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Karey Kirkpatrick Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview
"I worked on a script for Disney that’s still sitting there; I don’t think they’ll make it. It was called Me and My Shadow. It’s interesting: I get a phone call, saying, ‘We have an idea for a movie.’ I say, ‘Okay.’ And they sa,y ‘A guy gets separated from his shadow.’ And I wait for a few seconds, then say, ‘Is that it?’ ‘Yes, that’s it.’ So I’m supposed to go off and build a story around that, which is awkward. You’re torn as writer: you’re glad that somebody’s offered you a job, and you’re eager to take it, but you’re also struggling because you’re not sure what to do with this. I get kind of frsutrated because it’s such a long shot that you’re going to crack this nut. They just have this inkling of an idea. “Then a company called Interscope approached me. They had a film that was called Frank, about a kid Frankenstein. Here again, they had a script and they said, ‘This isn’t working. Read it. Tell us what you can do.’ So I read it and said, ‘Here’s what I think...’ So I worked on that one for a while, and that was where the Thunderbirds project first came to my attention. They had done some work with Peter Hewitt. Polygram owned the ITC library, and Interscope is a Polygram company, and Working Title is a Polygram company. So initially Interscope was going to do Thunderbirds. They introduced me to Peter Hewitt. What’s funny about Thunderbirds is that the film executives at Interscope called me in to say, ‘We have a film idea that we think you would be good for,’ having just worked with me on Frank. They said ‘Do you know the Thunderbirds?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Okay, well we’re doing a live-action version of the Thunderbirds.’ They started talking about Lady Penelope and Parker and all these different people for about five minutes, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’ Because in America, the Thunderbirds are the formation flying unit of the United States Air Force!" The equivalent of our Red Arrows. "Exactly." And you weren’t familiar with the TV series? "I had never seen it." It has never been properly syndicated in America, has it? "Well, it was, sort of. People who are about 40 years old remember it, but I was born in ‘65, when the show came out. When I saw it, it looked vaguely familiar. Maybe it was recalling some two-year-old’s memory that was stored somewhere. So after about five minutes I had to come clean and say, ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ So they sent me home with a treatment that Peter had written and the pilot episode of the show, and then I came back the next day when I had formulated some ideas. I met with Pete and we chatted, and in a couple of months I was in london, developing it with him while he was in pre-production on The Borrowers." By this point had you watched the whole series? "Yes. All 32 episodes were given to me on video-tape, so they have them all. I’m now an expert. I went to a film library in London and read about Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds. Because movie executives, the people at Polygram, they really don’t care if it stays true to the show because in their eyes, it has to play in the American market, and then subsequently at the world-wide box office. A movie studio won't do a $75 million experiment. Actually, Bean just totally reversed that idea. But Pete and I were thinking: ‘There’s a lot of really, really rich stuf in there.’ ”And Pete had a very specific vision for how this should be. This should be a sort of retro look at the future. The charm of the show is that it was made in 1965 and its view of the future is ‘atomic energy is good’ and so on. I remember, in one of the first drafts I wrote, somebody picked up this cellphone, because I would try to use little things, and Pete would correct me and say, ‘No, everything has got to be big. With big buttons on.’ As opposed to Star Trek which has black panels with LEDs and little buttons. Everything in Thunderbirds has big switches; big knobs; big, bright, colourful machinery. Where other things are high-tech, Thunderbirds is low-tech. I really bought into that. I thought, ‘That is what will make this film unique.’ A big, colourful version of the future. So we started working on the story. I’m now into my fourth pass at the script. The first draft I did was 150 pages and probably would have cost more than Titanic, so we’re continually trying to call in the budget, keep it managable. Whenever we’re together working on it, we always come back to: does that feel ‘Thunderbirds’? Does that feel like a Thunderbirds thing?" On the one hand you have an American market where a lot of people aren’t going to be familiar with Thunderbirds, and on the other you have the UK where you would be hard-pressed to find anybody under about 40 who couldn’t name every character. It’s intrinsic to Britain in the same way that Sherlock Holmes is. So is it tricky catering to those two different markets? "I think that’s why I was hired: because I’m not a British writer. When I came clean and said, ‘I don’t know this show’, I thought, ‘I’m not going to see this job again’. But they said, ‘Actually that’s good because we need somebody to develop a movie who doesn’t know it all.’ Like over here, had I written The Brady Bunch Movie - The Brady Bunch is like Thunderbirds; you know every episode - I would be filling it with lots of inside jokes."
