Rango (2011)

1. Okay, here we are.

2. Welcome to the audio commentary portion of your fine Blu-ray or DVD.

3. I'm Gore Verbinski, director,

4. and I'm here with four amazingly talented amigos, compadres, friends.

5. Why don't you guys self-introduce so that we know your voices?

6. This is Crash McCreery.

7. What do you do, Crash McCreery?

8. Tell us more, Crash.

9. I was production designer on Rango.

10. And this is Jim Byrkit, I wrote the story, co-wrote the story,

11. and was a designer and did voices and things like that.

12. I'm Tim Alexander and I was visual effects supervisor at ILM.

13. Hal Hickel, I'm the animation director at ILM.

14. Welcome to Rango.

15. This was actually one of the last shots finished in the movie.

16. Why was that, Hal Hickel? What took so long?

17. Well, we started it late, late in the game.

18. And the mariachis are always tough anyways.

19. We had a long road honing in on their characters over the course of the film,

20. and somehow or other, this shot just ended up being last,

21. the last one to do, first in the film and last to make.

22. - It's a great shot. - Plus, figuring out the stage.

23. We went through a whole design process trying to figure out those letters.

24. And the lighting, using the bar lighting.

25. All the techniques in the bar lighting.

26. Yes, this was really fun and Johnny did a great job

27. taking the warm-up concept and adding a little Felix Ungar kicker.

28. - It's my only shot in the whole film. - That's right, Hal.

29. Well, there's the shot... Oh, yeah. That's not in the movie any more.

30. - They cut that out. - We cut out most of Hal's shots.

31. I had two shots and you cut one of them.

32. Now, Gore, we had to rewrite this opening scene many, many times.

33. We kind of knew that going in, that this scene would change a lot.

34. It was haunting, and just packed, so front-loaded with

35. so much about the character that we had to get across

36. in such a condensed period of time.

37. There was always concern that this scene was gonna just be,

38. you know, "Stop talking, please, lizard, stop talking."

39. Remember we used to open the whole movie with the shot of a glass of water

40. and Rango was... Behind it. Yeah.

41. "Two parts H, one part O, just the way I like it."

42. Yeah, and Raoul, the bartender.

43. That's right. He was going to be having a cocktail party,

44. wasn't even putting on a play, he was having a cocktail party.

45. Mixing drinks, but the only drink you could mix was water.

46. And I love the simple look of the terrarium,

47. how it kind of lulls us into a sense that this film is gonna have

48. this very simple kind of computer graphics look.

49. And then all that gets smashed on the highway.

50. - We see what the world really looks like. - The sucker punch.

51. And production-wise, this was one of our first sequences we worked on, too,

52. so we were kind of grappling with the look of the film,

53. also knowing that we wanted it to be a little simpler than the rest of the film.

54. And Rango's colour as well.

55. Trying to figure out what colour he was going to look.

56. Yeah, really, really nice, you know, this is my favourite part,

57. sort of breaking the fourth wall.

58. The film is so self-reflexive, you know,

59. the mariachi Greek chorus singing about the protagonist,

60. the protagonist being an actor, who fancies himself the hero.

61. Again, just condensing all of that into, you know,

62. meet him, get his want across.

63. And then completely destroy his world.

64. And it's really his birth, this terrarium destruction,

65. I think, his metaphorical birth.

66. A little bit of... What's the movie where...

67. - The Dudley Moore? - The Dudley Moore picture.

68. - Bedazzled? - No. Was it Foul Play or something,

69. where the bed falls out and the disco lights come on?

70. Goldie Hawn.

71. Oh, my God, that was ridiculous.

72. That was actually a really good lighting reference, though.

73. It was, that's what we were using for that disco ball.

74. So here's the first time we see his context of where he really is.

75. That goes by pretty quick.

76. The Ave Maria was a temp cue

77. - that we just never got rid of. - That we kept.

78. - A lot of that... - Hans was like,

79. "We're never gonna make it sound like that."

80. A lot of things that we ended up keeping

81. started in the animatic that we edited with Wyatt Jones.

82. This was a hard series of shots to get right.

83. The energy of that explosion and all the pieces flying

84. and having it be comedic, but visceral, and all those things at once.

85. And having it be comedic, but visceral, and all those things at once.

86. It was tough to get right.

87. And the water, too. Those are some of our first water sims on the show,

88. - and trying to figure out detail levels... - Zero gravity.

89. and what's right for the look of the film.

90. It's interesting that

91. when you look at the storyboards, particularly for that sequence,

92. they're pretty accurate in terms of the...

93. If you imagine the pencil version of that exact sequence and the timing.

94. And, yeah, I think Wyatt and Craig did a great job

95. at sort of guessing the amount of...

96. There's no handles, those are frame accurate, every edit is frame accurate.

97. Craig Wood, by the way, our editor.

98. And editorial is such a story room, really, in a film like this

99. because you are dealing with so many narrative aspects at once.

100. Well, we worked that animatic down to such

101. perfection in sort of an unrelenting way.

102. But you have so much faith, there's so much faith

103. that a drawing with a soundtrack

104. is going to be the right length once you start seeing it move.

105. And that is really difficult.

106. Beautiful design.

107. It is amazing how accurate your story reel was to the final.

108. We really spent all of our time putting the pictures on the screen rather than

109. - re-editing and changing... - I think it was critical to take ILM,

110. the talent there, and really focus it on

111. iterations towards a goal rather than iterations sort of spazzing out

112. and heading in different directions.

113. It really was nice to have a sharp story reel.

114. I wish you had drawn telephone poles, though, in your storyboards.

115. - Telephone pole continuity. - Telephone poles and clouds,

116. that's all I think about when I watch this scene.

117. The composition.

118. Composition, yeah, they're cheated all over the place.

119. It's true, they move every shot.

120. In every single scene they had to be just right.

121. And we were having some issues with

122. disappearing telephone poles at that same time.

123. I just want to point out, Crash did this incredible design

124. of Roadkill, based on a sketch that Gore did.

125. Also, Jim, your first drawing of Rango was really

126. holding the glass of this water cocktail

127. with that shirt and standing in the middle of nowhere.

128. It really, I think, keyed this whole sequence, keyed his character.

129. Well, I drew that after we went to the pet store, remember?

130. That's right.

131. And we saw the dead bug floating in the water.

132. - Totally. - Like, Dr Marx.

133. We saw a real chameleon and it had such character,

134. we were like, "That's gotta be him. That's Rango right there."

135. I just love his discarded food. It wasn't a lot.

136. - It was just shells and bugs. Awful. - It was floating.

137. And I remember all the discussions about the chameleon eyes

138. and how important they were.

139. But it seemed like such a scary idea going into it

140. because you look at animated characters,

141. they've always got those big emotive ping-pong ball eyes that read so well.

142. And we were going to cover them up with flesh.

143. And so it was kind of a scary risk to take with our hero character,

144. but it really paid off.

145. Yeah, I had a feeling it would work because the whole eye moves.

146. And so you kind of have two eyes going on,

147. you have the big ball that's moving around,

148. and then you have his pupil that's in the middle.

149. Plus those rings, the rings are so expressive,

150. they're like circular eyebrows in terms of shaping an expression.

151. And they do change shape drastically, when he gets sad they bend.

152. We'll see some scenes coming up

153. where those rings are really adding to the expression.

154. We had one guy making all those shapes up at ILM.

155. - Who was that? - Jung-Seung,

156. he worked on that for months.

157. Making all those different expressions,

158. trying to make them all dial and work together so that...

159. Without stretching scales, too, that was a huge concern.

160. He also created all of the facial controls for Davy Jones,

161. - same guy, very talented guy. - There you go.

162. I love Rango. I love Rango, that he maintained the energy

163. from the first pencil sketches we were doing.

164. And then once you sort of took over, Crash,

165. you really made him a real guy with the colours,

166. - figured out the scale pattern. - Yeah,

167. but there was a lot we had done up at ILM as well.

168. - Exactly. - I mean, getting it into a 3-D model

169. and being able to see it from different angles

170. where you couldn't see it before, and the colour and the scales.

171. And we went up there a few times

172. and we actually got to poke around with the geometry.

173. - We literally sat there with... - With the modeller.

174. Frank and said, "Move this scale

175. about half a centimetre to the left."

176. And remember his crossed eyes?

177. We realised Rango needed slightly crossed eyes to get that expression.

178. That was Frank Gravatt, I think he's still in therapy.

179. But you know what? Having the challenge

180. that you know you're doing something kind of unique

181. when you're faced with so many difficult aspects of a character.

182. This was the first mariachi shot we did.

183. And honing in on their sort of seriousness and pride

184. and all those things was really tough

185. because they are so naturally cute

186. that the animators just wanted to make them bouncy and cute

187. the way they are playing their instruments.

188. And sort of dialing that down and finding the true sort of mariachi vibe

189. was pretty tricky, surprisingly tricky, actually.

190. Also that song is a demo that Ken and Rick did in preproduction...

191. - Ken Karman and Rick Garcia. that never changed.

192. And interesting thing about the mariachis is they were...

193. Right around the time we were working on the narrative and the story reel

194. and the whole concept of the narrative was on the table,

195. Crash, I remember you came in.

196. The assignment was creatures of the desert, Western. Go.

197. Let's just see any creature made into a bandito or a gunslinger,

198. or any kind of character from a classic Western.

199. You walked in with that drawing of those mariachis

200. right around the time we were like,

201. "Well, maybe this film needs like a Greek chorus or some..."

202. It's gonna need some sort of set-up...

203. - A Cat Ballou type of... - Yeah, Cat Ballou, kind of.

204. Somebody singing of the demise,

205. the guys with the coconuts and Sir Robin.

206. Again, literally that same day you walked in with that drawing.

207. - The stars aligned that day. - There they are.

208. That was our chorus.

209. And I have to point out, Gore has,

210. in the house where we were working out of,

211. about 400 guitars that we would start strumming

212. and make up mariachi songs as we were designing this.

213. This hawk escape sequence was the first thing I saw

214. as a running animatic that you guys had done.

215. And it was so funny and exciting to see it

216. because it's just got such great energy and timing.

217. Dave Feiss had storyboarded that

218. - in a really energetic way. - I loved his drawings

219. of Rock-Eye, the toad, just terrific,

220. - so funny, such funny drawings. - Those are classic.

221. Yeah, that blend-in concept probably goes back to 2003,

222. the very first idea of Rango.

223. I just remember saying, "I can only get so far in the pitch."

224. And he meets this rock, "Blend in," you know.

225. That concept sort of seemed to spur this whole identity quest,

226. and the guy doesn't belong, the fish out of water.

227. By the way, Rick, I know John and Tom did a great job with this music.

228. Joe Nuńez is playing Rock-Eye, who was amazing.

229. And we also have José Hernández,

230. who did the yodel voice, which was phenomenal.

231. I mean, he just came in at the last minute.

232. He's a world-class yodeller.

233. Oh, my God, he just did it in one take, did that yodel and

234. it was so great.

