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Headline, Industry News
Canadian director goes to the dogs
Monday July 26th 2010Brad Peyton, 31, has moved from CBC claymation monsters to a megalomaniacal Hollywood feline, but he says his dark sense of humour remains consistent.
So, too, does his “work ethic and maybe my blind stupidity of just putting your head down and pushing through it,” adds Gander, Nfld.-born Peyton, whose first big-budget movie, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, opens Friday.
It’s quite a leap for a young producer-director probably best known to hip Canadian TV viewers as the creative force behind the darkly funny stop-motion claymation What It’s Like Being Alone, which ran on CBC in 2005. Its animated cast of freakish orphaned kids earned a loyal following.
Peyton spoke to the Star last week while visiting Toronto.
Q: Did you have to tone the darker elements of your sense of humour down to make a studio picture?
A: I showed the movie to a friend of mind and he said, “It’s very much a family movie but it’s very much you.” I have a dark sense of humour and they don’t want a whole lot of that in Cats & Dogs (he laughs). But when you have someone like Bette Midler as Kitty Galore on your side and she is going to these fun, dark places, then you have a partner in crime. I really liked working with Bette and I really liked the character of Kitty Galore — a hairless cat who accidentally fell into a vat of bikini cream. It’s ridiculous and a little twisted and that’s pretty much me.
Q: Did you do much writing on the movie?
A: I had input and worked with the screenwriters a lot. I feel as a director on a big movie you constantly work with them. When the actors come in to voice record, you want to give them some freedom. I don’t know if there’s one line from Bette that stayed the same. I also liked what Katt Williams (the comic who voices Seamus the Pigeon) did. It was just him being him. He made the stuff up. I’d shot the scene and then run the scene with their lines and you tweak it as you go.
Q: How did you get former James Bond Roger Moore to voice Tab Lazenby, the head of MEOWS?
A: We called him! That was a real moment of excitement. For me, Roger Moore was James Bond when I was growing up. My dad and I argued about who was Bond — he’d say Sean Connery and I’d say Roger Moore. I hadn’t seen him in a movie for a while and I love his voice and he agreed. For me, as a total movie nerd, I loved it.
Q: You’ve gone from small Canadian projects to helming a big-budget Hollywood movie. How did that happen?
A: It’s funny, everybody asks that. Is it that shocking? (He laughs.) I think most of it speaks more to my work ethic than anything else. I don’t feel I’m close to anywhere in my top form as a director and I want to just get better with everything. I took this project knowing it was going to challenge me every day and I was going to learn a lot about aspects of moviemaking I hadn’t done before, like animatronics and pyrotechnics … All I know how to do is go my hardest and give myself over to it fully, whether it’s an independent music video for a Toronto band, I’ll work as hard on that as I do a Warner Brothers movie. I don’t know how to do it any differently.
Q: You have another big movie in the works: a Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel. Brendan Fraser has left the franchise, Anything you can tell us about casting?`
A: We’re casting now, but I can tell you that Josh Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right), who was 13 in the first movie, is now 17 and what we decided to do is for him to go out and have his own adventure. Which I could totally relate to when I was 17 in Gander.
Source: The Toronto Star
Headline, Industry News
Canadian director goes to the dogs
Monday July 26th 2010Brad Peyton, 31, has moved from CBC claymation monsters to a megalomaniacal Hollywood feline, but he says his dark sense of humour remains consistent.
So, too, does his “work ethic and maybe my blind stupidity of just putting your head down and pushing through it,” adds Gander, Nfld.-born Peyton, whose first big-budget movie, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, opens Friday.
It’s quite a leap for a young producer-director probably best known to hip Canadian TV viewers as the creative force behind the darkly funny stop-motion claymation What It’s Like Being Alone, which ran on CBC in 2005. Its animated cast of freakish orphaned kids earned a loyal following.
Peyton spoke to the Star last week while visiting Toronto.
Q: Did you have to tone the darker elements of your sense of humour down to make a studio picture?
A: I showed the movie to a friend of mind and he said, “It’s very much a family movie but it’s very much you.” I have a dark sense of humour and they don’t want a whole lot of that in Cats & Dogs (he laughs). But when you have someone like Bette Midler as Kitty Galore on your side and she is going to these fun, dark places, then you have a partner in crime. I really liked working with Bette and I really liked the character of Kitty Galore — a hairless cat who accidentally fell into a vat of bikini cream. It’s ridiculous and a little twisted and that’s pretty much me.
Q: Did you do much writing on the movie?
A: I had input and worked with the screenwriters a lot. I feel as a director on a big movie you constantly work with them. When the actors come in to voice record, you want to give them some freedom. I don’t know if there’s one line from Bette that stayed the same. I also liked what Katt Williams (the comic who voices Seamus the Pigeon) did. It was just him being him. He made the stuff up. I’d shot the scene and then run the scene with their lines and you tweak it as you go.