"Exactly. So I wanted to take from Thunderbirds the stuff there that’s rich and really good. To be honest with you, I sit down and I watch the series - and it’s very frustrating. Because firstly, they look amazing. I don’t know if you’ve seen them lately, but they still hold up today. The art direction, the model work. Derek Meddings; the guy was a pioneer. The colour saturation - beautiful. There’s a lot of great work going on there. However, I think on a story and character level... Those came second." There’s a lot of padding in some episodes. "I think they had the idea and Gerry Anderson put Thunderbirds out there and all of a sudden it was really well received. The first ones they made were a half-hour, and because everyone liked Thunderbirds they ordered longer episodes. The first nine episodes were made as half-hours, then they added more footage. I think all of the history around the characters in Thunderbirds grew as the series grew. But there are things in there that when you’re a writer trying to create a movie for an audience that’s a tad more savvy, there are many frustrating things there. Like: it’s a top secret organisation, and yet the brothers turn up and show their faces to everyonee at the rescues. When they leave, they go: ‘Now remember, this is secret. Don’t talk.’ That’s not very clever. ”So it was part of my job, figuring out ways to keep their identities hidden. And to really play up this fact that Jeff Tracy’s this billionaire that owns an island and has five rich playboy sons, that the world thinks are these John F Kennedy Jr types, born with silver spoons in their mouths, that they don’t do anything. Nobody knows who International Rescue are. Even the President of the United States doesn’t know who they are or where their secret base is. The other problem is that you can’t really tell a movie about people who just show up at random rescues. Because in essence, the Thunderbirds are firefighters. You look at the movie that Ron Howard did, Backdraft; in that movie they had somebody who was behind these fires. So the plot of the movie is: alright, somebody’s setting all these fires. We are telling a movie about firefighters, but we’re also trying to figure out who the villain is, what’s going on here. In a similar vein, in Thunderbirds, somebody’s behind some of these disasters that we’re showing." It’s not The Hood, is it? "The Hood is in the movie, but is an operative of the big villain. The Hood is a master of disguise that’s out there working for him. Someone is trying to get at International Rescue. That’s what gives us our plot, and as long as you have that, you can hang all the fun and the characters of it. Lady Penelope and Parker are such great characters to work with." You’re keeping all the main characters from the series. Brains? "Oh yes. I can tell you the characters: Lady Penelope, Parker, Jeff, all the brothers of course, Kyrano, TinTin, Brains, The Hood." Have you got Grandma in there? "Grandma isn’t in there yet, but she’s on the sidelines in reserve in case we need her." She never did much except make cups of tea. "And we have reporter Ned Cook [From the episode ‘Terror In New York City’ - MJS], who has made his way into the script. So those are the main charcters that we use. I’ll tell you something funny. One Polygram executive read the script, this was right after Men in Black came out and made a lot of money, and I kid you not, one of them said, ‘Could one of the brothers be... black?’ We said, ‘I don’t think so...’ Pete and I just looked at each other and went: ‘Uh... no.’" A lot of people are waiting to see what the actual vehicles look like? Have the designs been finalised? "Yes. People are going to be so pleased. Because if you went in and you looked at the drawings right now, as a guy who knows the series, and you looked at Thunderbirds 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, you’d look at them and go: ‘Oh yes, they look like them. Uh-huh, that’s exactly what theyy look like.’ Then if I pulled down a chart and said, ‘Let me show you the old ones,’ you’d go, ‘Oh wow, there is an improvement here, just a bit more updated.’ But you wouldn’t look at them and go, ‘Oh my God, they’ve totally changed!’" So Thunderbird 2 has still got the pods and things? "Oh, absolutely. Just the lines have been changed a little bit, or maybe an engine casing here, or whatever. But they look terrific. The artists drew them up and then they were scanned into a computer so that we could start playing around with them. Because a lot of them will have to be computer-generated. We’re not building little models. Pete put together a little computer-animated sequence of them flying and dropping a pod, and Thunderbird 4 going into the water. It looks absolutely great." Is FAB 1 in there? "Yes. Our job is to build these really incredible action sequences, the rescues, and to tell an emotionally interesting story that has to have intrigue; Lady Penelope playing top secret agent games. It’s set all over the world. It’s a very global, big, big story. We're being very dilligent about staying as true to the series as we can, and still make it an exciting action movie." What’s the projected date to start shooting? "I think they’re planning to start shooting this summer, in July. The script that we’re working on now, should be the one that they greenlight. There may be some changes, but they mostly want to make sure that we have a managable budget." Are they shooting in the US or the UK? "The UK. It will be based out in Shepperton, from my understanding. So all the sound stage work, and all the effects work, will be done in the UK. Peter Chiang is the effects designer. Then of course we’ll be on location." So there should be some hot casting news soon. Everybody’s waiting to hear who’s going to play these roles. "And that’s something that we should be pretty clear on, because last year I got it back that Joanna Lumley had been cast as Lady Penelope, which was really sloppy journalism because it’s not true. I know Joanna from working with her on James, and it’s not fair to Joanna, it’s not fair to the production. But no-one has been cast. Although of course names get thown around. At one time, somebody threw around Julie Christie. I think Peter did say that he viewed Lady Penelope as a younger Julie Christie, which was possibly not the right thing to say. But in fact I just saw a trailer for a film that had Julie Christie in it, and my wife turned to me and said, ‘She looks just like Lady Penelope.’ With Lady Penelope, it’s pretty important that her age be hard to tell. You’re not sure if she’s older or younger; she’s somewhere in never-aging land. But no-one’s been cast."
