thus, made the right call.)

I kept trying to find a cutoff point for my year end "best" that I feel comfortable with and the magic finally happened at 32! The thirty-two highlighted films are my touchstones from this year at the multiplex. They're the only ones I just could not let go of when I tried to gather my memories and glue them awkwardly into this online scrapbook thingie known as The Film Experience. Two of the films even got glued together and I couldn't get them unstuck (Longtime readers will know I don't approve of ties but what the hell: new decade, more flexibility! If you're a purist shove everything else down one notch.)

squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
and I'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head
cause someday you're going to get hungry
and eat most of the words you just said

The following thirty-two pictures were presented in vaguely ascending order but then the stairs were all rearranged to fit them into categories and for flow so don't read anything into the order...

Planet Ape
The year's cinema was overflowing with adorable dogs (too many to mention) and doomed cats (The Future, Dragon Tattoo) but the animal that seized the heart and truly shook us -- opposable thumbs are so handy! -- was the chimpanzee. The Oscar documentary finalist Project Nim charts the disastrous emotional fall out of a science experiment in the 1970s in which a chimp ("Nim") was raised by agonizingly fallible humans and taught sign language. Rise of the Planet of the Apes charts the disastrous sociological fall out of a science experiment in the right-now in which a chimp ("Cesar") is raised by a agonizingly naive human and granted super intelligence. Nim was a very real living thing and his heartbreaking story makes you want to scream "NOOOooooooo" as forcefully as the imaginary Cesar does at the climax of his own tale. That Cesar feels nearly as real as Nim is thanks to the Marlon Brando of mo-cap acting Andy Serkis, a brilliant visual effects team, and the superb action direction of Rupert Wyatt. (Wyatt's command is so impressive that the pictures fairly obvious flaws don't even register until well after the movie ends. If I were a Hollywood executive I'd be wining and dining him and offering him every franchise job on the calendar until he picked one.)

Favorite Unrewardables
The best thing I saw this year that's not eligible for my annual Film Bitch Awards is The Loneliest Planet (previously reviewed), about an engaged couple exploring a foreign land, which went unreleased. It had me from the stomping alien mundanity of its first image but in the end what really made it work for me was its sense of touch. That's rarer and rarer in our weightless CGI world but the images just felt so tangible: a lovers caress, cold water in your hair, rocky ground under foot; turns out when a movie is that good at touching, it's hard not to feel it. I could reward Clio Barnard's The Arbor, which did get a brief release, but I wouldn't know how. It's ostensibly a memoir doc about the short life of the troubled playwright Andrea Dunbar. But is it a documentary? Barnard's riveting experiment still uses traditional documentary tools like reenactments and talking head interviews but performs them instead, with actors lipsynching. There are so many layers it's suffocating; all the better to pull you under with these lives trapped in hand-me-down poverty and addiction. That probably doesn't sound like an endorsment but The Arbor sure is a fascinating novelty act.

Hip To Be Square
Who knew that we needed a 29th version of dusty Jane Eyre? Turns out we did! Okay okay okay... even if we didn't it was welcome since it was a beautifully rendered stride forward in four cinematic journeys we're on board with: Michael Fassbender seems to take another leap forward every three months, Mia Wasikowska is one of our most promising young actresses and this is her best film performance yet, director Cary Fukunaga and his cinematographer Adriano Goldman, who are two for two (see also Sin Nombre) are not just unusually capable but also unpredictable. We'll jump on their next vehicle whether that means more speeding trains or horse drawn carriages or something else entirely.

Two more unhip choices, abundant foreign pleasures and a few "only you could make this" treasures... After the jump.

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