235. Music was so key, working with Hans and talking about

236. schadenfreude. There's this concept...

237. Enjoying someone else's discomfort.

238. Yeah, the glee in the demise of the protagonist,

239. I think they really captured it.

240. It was always a musical sequence, this sequence.

241. It's funny the things you don't think are gonna be of any concern at all,

242. - like the size of that bottle. - Right.

243. When he's laying in it, it has to be one size,

244. when he's running in it, it has to be much bigger.

245. And we cheated it all over the place. It's a bunch of different sizes.

246. All I can think of is glass

247. when I see this sequence.

248. That glass was tough.

249. The magnification, refraction, the amount of dirt, everything,

250. really beautifully executed.

251. It was really interesting to talk early on about emotional reality,

252. not photo reality, but sort of emotional reality

253. and the detail in all these characters.

254. And maybe the world, like this sequence going quite surreal world.

255. So, not so much like things had to be absolutely real,

256. but there had to be an emotional reality to the characters.

257. And that required a tremendous amount of detail.

258. You've got a protagonist suffering an identity crisis,

259. it's not the 12 expressions of the talking potato.

260. There's, like, a tremendous amount

261. of involuntary muscle spasm under the eye, twitches.

262. The animators, Kevin, Maia, the whole gang.

263. Look all those faces right there in those two seconds. That's amazing.

264. And really useful to have the actors, and Johnny and Isla here,

265. really committing to the performance.

266. In fact, this scene, I think more than any, when they're...

267. And I knew it from the time we were storyboarding this scene,

268. the "What are you doing? What are you... You're frozen."

269. That scene only, recording somebody in isolation

270. and somebody else in isolation, trying to put together that moment

271. where they've got their arms around each other.

272. It's joyously awkward.

273. I think that it's just so great to have the actors in one space.

274. And particularly, Johnny and Isla.

275. They did a great job. Isla actually improv'd the little cuddle line.

276. - Yeah, I love that. - Which was great,

277. and we kept from the live action shoot.

278. And that footage was just a huge resource for the animators.

279. To be able to go and look at that every time they were starting a shot,

280. and mine it for every bit of business,

281. and it was just terrific,

282. it was just a great foundation for them to do their work on.

283. - I love this part. - Yeah, that's Johnny fully committing.

284. - There's no halfway there. - Yeah.

285. And that was really interesting also, to have the actors doing 10 pages a day

286. because you think about the process, a year-and-a-half, story reel,

287. 20 days with the actors, a year and a half at ILM.

288. Even longer because we were starting to build assets.

289. But that 20-day period, 10 pages a day,

290. these actors are used to doing a page and a half, two,

291. go back to your trailer, come back out a half hour,

292. do two lines of dialogue, go back into your trailer in live action.

293. It was really interesting to see everybody frustrated at the beginning.

294. And then by the end, "Right, acting, remember that?"

295. You just go and you are ripping through it.

296. And I think it was really great to see

297. the whole cast come alive.

298. - Beans was a tough character to design. - Yeah.

299. She was actually the last character we designed.

300. Rango was the first that we locked onto, and Beans was a year and a half later

301. - by the time we got her design down. - Yeah, she was tough.

302. - I think she came out great. - Yeah.

303. It was hard 'cause sometimes she was too monstrous

304. or she was too pretty.

305. We had to find just the right balance between the two.

306. At one point, Isla walked in the room while we were designing her,

307. and she gave us some suggestions.

308. She did, she asked for some certain enhancements on Beans.

309. Breasts?

310. But actually, it made it better, it really did.

311. So she takes credit now for the final design of Beans,

312. - which she should. - I throw it to her every time.

313. Yeah, what's that cup size?

314. But seeing them next to each other is really interesting,

315. she's about three inches taller than Rango.

316. I remember we had a head size problem at one point.

317. Yeah, the first time we put the two characters together

318. just to see how they looked together, it was ridiculous.

319. And trying to figure out, "Is that real hair?

320. "Is she wearing a wig? Is it lizard hair?"

321. We know she needed hair.

322. That was a Dave Shannon drawing, Beans, that really nailed it.

323. Dave Shannon had, and Eugene Yelchin had some huge hits.

324. And I think Eugene's big win is Priscilla coming up.

325. He just walked in with that drawing of Priscilla, and it was just...

326. - Yeah. - Bingo.

327. So there was a period of time for about a month or two

328. where we had four or five great artists

329. all just generating possible character designs.

330. Jim, Crash, Eugene, Dave Shannon.

331. The key characters we knew we needed Rattlesnake Jake, we needed a tortoise.

332. But then it was, like, populate this town, Dirt, we need to populate this town.

333. I love those Westerns where Strother Martin is...

334. Somebody walks into a bar and says two lines,

335. and you feel like if the camera followed them,

336. - there would be a whole other movie. - Everybody in this town...

337. - Clinker, Clinker. could have his own story.

338. - What's the name? Papa Joad? - Crevice.

339. - Crevice. - Crevice.

340. Mr Snuggles coming up.

341. We had so many... I don't know if people...

342. Some of these characters... We named them all.

343. - All back stories. - All right, name the kids.

344. - Cletus. - Lucky, Dutch, Boo.

345. - Cletus, did somebody say Cletus? - Priscilla. Yeah.

346. There she is.

347. Crash, you took that Eugene drawing...

348. This was actually the very first thing we animated on the film,

349. we used this sequence as a test bed to get characters working,

350. get the town of Dirt up and running.

351. As well as Roger Deakins' lighting test.

352. This was proof of concept that it was even gonna work.

353. - This whole idea of using ILM. - The depth of those eyes.

354. I love Furgus' eyes, you just want to pop them out

355. and give them a good rinse. They're filthy.

356. That 'stache is awesome. No lip-synch problems with him.

357. I love the roadrunners in the background.

358. I could just watch the background of this movie.

359. One of the things I like about the character design, Crash,

360. is the asymmetry of everybody.

361. It made it harder to build them, but...

362. Yeah, that was spun off of Jim's initial design,

363. which, I think, that aesthetic, we were attracted to.

364. It's, like, as soon as we lost it, something was missing.

365. That's the mantra for the whole town.

366. - Absolutely. - Look at that guy.

367. - That's Slim. - Cobb in the background.

368. This walk on Mr Snuggles coming up, this John Wayne walk,

369. we ripped that directly from reference we shot of Crash.

370. - Crash did the John Wayne walk. - I still have the movie file.

371. I had a big lunch that day.

372. There was a time at the beginning of this movie,

373. Crash, and I talked and we said,

374. "Okay, if we're going to do another animal movie, a talking animal movie,

375. "what's gonna be special about it?"

376. And we said it has to go to a whole new level

377. of texture and asymmetry and grunginess.

378. That's what's funny is, there's almost no more conventional form

379. for an animated film than a talking critter picture.

380. It's so not conventional in any real sense.

381. This scene is worth talking about, just from the lighting standpoint.

382. We could spend a lot of time talking about all these characters,

383. 'cause it's the first time you get a look at them,

384. but I just think when you first started moving

385. from very rudimentary test lighting

386. to actually full renders of this scene...

387. This scene took forever to light.

388. - It was very hard. I remember it was... - And it's so critical.

389. And we had talked about it for so long, about how it had to be great.

390. Lighting-wise, at least for me, it was one of the seminal moments of the film,

391. just trying to figure this lighting out.

392. We had a lot of conversations,

393. and I remember Gore would get on the phone with Roger,

394. and we walked through this sequence

395. just in terms of how might we do this on set?

396. How would we light this thing

397. and not make absolutely every single set-up unique

398. because that's what the sequence was calling for?

399. And every shot we placed the beams in, we put them hopefully in the right spot.

400. Tried to frame people, pop them off the background.

401. And get as much atmosphere as we could into the sequence.

402. That's the thing. This film doesn't have that clean, shiny,

403. simplified cartoon vibe.

404. It's a highly detailed environment, highly detailed characters.

405. And the lighting is so important to make everything read

406. and live together, and not just be a jumble.

407. It's interesting because, I think, early on,

408. not having made an animated movie, and not really knowing how to,

409. it's quite liberating because every discussion was about live action.

410. What would we do, 27, drop it in, put him on an apple box,

411. move it a little to the left,

412. negative fill here, balance,

413. smoke moving in the shafts,

414. ceiling fans interacting, cheats that we do on set constantly.

415. As well as accidental things that happen on a set.

416. Compositionally,

417. performance, everything, the creation of anomaly

418. and the preservation of anything awkward that we could find

419. and champion and preserve it through the process

420. 'cause everything tends to get so clinical so quickly.

421. That was my big fear,

422. that iterations were gonna just destroy any sense that this is happening.

423. I want 'em to feel like I've got a camera on my shoulder,

424. and there's a 5'8" lizard talking to a tortoise or whatever.

425. And it's like we're using take three for the close-up,

426. and take nine for the... So it has to feel like the skies are changing

427. between takes and clouds are mismatching.

428. Everything about the film has to...

429. We have to fabricate this feeling

430. that we're there filming it, it's occurring, it's not conceived.

431. I think it worked and I think your quest to have all of those imperfections, it reads,

432. even for people who don't know film inside and out.

433. They just feel there is something about this that's different.

434. The depth of background animation, too, from the whole team.

435. Giving somebody in the background,

436. whether it's Lenny pulling his finger nervously or...

437. Everybody's got some place they are coming from and going to.

438. That was really, I thought, a phenomenal experience up at ILM

439. with the animators, in particular.

440. And with James Tooley,

441. and cloth sim and lighting technicians, just to talk about character.

442. Everything was a character discussion.

443. "Where is he coming from? Where is he going?" Stephen Root.

444. - He is a god! - Stephen Root!

445. - He is a god. - And you guys really...

446. That foaming.

447. That's one of the favourite pieces of reference that you shot.

448. Toad had to chew the Alka-Seltzer with no water.

449. - Toad's a real guy, by the way. - Toad is not a toad.

450. In the video, you're going, "No, don't spit it out, you can't spit it out.

451. "Now try to talk..."

452. "One, two, three, four." "He's talking, and talk..."

453. That was one of the best parts of this is shooting little bits and pieces

454. of reference footage that we would then deliver.

455. Stephen really was off the hook with his...

456. - He was so funny. commitment to the...

457. And he did Merrimack, and he did Doc,

458. - and he did a little bit of Mr Snuggles. - Yeah.

459. And his face actually informed the design of Doc.

460. It's one of the few characters that actually hadn't been polished off...

461. - Was based on the actor, yeah. by the time the actor was casted.

462. Stephen Root is a pro and he's a great guy.

463. He's a desert island actor.

464. If you had five actors you could take to a desert island,

465. and you had to do seven genres.

466. How long are you going to be on this desert island?

467. I don't know, but I just, like, I'd take Bill Nighy

468. and I'd take Stephen Root,

469. these guys who can be a hundred different things.