"Well, Jake Eberts is the producer, and he was the executive producer on James. While I was working on James, he said that they had just landed a deal with Aardman. Jake and Lenny Young, the co-producer actually went and saw A Close Shave when it first came out. They screened it at a theatre near the academy. He went to see that and then he turned to me and said, ‘You know, we’re still trying to figure out how to do the feature. And if you’ve got any ideas, let me know.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’ Meanwhile, I went off and was working on Frank. When I hooked up with Lenny at a later date, he said, ‘Oh, they came up with an idea that they want to do.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘It’s The Great Escape with chickens.’ And I said, ‘What a great idea!’ They were going to hire a British writer to write it, so they hired Jack Rosenthal." An odd choice. He’s a very good, very respected writer, but he’s never written animation before. "No, he hadn’t. But I think their big concern was making sure that it stayed very, very British. And I absolutely agreed. Because Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and all that are quintessentially English. So their thinking was: let’s get a guy in like Jack who’s written loads of plays, he’s great with character, let’s have him do this.’ Then his script came in and wasn’t quite what they expected. So they had a conversation with Jack which I understand was very amiable, and he said, ‘Well, this is the way I live and breathe, but if it’s not working for you, then no hard feelings. Look around, get some other opinions.’ This is when Lenny called me. He had suggested to Jake that they send it to me, and Jake knew me from James. And this was the exact same situation that I was in on James: ‘We’ve got a script. It’s not quite working. Take a look at it and tell us what you would do.’ ”So they flew me over to Bristol, and I spent two days with Nick Park and Pete Lord. It’s very confusing, knowing all these British guys called Pete. I hear a British accent on the phone going: ‘It’s Pete here...’ We talked about what the script would be and what I would do, and I went away and they said yes. So I came back over to Bristol, and we all went up to the Yorkshire Dales - to Wensleydale, ironically - and pounded out the script in what was probably the two most creative weeks of my life. I can’t say enough good about these guys. Pete is a very collaborative guy, which is great for a writer. We came up with a lot of great ideas, and a 30-page outline. I went off and had four weeks to write that. I was living in London from August to November, working on Thunderbirds, because they had set up a think-tank over on Great Portland Street. We had artists, visual designers, set designers: all working together so they could share ideas. So I was in London, working on Thunderbirds and Chicken Run, trying to make sure they didn’t get confused. We actually spent four days working on the Thunderbirds script in The Royal Crescent, Bath." Is the final draft of Chicken Run done now? "It’s funny you should ask. I finished the latest draft. You know Dreamworks is the distributor? We’re getting together on Thursday and having a big pow-wow: Jeff Katzenberg, Jake Eberts, all of us are going to be in a room, talking about my script. Hopefully I’ve got all the right ingredients in the story. That’s especially important in claymation. If there’s something that I wrote in live-action, the dialogue could continue to be polished. When you get actors in to read, they come up with new lines. So it’s a very, very organic process. It’s organic nature is treated as a good thing. They don't call it ‘the creative process’ for nothing." Have you got anything lined up after Chicken Run and Thunderbirds? "I don’t. My wife’s having a baby in three weeks - that’s my next project. I’m going to be working on Thunderbirds and Chicken Run pretty much all year. After that I want to sit down and work on something that’s my own. Ever since James and the Giant Peach, I haven’t had the downtime to develop a project that I can go out and try to set up. So that’s probably what I’ll do. But sometimes you get a call that you can’t pass up. That’s what Chicken Run was. I’ve had a really good time on both these films, and they’re both going to get made.” It should be stressed that, although Chicken Run did indeed get made, Thunderbirds didn't (possibly as a fall-out from The Avengers which made Hollywood wary of films based on British TV series. The Thunderbirds feature that was released in 2004 was not written by Karey. Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview where Karey Kirkpatrick discusses The Rescuers Down Under, James and the Giant Peach and Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves | ||
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