Q: How did you get former James Bond Roger Moore to voice Tab Lazenby, the head of MEOWS?
A: We called him! That was a real moment of excitement. For me, Roger Moore was James Bond when I was growing up. My dad and I argued about who was Bond — he’d say Sean Connery and I’d say Roger Moore. I hadn’t seen him in a movie for a while and I love his voice and he agreed. For me, as a total movie nerd, I loved it.
Q: You’ve gone from small Canadian projects to helming a big-budget Hollywood movie. How did that happen?
A: It’s funny, everybody asks that. Is it that shocking? (He laughs.) I think most of it speaks more to my work ethic than anything else. I don’t feel I’m close to anywhere in my top form as a director and I want to just get better with everything. I took this project knowing it was going to challenge me every day and I was going to learn a lot about aspects of moviemaking I hadn’t done before, like animatronics and pyrotechnics … All I know how to do is go my hardest and give myself over to it fully, whether it’s an independent music video for a Toronto band, I’ll work as hard on that as I do a Warner Brothers movie. I don’t know how to do it any differently.
Q: You have another big movie in the works: a Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel. Brendan Fraser has left the franchise, Anything you can tell us about casting?`
A: We’re casting now, but I can tell you that Josh Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right), who was 13 in the first movie, is now 17 and what we decided to do is for him to go out and have his own adventure. Which I could totally relate to when I was 17 in Gander.
Source: The Toronto Star
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Headline, Industry News
Canadian director goes to the dogs
Monday July 26th 2010Brad Peyton, 31, has moved from CBC claymation monsters to a megalomaniacal Hollywood feline, but he says his dark sense of humour remains consistent.
So, too, does his “work ethic and maybe my blind stupidity of just putting your head down and pushing through it,” adds Gander, Nfld.-born Peyton, whose first big-budget movie, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, opens Friday.
It’s quite a leap for a young producer-director probably best known to hip Canadian TV viewers as the creative force behind the darkly funny stop-motion claymation What It’s Like Being Alone, which ran on CBC in 2005. Its animated cast of freakish orphaned kids earned a loyal following.
Peyton spoke to the Star last week while visiting Toronto.
Q: Did you have to tone the darker elements of your sense of humour down to make a studio picture?
A: I showed the movie to a friend of mind and he said, “It’s very much a family movie but it’s very much you.” I have a dark sense of humour and they don’t want a whole lot of that in Cats & Dogs (he laughs). But when you have someone like Bette Midler as Kitty Galore on your side and she is going to these fun, dark places, then you have a partner in crime. I really liked working with Bette and I really liked the character of Kitty Galore — a hairless cat who accidentally fell into a vat of bikini cream. It’s ridiculous and a little twisted and that’s pretty much me.
Q: Did you do much writing on the movie?
A: I had input and worked with the screenwriters a lot. I feel as a director on a big movie you constantly work with them. When the actors come in to voice record, you want to give them some freedom. I don’t know if there’s one line from Bette that stayed the same. I also liked what Katt Williams (the comic who voices Seamus the Pigeon) did. It was just him being him. He made the stuff up. I’d shot the scene and then run the scene with their lines and you tweak it as you go.
Q: How did you get former James Bond Roger Moore to voice Tab Lazenby, the head of MEOWS?
A: We called him! That was a real moment of excitement. For me, Roger Moore was James Bond when I was growing up. My dad and I argued about who was Bond — he’d say Sean Connery and I’d say Roger Moore. I hadn’t seen him in a movie for a while and I love his voice and he agreed. For me, as a total movie nerd, I loved it.
Q: You’ve gone from small Canadian projects to helming a big-budget Hollywood movie. How did that happen?
A: It’s funny, everybody asks that. Is it that shocking? (He laughs.) I think most of it speaks more to my work ethic than anything else. I don’t feel I’m close to anywhere in my top form as a director and I want to just get better with everything. I took this project knowing it was going to challenge me every day and I was going to learn a lot about aspects of moviemaking I hadn’t done before, like animatronics and pyrotechnics … All I know how to do is go my hardest and give myself over to it fully, whether it’s an independent music video for a Toronto band, I’ll work as hard on that as I do a Warner Brothers movie. I don’t know how to do it any differently.
Q: You have another big movie in the works: a Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel. Brendan Fraser has left the franchise, Anything you can tell us about casting?`
A: We’re casting now, but I can tell you that Josh Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right), who was 13 in the first movie, is now 17 and what we decided to do is for him to go out and have his own adventure. Which I could totally relate to when I was 17 in Gander.
Source: The Toronto Star
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