470. He is so amazing.

471. He just commits.

472. And I have to say, Crash did a good job as Parsons,

473. - the bank clerk. - Yeah.

474. - My favourite vocal performer. - Yeah.

475. - "The bank's been robbed!" - "The bank's been robbed!"

476. "Oh, no, the bank's been robbed!"

477. - I lost my voice for three days after this. - Yeah, that was great.

478. There was a lot of yelling in this movie.

479. Like, "Everybody, we need a crowd, we need everybody to yell".

480. This is beautiful, this lighting was fantastic, Tim,

481. really off the hook.

482. - Gordy. - I love how you guys let things go dark

483. where they need to go dark, and let it get a little blown out

484. where they are getting blasted and stuff, and it just feels great.

485. It was nice that we were able to embrace that

486. and just not over-light everything.

487. You were constantly just trying to make it look like we were there,

488. shooting it. If you're exposing it that way,

489. that stuff's gonna go dark. You're not going to be able to see it.

490. The number of singular...

491. In most animated movies, you would have the town full of pigs.

492. The big pig, the small pig, the mama pig, the daddy pig.

493. - And then variations on the same. - Every character is different

494. in this movie, I think.

495. - There's over 90, right? - Ninety character designs in this.

496. - Ray Winstone. - I love Bad Bill, just as a design,

497. and Ray did such an awesome job with the performance and the voice,

498. it was just great.

499. I love his design. He's a gunslinger that can't reach his own guns.

500. His arms are too small.

501. T. Rex.

502. Another great note for the animators,

503. no gratuitous movement. That was a huge...

504. - Don't be afraid to be still. - Yeah, absolutely.

505. Less is more.

506. Don't just do something, stand there. Yeah.

507. It took a while to get to that 'cause animators, they want to animate.

508. - They want to move something. - Wanna move the hell out of things.

509. And just to getting to find the moments of stillness.

510. And, Gore, you were always asking for truth, and not just antic,

511. funny motion, but to really find the truth in it.

512. There's a lot of standing up and very, very hard to have a conversation

513. on this movie without a lot of hand gestures,

514. and getting up, pushing tables around.

515. - Beautiful smoke. - That smoke shot

516. is one of my favourite shots.

517. This performance is pretty singular.

518. - Waffles. - Kevin Martel, our lead animator,

519. lead animator on Rango really established the look of Rango.

520. And those taps, the cadence of those taps

521. - are from like the original animatic. - That's in the animatic.

522. That's exactly how he did it.

523. Same with the little squeaky.

524. There was so much good comic timing that came directly from the animatics.

525. Time and time again, if we were having trouble with a comic moment,

526. we would just, "All right, let's go back to the animatic.

527. "It was funny in the animatic when it was just drawings,

528. "why isn't it funny now?" And it was just great.

529. Key all sound.

530. It was great to have Ray and Johnny together for this scene, too.

531. I remember this. It's like, "Okay, remember when your mom

532. "spits on a napkin and wipes your face?" It's just like that.

533. So we cheated his arms longer here,

534. so it looked like he could reach the guns,

535. but there, clearly, he can't.

536. - I love hearing people... - Snap, snap.

537. People in the audience always react to that knuckle cracking.

538. Peter Miller did a great job with the sound design.

539. He and Addison were really trying to...

540. We had that squeaky windmill in the temp forever

541. and he kept coming back with different versions of the squeak.

542. I'm like, "That's not it, that's not quite it".

543. The lighting here and in the shootout,

544. I think are some of the best town lighting.

545. We just blasted the sunlight in there, and then let a lot of the bounce light

546. off the ground do the rest of the work.

547. The non-sky.

548. So important to balance the skies out.

549. It really is, especially moving from the terrarium

550. immediately to this world that's hot,

551. and the heat vapour in the background.

552. And just the almost skip-bleach.

553. I love how Johnny found a voice for Rango that seems organic.

554. And yet it's still connected to that original voice

555. of the very theatrical goofball in the terrarium.

556. - It's got a little bit of Don Knotts in it. - That's a great performance.

557. It's got a little bit of one of our former presidents.

558. Great job.

559. The Pepto-Bismol bottle.

560. It's interesting 'cause there's a lot of found objects

561. in the town, but we don't really play them up.

562. This is probably one of the few things that you can really identify.

563. Yeah. Kudos to Jim Carson, who designed, I think,

564. practically all of the buildings.

565. And he actually helped set the lighting look.

566. Yeah, lighting texture.

567. Also John Knoll on that first pass to the rotating bar.

568. - Really beautiful pass, sets that light... - Yeah, it's fantastic.

569. Take a look at what our lighting's gonna be like.

570. He basically took Jim Carson's illustration and made a 3-D turnaround.

571. This sequence is a great show-off for our guys at ILM who do

572. - destruction and simulation of objects. - I couldn't believe this when I saw it.

573. - How did you... - James Tooley and his team.

574. Unbelievable. Those guys are just off the hook.

575. And it's so nice. Everybody, the whole gang,

576. I think really appreciated

577. these conversations about

578. a sense of ownership. It's not a shot. It's that whole...

579. We're not making shots, we're making a movie.

580. I just remember every conversation was, "It's not a shot. It's a movie".

581. And to see them get excited about it.

582. I don't know when that threshold was like, "Oh, wow!

583. "Wait a minute, we're not making... We're doing a whole movie!"

584. It was a culture change, really, to go from being

585. the guys who stick the creature into the live action scene

586. - in postproduction... - Matching plates and lighting.

587. to you're a filmmaker and you're making a movie,

588. a whole movie, and you're gonna look at the whole sequence

589. and you're gonna see the sequence's place in the whole movie

590. and understand it.

591. - And you care about my opinion? - Yeah, exactly.

592. That's really what I mean. It's like you and Pat.

593. First start with the best, and then empower them.

594. And the context. I mean, just to hear... Talking to Tooley about the cloth sim,

595. and where is the emotional state of the character,

596. and where is he coming through. His shirt should feel a little damp here,

597. and bigger and heavier, 'cause he's down.

598. And here it should be up, and the scarf's blowing.

599. Having those conversations that are scene specific,

600. and the character of the water tower, the liquorice stretch, or...

601. It's really nice when people start to go, "Well, I'm essential.

602. "What I do is essential to the narrative."

603. In Pirates the context was the shots that surrounded it that we would bring.

604. Yeah. Usually, we're delivered...

605. There's so many decisions made upstream of us.

606. I still think visual effects are really creative,

607. but there's a lot of decisions that are made while you're on set.

608. And so we were part of that decision-making process,

609. which was great.

610. And it was great to see what they brought to the table.

611. After a while, they got comfortable,

612. and so things you wouldn't expect that were added in

613. just from the love of doing it was fantastic.

614. Also, while we're here, I should point out Russell Paul.

615. He was our hard surface model supervisor, built most of the town,

616. and all those breaking boards earlier.

617. All those things are individually modelled.

618. That's a lot of polygons.

619. It's a lot of boards.

620. I love that overhead shot.

621. That was based on a Dave Shannon drawing, right?

622. The hawk splayed out like that?

623. I just have to say, Crash, also your addition of the metallic beak

624. on the hawk was so awesome.

625. And we ended up using that as the ricochet when Rango shoots it.

626. I love this gag.

627. With the gun and the arrow.

628. The next time we see the owls, we have to get their names across.

629. Señor Flan, Lupe.

630. Here's Claudia Black as Angelique, the sexy receptionist fox.

631. And she was tough, too, design-wise, because she always wanted to look

632. too conventionally cute.

633. Yeah, she looked a little Disney at first.

634. She's probably one of the cleanest characters.

635. But she's from France, so she's more sophisticated.

636. And I love this recurring theme of Rango in the box, in the terrarium.

637. - Keeps coming back. - He's always framed by a device.

638. His life is in context of a theatrical setting.

639. I think he knows. I think the Mayor knows he's a phoney.

640. But we went through a whole thing with the Mayor,

641. when we first started seeing him in shots,

642. where he just didn't look like the man of power. Remember that?

643. His shirt looked rumpled and soft and a little dirty.

644. And we added that embroidery and sort of starched up his collar a bit.

645. Right, cleaned up the hat just a little bit.

646. And straightened him up a little bit.

647. Another cool lighting situation in this room.

648. - I was gonna say, this set was... - The stained glass.

649. John really, I thought, did a great job with the set.

650. And that stained glass took forever to get right.

651. Yeah, but it's beautiful. I just love how there it's hitting the floor,

652. and you can see the orange on the Mayor.

653. So, one thing we should mention is that John Logan was the screenwriter

654. - that we worked with. - Extraordinary.

655. And John is amazing, and he was acting almost like a faculty advisor

656. for us as we would bring him ridiculous things we wanted to do.

657. - He kept us dramaturgically correct. - Yes, but he writes villains so well.

658. - He did the voice of the Mayor. - In the animatic, yeah.

659. - Great job. - But the scenes with the villains

660. that John wrote, we didn't change them at all.

661. I think we kept them almost word for word,

662. whereas the other scenes, we did a lot of improv,

663. we did a lot of silliness that we added to it.

664. But he writes villains so perfect.

665. So all the good scenes are John's.

666. And all the messy ones are...

667. I love the Mayor as a character.

668. I like his design.

669. Ned Beatty did an awesome job with his voice and making it a new thing,

670. and it's just great, and his design is just fantastic.

671. It was so much fun to animate.

672. Ned Beatty, it was such a pleasure to work with him.

673. And his performance in Network is still...

674. - Iconic? unbelievable.

675. "Primal forces of nature!"

676. And there's a little movie called Wise Blood that he's in

677. with Harry Dean Stanton and Bill Hickey

678. that John Huston directed. So he's got some

679. really great John Huston stories and does a great impersonation.

680. This scene coming up is one of my favourite scenes in the movie

681. - in terms of just comedy. - Yeah.

682. I laugh so hard every time.

683. Great line overlap, great...

684. Put it all on top of itself and try to keep it quick.

685. "Ten-gallon hat, marked down from 15."

686. Ridiculous.

687. And a great set here, too.

688. This thing has the kitchen sink, in terms of set dressing, in there.

689. Literally.

690. And I love just handing a loaded gun to a child.

691. Yeah, it's a great example of what...

692. Cartoons used to do and we can't do any more. It's verboten.

693. It's so wrong.

694. He's chewing on the gun.

695. We really thought that this was...

696. - Pointing at Mom. Sign the Bible. gonna be a problem.

697. But Rango just doesn't get it.

698. This flaw of Beans' was a fun thing to get right.

699. Does she freeze? Does the camera do a little shimmy when she freezes?

700. - Is it just her? - A little sound effect helps.

701. - This shot. - Doc.

702. And Lew.

703. - Lew Temple. - Lew Temple, yeah.

704. Amazing job.

705. I like this gag at the biting the apple.

706. So is there any story behind the steampunk spider?

707. Mr Black. He's Mr Black.

708. I don't know. References just came out, yeah.

709. We decided Mr Black has a whole underground laboratory.

710. I love that shot. That is one of my favourites.

711. The beginning part of the sequence is really about contrast,

712. we really kept trying to darken.

713. Really early on, Jim, I remember talking about

714. just how the town needs a belief system.

715. There's gotta be something about this town that is off.

716. You're not just walking into a straight Western.

717. There's a little Stepford moment. There was a little bit of...

718. And we were talking about this sequence

719. and trying to get a little Eisenstein with the compositions.

720. He's not in Kansas any more.

721. Yeah, we knew we needed to take it to a weird place here.

722. But also, they're... How long... "Every Wednesday, just like clockwork."

723. - That's what they do. - Yeah.

724. And I love this track.

725. Hank Williams, just beautiful.

726. And this dance scene was one of the only times we used motion capture.

727. But did we actually use any of that information?

728. - No. - I threw it out.

729. It helped us in planning the scene.

730. It was a quick way to get the motion of the choreography

731. in front of a camera without actually using it

732. to drive the characters in the end. They were all animated.

733. But, yeah, it was useful for planning it out.

734. Crash, that is a great design on that lady right there.

735. - Miss Daisy. - Yeah, she was designed after Granny

736. from the Clampetts.

737. She is outrageous.

738. - There's the bird. - There's Gil.

739. He just nailed it.

740. And Abigail.

741. I liked... You guys had a gag originally

742. where he's only got the one leg and the crutch through the whole movie.

743. And then at some point, he would just put down the other foot.

744. We dumped the whole thing.

745. We never found a spot to do that.

746. Sequel.

747. God, that lighting is amazing.

748. So here we see that Rango is just one of many sheriffs.

749. I love "Hold my beer and watch this."

750. - So the pipe... - The monolith.

751. That's everything. Water is everything in this movie,

752. from the beginning to the end.

753. It's all about putting shadows of characters on the edge of frame

754. to just make it feel like there's more people.

755. Crowds are just so tough to do, they're just a lot of work.

756. I love these guys. They're so random. It's like...

757. - The frogmen. - The acolytes.

758. - Chainmail. - Acolytes.

759. The crowd thing is so opposite of live action, right,

760. where you just bring in your extras, and you just...

761. - You got 'em for a day. - It's easy. That's the cheap part.

762. Everyone we added here was...

763. Grab the craft service guy and throw him out there.

764. And a lot of this, we'll start seeing in these next few sequences,

765. a lot of the background characters that we had to build, as well.

766. Some of them based on some of the foreground guys.

767. There's a guy based on Papa Joad with the big beard and the arm sling.

768. How did we end up with that hippie?

769. I don't know where that guy came from.

770. Why does that guy keep showing up in shots?

771. With the big old body.

772. It's a little Sid and Marty Krofft.

773. It's a guy who snuck on set for sure.

774. Somebody's cousin.

775. This glop that falls on his face is terrific.

776. - It always gets a great reaction. - Great music through here, too.

777. - Yeah, it's amazing. - Beautiful.

778. I just love how it keeps coming back to the thirst.

779. It's a town that's drying up, but Rango is thirsting for adventure

780. and thirsting for love.

781. And by the end, it comes.

782. The water comes, and the love comes

783. and the adventure comes.

784. I loved your one-sheet: "A Be Who You Aren't Story."

785. Yeah, this is a... That's what it is.

786. Be who you aren't, in order to find who you are.

787. This was one of my favourite scenes, actually.

788. The crowd, the ravenous crowd.

789. The whole thing shaking. They're about to tear it down.

790. Remember how I tried to get this involuntary shiver, spasm?

791. When he finally sees the water.

792. Yeah, Kevin Martel.

793. Rango is so thirsty, and he can't believe it when he sees...

794. - The shiver. The shoulder. - Gonna have to change those undies.

795. And Johnny just nailed this, too.

796. Just trying to keep control.

797. It was great to have all the crowd.

798. When we shot this audio, to have the whole crowd there,

799. so he can really perform. No more projection.

800. This water was great, too.

801. Really, just the waste.

802. "You!"

803. There's a shot coming up where Merrimack looks like he wants to say

804. something about him wasting the water.

805. That's beautiful.

806. - Really beautiful. - He doesn't quite speak up.

807. Who animated that?

808. I don't remember.

809. - Pal! - I know.

810. Just make it up. Maia. Maia gets credit for it.

811. We had such an amazing collection of character actors on the stage with us.

812. Everybody.

813. - Blake Clark. - Blake Clark was amazing.

814. Lan Abercrombie,

815. Alanna Ubach.

816. She's a talent, boy.

817. Lew Temple.

818. Lew, who can do no wrong.

819. And Alex Manugian as Spoons.

820. Alex came in as a temp voice on the animatic.

821. He was a friend of ours who would come by,

822. and I've known him for years.

823. And we said, "Can you do just an old man?"

824. He crushed Spoons, he did that read for the prayer.

825. He did the prayer, that just moved us to tears.

826. And we tried to find a replacement when we actually cast the movie,

827. and it was like, "All right, let's find a real old guy now,"

828. and we couldn't find any better than Alex.

829. And so he ended up doing it for the movie.

830. - He was great. - He was so happy.

831. He loved being with the character actors.

832. Hearing their stories.

833. - I love the dingle balls on the hat. - There's Alanna and Kym.

834. Our town drunk there, great character.

835. - "Hiya, Sheriff!" - We have a drunk in this film.

836. That's right, Jim.

837. - Several drunks. - We have a couple drunks.

838. - Cactus juice. - Cactus juice. That's what it is.

839. This was one of our first night-time-look sequences.

840. Like trying to figure out what colour the skies were.

841. I remember that our inclination was to go blue,

842. but you guys wanted to get more of a cyan kind of green look.

843. I love Frederic Remington's night paintings.

844. - They always had that green sky. - Beautiful.

845. And we really see it in the love sequence later.

846. Yeah.

847. - This was a tough lighting thing, too. - That's beautiful.

848. That's like a Renaissance painting.

849. - I love this here. - Yeah, Deakins was...

850. You could pretty much count on him saying, "More contrast."

851. Now, Crash, here's another example where you did use the real actor

852. - as the basis of your design. - Yeah, no offence to Harry,

853. but I literally ripped any feature I could off of Harry Dean Stanton for Pappy.

854. Harry Dean was such a trip to work with.

855. And Ryan Hurst and Vincent did just an amazing job.

856. As Jedidiah and Ezekiel.

857. - Some of that stuff... - Loofah.

858. His hand gestures were so great. Ryan's.

859. His fingers really came off.

860. - And here's Crash. - Crash's big acting moment.

861. I love the morning light here. How did you guys do that?

862. We used some reference, that you mentioned earlier,

863. that John Knoll did of the saloon. He did an early morning light there.

864. And Gore sent us some reference from The Weather Man

865. that actually gave us the two-tone colour in that sequence.

866. And it was something we struggled with early on in the film.

867. Meet Beans sequence, where we were trying to do an early morning light there.

868. Didn't feel right for the sequence. We were struggling to get the look right.

869. But I think we got it better here.

870. Yeah, it was really chromatic in that earlier sequence

871. and here, I don't know.

872. It may not have had the right colours or something.

873. Also, we've got a lot more

874. to look at. I think when it was just two characters and the horizon,

875. there was nothing to interact. There was nothing to cast shadows

876. other than the characters themselves, and they were sort of cut mid-level.

877. I think this was the right scene to do it in.

878. And that song that Rick Garcia and Ken just crushed.

879. That was in the early stages of preproduction.

880. Again, a song that sort of made it all the way through the process.

881. You and I kind of improv'd that one day and it ended up being redone.

882. They did a great job taking it and making it real.

883. But it's nice to work on a story and have guitars around,

884. and have sound design and music and everything

885. informing narrative and illustrations.

886. And so it wasn't just screenplay and then shoot it and then movie.

887. It was completely organic.

888. The edit room up and running at the same time you're doing drawings,

889. at the same time you're playing guitars and picking music.

890. Everything. Going on scouts into the desert,

891. to look at cactus and coming back with reference material

892. and having that inform narrative.

893. I love the dead end of that scene.

894. - I intended to come back. - There's nowhere to go.

895. We knew we needed a riding scene right away.

896. But we also knew that there was nowhere to go.

897. The fact that that survives the cut, what a ride.

898. Not really. I just think it sums up his character so wonderful.

899. And it's great to have a movie that can be a little loose like that.

900. So here's where we really get to meet some of the posse.

901. Here's Blake Clark as Buford, the bartender.

902. And here's Lew.

903. And here's Gore, Gore is playing...

904. That was a Dave Shannon special, as well.

905. The conjunctivitis gag was fantastic.

906. - Nasty. - One for the moms and kiddies.

907. For the kids.

908. Yeah, beautiful look again, the lighting.

909. And then getting into the tunnels and the torches.

910. A lot of looking at those torches from Pirates 1

911. and having all that live action reference,

912. and studying them. You guys did a great job.

913. Raúl's effects team was in charge of that.

914. Some of the shots, when they're moving fast,

915. we'd do really specific sims for those.

916. Other ones we had generic sims that we were able to plug

917. on the top of the torches.

918. Really looking at those references for exposure and things like that,

919. 'cause really blowing them out and just letting it go.

920. And the glow, atmospherics.

921. You did the temp voice for Priscilla through the film, I was thinking...

922. - I did all the ladies. - He did Beans and Priscilla.

923. - He was great. - It was tough getting over those voices.

924. 'Cause you lived with them for a year and a half.

925. And they pulled it off.

926. But, man, I was married to Jim doing Rango and Gore doing women.

927. I like the reality that Abigail brought to the character.

928. We traded one kind of comedic thing for a kind of reality that came with it,

929. - and it was just great. - I think that

930. it's so great to have this immense, the dream team, talent-wise.

931. I mean, come on.

932. Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty and Alfred Molina.

933. It was just a joy, an absolute pleasure.

934. Gore, you did a great job in having each character

935. have their own wavelength in terms of their voice.

936. The bouillabaisse, yes. Everybody's an ingredient,

937. but nobody can have the same...

938. You're gonna end up with too much garlic.

939. 'Cause sometimes you go to animation and all the voices sound the same.

940. But it's a live action problem, too.

941. You cast too many characters that look the same.

942. There is something nice about the Laurel and Hardy of it all.

943. Waffles has this very wispy voice, and then there's John Cothran,

944. "He said follow the pipe."

945. John is great, and that's Jim doing Waffles.

946. That was a keeper, too.

947. There were some of the voices, your Waffles,

948. my Sergeant Turley, Crash as Parsons.

949. Some of them just made it through.

950. The beautiful Miyazaki-esque kind of moment of mystery.

951. I can't tell you the number of people that have asked me what that eye is.

952. Yeah. Exactly.

953. People wanna be so literal.

954. One person asked me, "Is that Jake? Is that like a foreshadow?"

955. I'm like, "No, no, no. That's not."

956. We were at one point gonna show that the pill bugs were feeding.

957. - That was Momma pill bug. - Breastfeeding pill bugs.

958. That got a little weird.

959. Even we had to rein ourselves in a little bit.

960. I liked the idea of finding Beans' dad like a skeleton.

961. That's right.

962. Don't say anything. A can of beans and a bottle of scotch.

963. A sign that says, "Welcome, Andromeda Five."

964. Aliens are coming.

965. - I know you're friendly! - Tennis shoes.

966. Another great lighting moment here, I think, when the lights go out.

967. - Yeah, that was pretty. - Yeah, that's nice.

968. Yeah, nice transition.

969. So this is the first time Rango actually does something sort of worthy

970. of being a sheriff and Beans notices.

971. They're developing a connection here.

972. It's also our cactus spirits. So much taken from that.

973. There's both the scouts in...

974. There's not a lot of animated movies

975. - where there's scouting in the budget. - Scouting locations.

976. "What's this budget number, scouting?"

977. Yeah. We went to deserts in Mexico, we went out to the deserts of California,

978. came across those great cactuses with those faces. Remember that?

979. - It was the end of the day, too. - "Look at that face."

980. We were on our way out.

981. We took pictures and we said, "We've got to work that into the movie."

982. That was the first image I saw from the film.

983. I saw you, Gore, at a visual effects event

984. before we'd even come down to Blind Wink, and you're like,

985. "Hey, I've got these."

986. And you pulled these photos out of your coat pocket.

987. And you're like, "Look at this, look at this, it's a face!"

988. So cool.

989. Yeah. And then we went to Mexico, and in the bonfire, remember?

990. They were making a face.

991. - That was insane. - Making this crazy sound.

992. I sent that to Peter Miller, the recordings of those bonfires.

993. That was unworldly.

994. And their eyes were glowing. That's where we got that,

995. - the image from the dream. - From the dream sequence, yeah.

996. I was glad they were still there when we saw the footage.

997. This prayer, it was great. It didn't make it into the final cut,

998. but the organ music.

999. Rango is struggling. He doesn't know whether he's arresting him,

1000. having a funeral or a wedding.

1001. Sort of combines them all.

1002. - "You have the right to remain silent." - I do that from time to time,

1003. - when put on the spot. - Yeah.

1004. It was probably best not to stay.

1005. It's really good, those moments after you watch a film with your kids

1006. that you come back home, and you talk about the movie,

1007. and you have to explain to them what a prostate is.

1008. Totally. Those are family-building moments.

1009. I would bring Gil Birmingham in to talk about moulting and mating,

1010. and all those things.

1011. "Sidesaddle."

1012. Yeah, this gets weird here.

1013. The posse is so confused.

1014. When the guys were recording the audio for this,

1015. and all the actors are lined up, and he would come through

1016. and he would snap that glove and say that line,

1017. nobody could keep a straight face.

1018. That was a good day.

1019. This Rango tune, it's interesting.

1020. The Thum brothers, John and David Thum, wrote this tune.

1021. There's vocals for it at the end of the movie over the credits.

1022. It's a song about the main character. It's a good hook.

1023. I love that we never know what his name might have been

1024. before he adopted the name Rango.

1025. Can we just get something clear? Because there was an article

1026. where a reporter had called him Lars.

1027. And Johnny played that character, so in the credits,

1028. he's credited as playing Lars.

1029. Who is the driver of the car.

1030. So we just had to come up with a name for that character.

1031. And somebody had sort of felt that that was Rango's name.

1032. Rango, on the record, does not have a name. It doesn't exist.

1033. - It's definitely not Rango. - And it's definitely not Lars,

1034. if we did have a name.

1035. - He's The Lizard with No Name. - Exactly.

1036. That's the whole point.

1037. So, I love this part.

1038. Gore had this idea that they would just start drawing with a stick on fire.

1039. And I remember when you pitched this, Gore.

1040. "How? What? What?"

1041. "He's drawing in the air?"

1042. There's a TIE fighter, there's "KISS."

1043. But it worked. We drew it several times, dozens of times,

1044. and then it actually makes sense, what you see.

1045. Absolutely. Good technique. Shooting the reference.

1046. We shot still reference, but then shooting the video reference

1047. and moving faster and slower, torches.

1048. Persistence of vision.

1049. A couple of people have said to me, "I saw the TIE fighter, that's ILM, right?

1050. "That's your Star Wars." I'm like, "No, that's not why that's there."

1051. That's what Rango's mind is made of, just random scribblings on a notebook.

1052. Rock and roll over, baby.

1053. I love this, the belly button is the snake bite.

1054. He digs right in there.

1055. So this was another great area of learning experience for us,

1056. which was how important eye lines are,

1057. Gore, to your story and to the blocking and to the feeling of the actors.

1058. And we were rendering these things with true refraction,

1059. which means that the eyeballs actually get distorted through the refraction.

1060. And it would turn the eye lines. And point them all over the place.

1061. 'Cause animators were animating the pupil on the surface

1062. and rendering put it back and put the lens on top.

1063. So, depending on your angle, the pupil would be in a completely different place.

1064. And it gave us great depth to the eyes.

1065. But we soon realised why people generally in cartoons just have the iris

1066. - painted on the surface of the eye. - It's a lot simpler.

1067. Oh, my God, that was a nightmare.

1068. You guys had to figure out a way to reverse...

1069. We did. We came up with a tool at the end.

1070. Inverted math, to sort of say, "This is where it needs to be,

1071. - "once we put the lens on." - Yeah, we did, we came up with a thing

1072. for the animators to use right at the end that would show them.

1073. This sequence was always, beyond having a lot of fun,

1074. at the beginning of the sequence and riffing on all the belly buttons

1075. and the drawings. It's really where

1076. people start believing in him and where Rango first clocks...

1077. - "I'm into something real now." - "Life is not a stage."

1078. Look at him staying up all night, thinking about it.

1079. I love this pairing of Rango and Beans coming up,

1080. because our lead Rango animator, Kevin Martel, animated Rango,

1081. and our lead Beans animator, Maia Kayser, animated Beans.

1082. And it's just such a beautiful scene

1083. and the interaction's so great and there's this beautiful animation.

1084. And it was really... Also, Isla and Johnny did a great...

1085. We shut things down, the two of them just played the scene naturally.

1086. And I thought that was a really...

1087. It's nice to get quite simple and real and honest.

1088. Absurdity is such a powerful tool, but it's the right...

1089. It's nice that the left hook is sort of genuine emotion

1090. when you least expect it or when you're thinking

1091. everything is maybe a little bit over the top.

1092. And people ask why did we slow the movie down so much here,

1093. but you have to. If we didn't have this, it wouldn't have the emotional grounding

1094. and it would really be missing.

1095. And it wouldn't work.

1096. Plus, you've got the bat sequence coming.

1097. That's right.

1098. - Shortly. - Just sit tight.

1099. So just hold on.

1100. And here's that night-time colour palette I was talking about earlier.

1101. Yeah, I thought this came out so nice.

1102. Crash, you did a bunch of drawings of this scene, I remember.

1103. Yeah, trying to get that down, getting our backgrounds right.

1104. It's such a tender moment.

1105. Even when we do have characters that have great big sort of white eyeballs,

1106. that there's so much interest and detail in them.

1107. If you look at Beans' eyes, they're not just white.

1108. There's layers of pearlescent detail and interest there.

1109. They're just beautiful.

1110. - She fakes it here. - Yeah, it's great.

1111. She's got a freckle pattern that's sort of Julianne Moore, a little.

1112. Yeah! We looked at a lot of redheads

1113. - for reference of her. - Susan Sarandon.

1114. - That helped a lot... - This performance reference

1115. that Johnny did was really good here, too. It was really nuanced.

1116. I thought the guys did a great job preserving and augmenting that.

1117. Gore, I remember that that fake kiss,

1118. that fake freezing, was one of the first things you wanted to do

1119. once we figured out she had the freezing problem.

1120. - And that stayed through. - That's right.

1121. And I remember walking in with the name Beans.

1122. - Right, we were trying to name her. - "I got the name, Beans!"

1123. You had a list of dog names.

1124. That's what you walked in with.

1125. Now this is interesting. So the play,

1126. we actually put into the movie here.

1127. And then went back and modified the terrarium.

1128. Remember the terrarium and the play? They didn't coexist as a pair.

1129. They didn't match, yeah.

1130. We went back and watching the animatic, we're like...

1131. We had to really pay something here that we've been priming before.

1132. - My head hurts every time I see... - He really whacks those guys.

1133. This was a ridiculous day on stage.

1134. It was fantastic, just fantastic.

1135. We did all this, we had all these props, all these hats.

1136. - Yeah, that was quite foolish. - The confetti, we threw confetti.

1137. It's great to see Buford and Stephen Root dancing.

1138. - Throwing confetti. - Fully committed.

1139. And this... Really, really ridiculous.

1140. Again, it's one of those things you kind of need to get it up on its legs

1141. and get everybody working it.

1142. This is a great piece of animation, I love that, Turley here.

1143. - I love that Rango's mouthing. - He's doing the lines with him.

1144. From the high school play, even junior high,

1145. when you see the kids in an elementary school play.

1146. "I was the tree!"

1147. This track that's coming up,

1148. Lorne, over at Zimmer's, just absolutely crushed this music.

1149. It's so gonzo metal.

1150. And the chant that we did in the house, this is still the chant...

1151. I was gonna ask you, this is us!

1152. From three years earlier, with no click.

1153. "Grits and spit and monkey..."

1154. So he clicked it out and then wrote the music

1155. to the tempo that we originally chanted.

1156. "Collard green."

1157. Rango is so moved.

1158. - These rodents were a lot of fun. - The inbred rodents.

1159. They're great to animate.

1160. Again, great designs by Eugene Yelchin,

1161. and then taken to the next level by Crash.

1162. That's our bucket lady. Maybelle.

1163. The whole process of Crashification of characters was always a joy to watch.

1164. You'd see this simple drawing transformed into...

1165. - Well, it's a unifying... - Absolutely.

1166. aesthetic. Because every artist is kind of different.

1167. Especially, the difference between Dave Shannon, Jim, Eugene and Crash,

1168. they're so radically different. It all had to get processed by one brain.

1169. Dave and Eugene's background in children's books

1170. just brought a whole other element to the design process.

1171. The silhouette. You can sort of always tell a great character

1172. - if you just draw the silhouette. - Absolutely.

1173. And we kind of had a rule, every character

1174. needed to be broken a little bit.

1175. Like you can't just have a guy with bunny ears,

1176. he's gotta be missing an ear.

1177. Well, it's the same sort of, no parallel lines in the town.

1178. No right angles. Everything had to be a little fuzzy.

1179. I love this environment, the cave dwelling and the whole canyon.

1180. It's just gorgeous.

1181. We actually tried to do Ride of the Valkyries

1182. with nothing but banjos.

1183. That was the original plan. Like, just 500 banjos.

1184. Nothing but banjos, all the parts.

1185. And that didn't work so good. It was so annoying.

1186. You couldn't even tell what tune it was.

1187. It was so horrific, we abandoned that.

1188. Now this was one of the few scenes that we did previs.

1189. And Alex Cannon and Dan Heder were at the house for months.

1190. For months, yeah. They joined us.

1191. Remember we had those like little toy aeroplanes we were flying,

1192. we were like videotaping flying?

1193. And the storyboard,

1194. I mean, I thought Josh Hayes' storyboards were great for this.

1195. - And so were Tom's. - Dave Lowery helped us.

1196. Really great storyboards, but the timings for a sequence like this,

1197. from storyboards were just impossible.

1198. And really tight.

1199. I mean, the previs, timing-wise, very accurate.

1200. Well, both Alex and Dan are actually, I think, are gonna go very far

1201. because they have an innate sense of cinematic storytelling.

1202. And when the previs wrapped, Alex came up and he worked

1203. both in our layout group and as an animator.

1204. That's right, he did some Waffles shots.

1205. - A dream job for him. - Oh, man, he was so happy.

1206. He was just up, "This is where they made Star Wars!

1207. "I get to work here."

1208. That's what I was saying every time I got to go up.

1209. - Children with dynamite. - Nice explosion sims.

1210. But I'm glad we didn't cut this down too much,

1211. because I think for an action scene this actually develops nicely,

1212. and it's not just these random action shots.

1213. There's a progress to the story here.

1214. Yeah, there was some music redundancies

1215. that we had to overcome early on.

1216. I think in the temp there was a lot of the same sort of generic music,

1217. and once we got the themes back,

1218. and actually once we got the Rango tune in the third section,

1219. it really started to feel like it was culminating.

1220. The fact that this happens, in the middle of this crazy action scene,

1221. - Rango is having an epiphany. - A Peter Pan experience.

1222. Yeah, his dream come true of getting to fly.

1223. "I always wanted to be on the wire!"

1224. And there's so much character in that moment,

1225. that that's what's important to him.

1226. Now, this was really the centrepiece of that.

1227. - Hitching up his skirts. - Yeah.

1228. This took a lot of back and forth to get feeling right.

1229. And then we were trying to figure out how to get Rango back down

1230. to the stagecoach.

1231. This tune's a great tune, too. Hans wrote this.

1232. We had so many tunes from the animatic.

1233. When he wrote this tune and the tune that's in the bar.

1234. He wrote this like seven-minute opus.

1235. Remember that bar scene?

1236. Like, trying to get that to sit with the dialogue took forever.

1237. But really great, old school.

1238. He lands on Spoons.

1239. I don't know if people can hear, but Spoons says,

1240. "That wasn't altogether unpleasant!"

1241. Rango breaks the fourth wall slightly as he goes down.

1242. What kind of film is this?

1243. I love Ambrose... As he's coming down.

1244. A tooth gets knocked out there.

1245. Really, that's one of my favourite shots, too, that pan back.

1246. Maia, our lead animator, again, on Beans,

1247. we had given her all these really tough acting moments of Beans.

1248. So we got to this sequence, she came to me and she said,

1249. "Look, I really want some action.

1250. "I want to do some shots in the bat sequence, can I please do it?"

1251. And so she did this section here with Beans and Rango on the wagon.

1252. - And the stretching the legs. - Yeah.

1253. That we had to come back and redo four times?

1254. Through no fault of Maia's.

1255. - It was just a conceptual reworking. - Who modelled the canyon?

1256. - Who actually made that? - That was Dan Wheaton.

1257. He's one of the guys in our digimatte department.

1258. Figured out a great way to build this canyon

1259. and make it kind of sectional so we could make it feel

1260. really long, different heights.

1261. And then we could set dress in boulders and pillars,

1262. and really, really outstanding.

1263. Now some people notice those glasses there.

1264. A little 4-year-old kid noticed that Merrimack's glasses were there,

1265. and he said, "Merrimack, did he drown?"

1266. "They shoved him in the jug and left him in the desert."

1267. - That was Tom's son. - That's fantastic.

1268. Yeah, well that's what happened.

1269. I remember we were talking about actually having a quick flash

1270. of Bad Bill, the muddy shoes.

1271. Holding Merrimack in the water.

1272. Some main characters die in this movie, which was kind of a bold move.

1273. I don't know, Bambi, Old Yeller. We didn't make you shoot your dog.

1274. - That killed me. - That's right.

1275. Flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz...

1276. - They're still with me. - That's scary!

1277. Still with me, I'm still scarred.

1278. - String him up. - And now for the mammogram!

1279. Now as much as I would like to take credit for the mammogram line,

1280. it's actually Gore Verbinski who wrote that.

1281. But you performed it so well, James. You brought it to life.

1282. This cue, there's a really great composer over at Zimmer's,

1283. Adam Peters, who doesn't use synthesisers.

1284. He's like one of the only guys over there who doesn't use synthesisers.

1285. He did this cue right here.

1286. Demoed it in his little room, whistled, did the whole thing

1287. and as soon as we heard it we thought, just beautiful.

1288. Pretty harsh look.

1289. I love Dutch back there, the little serious, little kid.

1290. I love that you get a sense of there really is a town in danger here.

1291. There's like over a hundred people that are depending on this.

1292. And then we play golf.

1293. Yeah, it got a little weird.

1294. Remember when we were trying to think of what game they would play?

1295. Like is it horseshoes?

1296. What was the James Bond movie with the golf scene?

1297. Goldfinger, yeah.

1298. - Was it Goldfinger? - Yeah. Beautiful.

1299. I was always kind of curious about this sequence

1300. 'cause you have a lot of comedy yet it's also revealing,

1301. - or he's figuring things out, yeah. - It's tactical.

1302. It's touché. You've obviously mastered this game.

1303. Yeah. And we took a chance

1304. because it starts out as a very classic quest movie, hero's journey

1305. and then it shifts into this sort of Chinatown vibe

1306. and we had to have this scene to solidify that part of it.

1307. I love the wardrobe changes for Bad Bill's gang.

1308. Yeah, those were fun.

1309. Those were based on Three Stooges.

1310. That's right.

1311. That's a great gag.

1312. - You found that reference? - Yeah.

1313. That was a fun scene to shoot.

1314. And this, in terms of the design and the lighting and the dust,

1315. there was great artwork for this,

1316. and another sort of later-afternoon or early morning-ish type of sequence

1317. that I think we started getting better at, in terms of lighting,

1318. as we moved through the movie.

1319. Yeah. The light moves. It's lower and lower throughout the scene.

1320. I love how they're suddenly in Monument Valley, Arizona.

1321. The Mayor's wheelchair was a lot of fun to work out.

1322. The big spring-wound mechanism and the mechanism for golfing

1323. and all that stuff was a lot of fun to figure out and animate.

1324. Great sound opportunity.

1325. It was a tragic golfing accident that actually...

1326. - Injured the Mayor? - Lightning. Freak lightning storm.

1327. There's a newspaper article on the wall.

1328. Yeah, you can pause it and read the article.

1329. The Mayor has a rich history.

1330. Yes, he's like the council of elders.

1331. Who's the oldest ape in Planet of the Apes,

1332. - who knows about all the... - Dr Zaius.

1333. Dr Zaius, Dr Zaius Dr Zaius, Dr Zaius

1334. Yeah, he's Dr Zaius.

1335. And Rango is growing into the role here.

1336. Almost.

1337. That's a great performance.

1338. And Bad Bill was another one where the drawing by Dave Shannon

1339. kind of inspired the voice.

1340. We saw that guy in the T-shirt, we just couldn't help going, "Right, right then!"

1341. The bowler hat and the trousers.

1342. Yeah, that was a great drawing from Dave.

1343. Whiskytree.

1344. - Did I mention Whiskytree? - Yeah.

1345. This was very controversial, having hanging mariachis.

1346. - Why? It's gallows humour. - You got me.

1347. I have no idea what people found offensive about this.

1348. This started, I think, our most challenging lighting situation.

1349. This red sky.

1350. And it was one of the last sequences we started, as well.

1351. It's tough to not get into Candy Land, this...

1352. Who's that a reward for, 9 Bolt, on the back?

1353. I wanna know his story.

1354. Once we get outside, I think finding the right tone across all those shots

1355. of Rango speaking to the townspeople

1356. and then Jake arrives and, boy, it was so tricky. Tricky sequence.

1357. Yeah, there were a lot of lectures with 40 animators.

1358. The room full of... Remember that?

1359. To get everything, oh, God, it took forever to just keep him nuanced,

1360. and to break it into sections.

1361. Great crowd, Adam, by the way.

1362. Giblets, always a good one.

1363. - Anytime we can get giblets in... - I try to get them in every movie I make.

1364. Man, how long did these take to render?

1365. - That's a pretty packed... - Yeah. A lot going on.

1366. Luckily, I think one of the reasons why we did backload the sequence

1367. was 'cause we knew we had a lot of characters in it,

1368. so we knew that we'd be more up to speed with rendering large groups.

1369. Early on in the show, it was really hard to actually render

1370. large groups of characters.

1371. So, we had to do a lot of optimisations to get everybody to render.

1372. Yeah, didn't we like shut down your whole farm?

1373. I mean, we took it, we maxed it out a few times.

1374. The render farm.

1375. - For sure, I mean there were nights... - Organic.

1376. - Organic render farm? - Yeah.

1377. No hormones.

1378. There were nights where we were pushing it into the red, right?

1379. We were pretty much using the whole render pool,

1380. which has never happened before.

1381. And using more, you know, we needed more hours,

1382. we didn't finish everything overnight.

1383. We'd have to prioritise and choose the shots that we needed to finish.

1384. Do you ever worry that the render farm will become sentient?

1385. Every day.

1386. Rattlesnake Jake, so much to talk about.

1387. I mean, just the anim, the sidewinder, the motion,

1388. the design from an early Eugene drawing,

1389. and then the Crash drawings.

1390. We almost had him be an albino at one point.

1391. For months we had him as an albino.

1392. I'm really glad we didn't go down that route.

1393. Bill Nighy's performance, I think, is just extraordinary.

1394. He really commits.

1395. His first American accent, he told us.

1396. Snakes are just notoriously hard to animate.

1397. Just the way their bodies are built

1398. and figuring out how to give the animator enough opportunities

1399. to use the whole body and decide where they want it on the ground

1400. and where they don't want it on the ground, et cetera,

1401. that they just end up being really complex.

1402. The controls to animate them are really complex.

1403. And we had a great guy, Keiji, who rigged Jake

1404. and then a really fantastic lead animator, Jakub Pistecky,

1405. who was in charge of Jake as a character,

1406. and it really just came out great. Tough to animate.

1407. Not to mention Patrick. Each one of those scales is a separate scale.

1408. It's not a map.

1409. He really wanted those scales to slide on each other.

1410. Those are 3-D plates moving against each other.

1411. Yeah. So it's super dense, but, man, it made all the difference in the world.

1412. And Justin Holt painted each of the scales.

1413. Yeah. Individually.

1414. To get the pattern on there.

1415. It's great, you can see them separating when he bends and bunching up

1416. and it's great.

1417. I really wanted Jake to always feel like you couldn't compose him.

1418. That there would always be a piece of him

1419. on the left-hand side of frame and a rattle coming in the right.

1420. - He's all-encompassing. - You never saw him whole.

1421. The frame can't hold him.

1422. He is the Grim Reaper. I mean, he's sort of omnipresent, everywhere,

1423. surrounding you at all times.

1424. The rattle, Peter Miller did such a fantastic job

1425. with the sound design on the sequences.

1426. That rattle moves around the surrounds,

1427. it moves from behind you, in front of you.

1428. Genuinely, you know, genuinely scary.

1429. - He's got a mythic quality. - I love the moustache.

1430. - That's kind of Lee Van Cleef nod, right? - Yeah. It was.

1431. This was definitely the hardest scene, dramatically, for the animators to get.

1432. The subtlety of these little eye moments

1433. and Rango wanting to be the hero,

1434. but just the inability to physically do it. He doesn't have it.

1435. He doesn't have that capacity.

1436. And remember how many times we re-animated those close-ups?

1437. I mean, just too much, too far, not enough, back.

1438. Just finding that moment where he...

1439. He wants to pull that trigger. He wants to be that guy.

1440. He wants to be the hero

1441. and he's just letting everybody down and he knows it.

1442. That's really where the complexity of the rigs themselves,

1443. the complexity of the character design,

1444. the amount of detail in those faces, man, you just can't get that.

1445. The human face has just thousands of...

1446. There's a language there as you read other people's faces.

1447. And sometimes in animation

1448. we distil things down to 16 basic expressions,

1449. and it's so nice to take Rango to a completely different place.

1450. And you talked about this from the beginning, Gore,

1451. that you didn't just want it to be wall-to-wall

1452. jokes and pop culture reference.

1453. That it would actually go to this serious place

1454. and we were gonna allow this wacky character

1455. to sort of undergo this existential crisis.

1456. It actually worked.

1457. This exodus, I mean...

1458. The exodus, epiphany, catharsis, resurrection,

1459. this is sort of where we get into the Joseph Campbell part of our film.

1460. From the beginning, setting up the road as a barrier,

1461. and the cross and the tears of the sand there.

1462. It was really nice even in storyboard form to have this.

1463. This is actually a temp piece of music that was done by Danny Elfman,

1464. for, I believe, The Kingdom that we just ended up keeping

1465. because it just fit so well

1466. and became the iconic piece for his journey.

1467. And it was one of those things where we had all these themes in the movie

1468. and typically you'd say, "Okay, well, this is where his theme plays out."

1469. But he's so devoid of personality.

1470. He's so not knowing who he is and kind of stripped to zero,

1471. everything kind of stripped bare,

1472. that it's nice to have a tune you hear nowhere else in the film.

1473. Even in the animatic bit, where Wyatt had created this crossing the road,

1474. it had the emotion in it.

1475. Also a scene we previs-ed, remember?

1476. That's right, and then we previs-ed it a few months later.

1477. Yeah, I love this scene.

1478. And the lighting is just phenomenal here on the road.

1479. Yeah, David Meny was our lighting supervisor on this one.

1480. And hitting all those... It's really musical where the flares happen.

1481. This is my favourite moment right here, coming out of the dust silhouette.

1482. I love how there's this brief moment where he's

1483. illuminated by the amber of...

1484. - The tail lights. - The tail lights, I just love that.

1485. This was a scene the animators all loved dearly.

1486. Anyone who came on the show,

1487. this was the scene that sucked them in.

1488. Whatever else they saw, and loved,

1489. but this was the scene that they knew they were gonna be working on

1490. something that was really, really special.

1491. I remember Alex Cannon animated that at first in this super dramatic way

1492. and we were like, "That's great! Yeah, we gotta keep that."

1493. - Operatic. - Yeah.

1494. Yeah, definitely where the film gets a little more surreal.

1495. We had hints at it in that first dream sequence

1496. with the floating Mr Timms and the voice by Alfred Molina

1497. as Roadkill into the voice of Mr Timms.

1498. But here I think we just really let the sort of spirit of the desert,

1499. the Spirit of the West take over.

1500. A lot of it has to do with the ability to work small

1501. and to work outside the system.

1502. You know, that first year and a half

1503. having Graham fund the story reel

1504. and then not having any studio affiliation was really joyous,

1505. to just have the house and the artists

1506. and kind of conjuring up this sort of stuff.

1507. The Academy Awards there, in the back of the...

1508. golf cart. - Well, this has a singularity of vision

1509. because you got to be so pure with

1510. how you wanted to tell this story

1511. and we had such a small group of guys that we trusted to.

1512. That was left alone. Like you said, nobody was interfering at all.

1513. It was a really tiny, creative nucleus of you, Jim, and Crash and Gore.

1514. And then surrounded by others,

1515. but it was a really tight, small group that everything was flowing out of.

1516. Well, I don't think you can do this kind of stuff with a committee.

1517. Even with good intentions,

1518. the homogenisation process by just multiple voices,

1519. I mean, "Why does he have a metal detector?"

1520. Right. Everything would have been questioned.

1521. Everything would have been so weird.

1522. Well, he's searching.

1523. We were lucky. Graham was great.

1524. John Carls, our producer, very supportive of the vision.

1525. - Shari and Adam. - Shari Hanson, who came on when

1526. we moved into ILM territory, was such a great addition.

1527. And Adam doing his sculptures in the background.

1528. Yeah, our producer, Adam Cramer, sitting on the kitchen table

1529. sculpting Rango and sculpting Rattlesnake Jake.

1530. Great job on the Spirit of the West, by the way, guys.

1531. Really incredible.

1532. And Timothy Olyphant's voice was so great.

1533. It was one of those... Humans are always really difficult to do CG

1534. 'cause you hit that uncanny valley if you're not careful,

1535. but I think that the design sort of abstracts it enough that

1536. you can make it look really rich, detailed and do a lot of realism to it,

1537. but you don't fall into that, "That looks strange."

1538. You still have to exaggerate it just enough

1539. so that it tells the eye, "Don't compare this to a real human."

1540. Aaron McBride designed that, right?

1541. - Is that right? Aaron? - Yeah, that's right, Aaron.

1542. He's awesome, as well as Lars.

1543. - Look at Roadkill there. Just beautiful. - Alfred Molina.

1544. Shawn Kelly was our lead animator on Roadkill.

1545. He also was lead on the Mayor,

1546. and I think he did a great job with both characters.

1547. I love this. See, this shot, where a movie just allows a scene this long to play

1548. because he really is feeling something new here.

1549. Again, this music is something we took from The Weather Man.

1550. It's Hans rewriting Hans.

1551. At the end of the day I was like, "Let's just use it."

1552. Really beautiful cue, a great epiphany cue.

1553. See, this is risky

1554. 'cause you take this character who's been so wacky the whole time,

1555. and he gets serious for a few minutes

1556. and you have to keep it interesting without relying on silliness.

1557. Getting these faces to read on these cactuses was really interesting.

1558. 'Cause we see them throughout the film, but it's different cactuses

1559. in different places, and always trying to get a different kind of a face to read,

1560. but not the same face as the one in the dream.

1561. There's the one he sees early in the film. It's really tricky.

1562. Martin Murphy was our modeller on that, and he built a bunch of different heads

1563. with different faces in them for the different portions of the film.

1564. I remember seeing the textures on those for the first time

1565. and that's when I realised, "This is gonna work.

1566. "This is gonna be fantastic."

1567. That's the other thing, I mean, it was just so clear to me.

1568. I don't know what it is, but when you guys turn on that sun,

1569. it's from matching all those live action plates

1570. and matching all the reality of what you did day in and day out.

1571. As soon as we saw the first test and...

1572. It's like, it's not a multiple point source.

1573. It really has that sort of specularity of the single point source,

1574. and I look at those sequences...

1575. And the contrast ratio for some reason seems much more accurate

1576. than when other people do sunlight.

1577. The sun is really hard to mimic. It's really hard to get right.

1578. Is there one big sun button that you guys push?

1579. It's big sun. I think that the contribution of...

1580. "You're on the sun, boy!"

1581. All 500 people up there.

1582. Tora! Tora! Tora!

1583. San Francisco shuts down for three hours.

1584. It's right next to the funny button.

1585. We've got a funny button and a weird button.

1586. - They're dials actually. - Ours broke, but that's all right.

1587. The contribution from the environment, from the sun,

1588. is what also gives it a lot of that realism.

1589. If you look at Rango, you see the bounce coming off the ground,

1590. - under his chin. - Sub-surface scattering.

1591. I mean, the light under his skin, it's just...

1592. So, is there ray tracing going on?

1593. In some cases, yeah.

1594. Like when we do glass and those types of things,

1595. that is ray tracing technology used.

1596. We debated this so long.

1597. How much of a flashback?

1598. How much do we explain the plumbing of the world?

1599. The movie was hijacked by its own plot for quite some time.

1600. "Wait a minute, so whose boots are those?

1601. "But the Mayor... It can't be the Mayor's boots."

1602. - "Who was bleeding water?" - "That's the mayor."

1603. - "Whose wheel trail?" - "Who's wheelchair tracks are those?"

1604. "Las Vegas took all the water?"

1605. Man, this was brutal.

1606. 'Cause if you explain too much, to make it make sense, it gets boring.

1607. And if you don't explain enough, people are like, "Well, what happened?"

1608. Yeah, we did that flashback 200 times.

1609. It's very tricky, how much to tell the audience.

1610. Well, ultimately it's about Rango, not about the plot.

1611. - That's right. - It's about Rango.

1612. It's just his emotion.

1613. Coming to terms with who he is

1614. and realising he can't leave the story that he created

1615. and that, "These aren't inanimate objects,

1616. "this isn't an audience, these are actually my friends."

1617. I think that story works on an existential level

1618. and also on a very... Who doesn't wanna be loved?

1619. And who doesn't wanna belong?

1620. - This sand storm was beautiful. - The sand is so incredible.

1621. And this resurrection through the graveyard,

1622. I mean, I just always loved this shot from the beginning.

1623. And just those flowing little pieces of grass over in the corner.

1624. When we started that, they were static, weren't they?

1625. Like, "That grass has to blow."

1626. You could see all the producers cringing.

1627. Everybody comments on the grit of this movie

1628. and you guys really found a way to have a reality to that.

1629. Was that hard to do? Those multiple passes?

1630. Yeah, that dust stuff, in particular, was a really difficult shot.

1631. The whole comp team as well, really great job.

1632. I mean, a lot of finishing happened in our comp department.

1633. They added a lot of the atmospherics.

1634. Nelson Sepulveda was our comp sup on the show.

1635. Really fantastic job.

1636. Glass of water, another one of those things

1637. you wouldn't think would be such a big deal.

1638. That's right.

1639. But again, everything in this movie is about thirst.

1640. Beans wanted that water so badly.

1641. I like how serious and scary Jake is in this scene.

1642. He's not a make-believe bad guy. He's a real bad guy.

1643. Even freaks out Bad Bill.

1644. And those eyes were really a tough thing to try to figure out.

1645. How bright? How dark?

1646. I thought it was a good blend, 'cause we really wanted that fire,

1647. that hellish fire, but not have it look too phoney.

1648. I remember we got to this part in the movie

1649. and we're like, "What does the back of Beans' head look like?"

1650. That's right, upside down.

1651. I think we turned Shari Hanson upside down to look at her hair.

1652. She was our reference.

1653. Thank you, Shari.

1654. I love that light through the window slats. Really hot.

1655. Pure Zimmer here.

1656. Atmospherics and dust.

1657. The dust is making it.

1658. And I love the threads on his serape, just how tactile it is.

1659. You know exactly what that would feel like if you'd put your hand on it,

1660. - just looking at it. - Yeah.

1661. Modellers got very good at placing those things right in the right places.

1662. 'Cause always everything had to look... Nothing could look new or clean.

1663. One bullet left.

1664. We had to remember to remove all the bullets from his gun belt,

1665. because we had a shot like that, and it was all full of bullets.

1666. - We were like, "Well, that doesn't work." - "You dummy."

1667. I love that through the glass.

1668. There's something so real about looking at the kids through the glass.

1669. The dust stopping and just the sound of the footsteps and the bell here.

1670. And then we knew we had gone so long without a laugh.

1671. We were trying to figure out how to get some funny little thing in here.

1672. And that was not it.

1673. And the noose, that was the big laugh.

1674. - There it is. - Yeah.

1675. - Snap. - Crunch.

1676. - Like celery. - A lot of people die in this.

1677. I love how it just...

1678. Great close-up of the Gatling gun.

1679. This is another that we storyboarded many times.

1680. Oh, my God, this went on and on and on, this sequence.

1681. - And cross cutting, again... - With the rodents getting ready.

1682. It was quite more elaborate, they were jumping in the hole...

1683. That's right, the whole Impossible sequence

1684. of them jumping in on lines.

1685. - Welding or cutting and stuff. - That's right, they were.

1686. Welding the pipe and dropping down.

1687. Full Peckinpah right there.

1688. I love the classic stunt fall.

1689. You know there's a mattress waiting, and pad.

1690. - His hat's back on. - Magically lands on his head.

1691. Now Wounded Bird did survive, just so you know, you'll see him at the coda.

1692. Are you telling me? I've seen the movie.

1693. No, I'm telling this pile of kids in front of the TV.

1694. - The viewer at home. - Kids? This is not for kids.

1695. Except for the water sim here.

1696. That was pretty extraordinary.

1697. I think everyone was a little afraid of the sequence for quite some time.

1698. We had to figure out how many explosions

1699. we could actually get away with, what was the minimum.

1700. I like how we started to pair up characters later.

1701. Like Melonee becomes Boo's mom.

1702. Some made sense, some not so much.

1703. The bell going up is great, when that water hits it.

1704. This is the section now where,

1705. like you're talking about the compositing, Gore.

1706. We start getting some rainbows in there,

1707. and all kinds of lens flares,

1708. and the atmospherics coming off of the water.

1709. Lots of reference we used from fire hydrants exploding

1710. and things like that to try to get that really atmospheric look.

1711. This was a tough concept to get right.

1712. The whole team here, with the mist,

1713. and also the separation from the geysers.

1714. Yeah, the glass reflection.

1715. The reflection is so complicated.

1716. And then full aerial combat.

1717. And then Beth Grant's line that we re-recorded eight times.

1718. Look at the black smoke.

1719. I like that the bats blow up like aeroplanes blow up.

1720. - Why not? - And did they all die?

1721. That was the plan.

1722. - Hey, wait a minute. - We're gonna sacrifice 18 of our own

1723. to save three.

1724. - They'll make more. - They're very durable.

1725. - Don't think too hard about the plan. - Do not question the logic.

1726. - He forgot about her. - Of course forgot about this, whoops.

1727. Yeah, Beans.

1728. - Other than that, perfect plan. - Foolproof.

1729. I'm gonna have to go to plan B.

1730. I like how Angelique is having second thoughts also.

1731. Like, "I don't know if I want this job."

1732. Yeah, I think, in fact, at one point we had her backing away.

1733. Leaving slowly.

1734. - Another difficult water in this area. - This looks so good.

1735. This lighting is so beautiful.

1736. We actually flooded a stage during the record to do this scene.

1737. Yeah, we did.

1738. No, seriously. I did voices underwater

1739. - at Dave Shannon's pool. - I know you did.

1740. In the middle of winter, unheated.

1741. - That's why the pitch is a little higher. - Yeah, it's a little higher.

1742. Dedication, Beans.

1743. Another interesting portion is

1744. having to make these guys feel wet. See, if you look at her hair,

1745. the lower part of her hair is darker than the upper part of her hair.

1746. We had to actually do a wet look on top of all the other looks

1747. for all the characters that are in this finale sequence.

1748. That kiss is really nice.

1749. I love the background here.

1750. The contact, the lip contact.

1751. - He spins her around. - "Hey, Beans."

1752. Nobody's listening to what the Mayor's saying at that point.

1753. - No, you're just watching. - Kissing lizards.

1754. Great nostril flare.

1755. Muscle spasm, the sim on his jowls is really nice, too.

1756. The fat sim is really great.

1757. That was a huge shot. Dave Gosman storyboarded that.

1758. That water was super easy.

1759. - It was a button. - Another button.

1760. We had Ned in one of those '70s chairs.

1761. - The papasan. - It spun around.

1762. This is another one of those things where we had him in the wheelchair

1763. with the blanket in his lap the whole time and then we're like...

1764. - "What's underneath?" - Yeah, "What's underneath?"

1765. - Where do those suspenders go? - Hello!

1766. What are they actually clipped to?

1767. - Mandible. - He's all about airs.

1768. That's a great performance.

1769. I love how the water becomes mist,

1770. the particulation going on in the background. It's so complicated.

1771. - The rainbows there in the mist. - Yeah, really great work.

1772. This is a huge shot.

1773. You have that incredible action and then it lingers

1774. and then people start coming out, splashing.

1775. I love how Waffles just throws himself down in the water.

1776. Nice wet look on Priscilla.

1777. Yeah, that's why we needed Abbie.

1778. That's a great anim, really nice.

1779. - That took a little while. - Yeah.

1780. - That shot took a little while. - Getting the humourjust right on it.

1781. I love how the second guy's just wailing.

1782. David Hidalgo came in and played this guitar part

1783. and then we rolled video on it, and he's just hunched.

1784. He's just completely focused on just wailing.

1785. And you guys gave us great video

1786. for all the musicians in all the mariachi shots

1787. and we followed it religiously.

1788. It was tough, 'cause you would call us on it.

1789. Like, "You know, this shot's not quite the right..."

1790. So this is a bonus scene that was not in the theatrical release,

1791. but this was the original possible ending.

1792. This was in the movie forever. So it got dropped at the last minute.

1793. We debated, earlier, whether to get rid of it,

1794. but we thought maybe we needed to catch up with all the posse.

1795. I love this scene. It's ridiculous.

1796. - That water's fantastic. - Ultimately,

1797. it's not in the theatrical release, I think because we have two endings.

1798. And also, as you see, sort of,

1799. Rango's sort of returned back to his original state,

1800. whereas I think there's something very satisfying about the fact

1801. that he's moved on.

1802. - Don't spoil it. - This is us spoiling it.

1803. Exactly.

1804. This is skewing it, yeah.

1805. Here's some great gags, with the Tic Tacs and the...

1806. Gun lotion, one of my personal favourites.

1807. - Yeah, gun lotion. - Gun lotion.

1808. It seems like when you're pushing in on the mariachis

1809. in the shot prior to this, you're ready for the movie to end.

1810. - That's the end of the story. - People are getting up to leave.

1811. - Yeah, it's done. - Fantastic.

1812. This is a subversion, that's not necessary, but funny.

1813. - But funny. - Look at those bikinis back there.

1814. Almost everybody has some kind of costume change going on,

1815. flowers added or stripes.

1816. Great sunset shot.

1817. That's my favourite line, "Give them a good one."

1818. I like that. That's what he cares about.

1819. It's the performance of a lifetime. That's a classic, too.

1820. I love that sun.

1821. It's a sunset shot and it suddenly cuts to sunset.

1822. Again sort of fourth wall.

1823. This epilogue, or coda, was really much,

1824. again, about the film language and the film itself.

1825. - And knowing we're in a film, yeah. - Wrapping up the hero.

1826. Being very aware of the conventions.

1827. This Winston Churchill voice

1828. is one that he doesn't do really anywhere else in the film.

1829. - He just comes out with it. - Break it out.

1830. "I will be watching you."

1831. And, Hal, your other animated shot, right?

1832. - Yeah. - Beautiful, Hal.

1833. - Nicely done. - My swansong.

1834. And then a great musical intro here by David.

1835. Hidalgo, the whole Los Lobos came in and just crushed this.

1836. Sort of surf guitar version of the tune.

1837. I love the sequence that Prologue did, and Henry over there.

1838. This was really, really fun.

1839. Was it Arturo Sandoval as the...

1840. Arturo came in, he was actually as an afterthought

1841. 'cause we had this track

1842. and there was a day on the stage where Arturo was in,

1843. as the sort of trumpet player for the orchestral score.

1844. Hans pointed out, I was like,

1845. "Wow, we gotta get him to play trumpet on this tune."

1846. And he just came in, in one take, and played this trumpet solo.

1847. It was such a gift. It's just one of those... Just sat back.

1848. And the combination of Hidalgo's guitar and Arturo Sandoval's trumpet here

1849. is just, to me...

1850. He hits these high octaves at the end and it's just crazy.

1851. - These animated titles are great. - They're fun.

1852. We almost did something very different for the ending,

1853. where the mariachis were gonna walk back out and start improv'ing.

1854. "That was a really good movie."

1855. Look at this cast. Denise Chamian, come on.

1856. - She put this cast together. - Unbelievable.

1857. Timothy.

1858. - There they are. - And that's Rango.

1859. Roger Deakins.

1860. That was a lot of fun.

1861. All right, well, thank you so much for listening to us babble

1862. for 104 minutes.

1863. - If you made it this far, congratulations. - Thank you.

1864. - Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Crash. - Absolutely.

1865. - For everything. It was a blast. - Thank you.

1866. - All right. Until next time. - Until next time.

1867. Keep it fuzzy.

1868. Dangle!

1869. Good night, everyone.