Together in LA for a press conference, the voice cast talked about their three year long experience of working on How to Train Your Dragon.
Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson How to Train Your Dragon Press Conference
Jay, when you were a teen, were you a misfit at all? How did you channel your inner 16-year-old to play this character?Jay Baruchel: "Oh, that was very easy. Look at me. I always spent plenty of time behind closed doors, writing and drawing, or doing whatever, and just escaping into my daydreams."
Craig Ferguson: "What’s 'whatever'?"
Jay Baruchel: "That’s not appropriate. I was training my dragon! It means masturbation. Am I right? But, yeah, any of us weird kids [can identify with that]. That’s what happens. Hiccup is a great analogy for every kid that isn’t playing sports in high school."
Gerard Butler: "I actually think Hiccup is a great analogy for every kid, even if they’re playing sports. There’s still that coming of age thing where you want to get the girl, you want your friends to like you, you want your family to be proud of you. I don’t think there’s a teen in the world who doesn’t go through that process of feeling awkward and being the odd one out. It’s very in accordance with history that we all go through that same thing."
America Ferrera: "Aside from being an outsider, the dorkiness and wanting to be accepted, I really related to, as a kid, wanting to be great, in some way."
Jay Baruchel: "Wanting to make a difference."
America Ferrera: "Not to just be a Viking, but the greatest Viking in the world."
Gerard, can you talk about getting to use your own Scottish accent for a movie about Vikings and dragons, when you wouldn’t normally expect Vikings to have a Scottish accent?
Gerard Butler: "Why would you ask me, when the kids were doing a f--king American accent? That’s the least Viking accent you could imagine."
Jay Baruchel: "If anything, theirs are closer to how they actually would have sounded than us. We sound like we’re from the f--king food court at the mall."
Gerard Butler: "This was the only movie that I’ve ever made or will make that, after watching it for the first time, made me realize that my accent was not Scottish enough. I was like, 'What is that?' I was stuck in the middle, so I felt that it needed a bit more. I think a strong Celtic accent lends itself to Viking-ness, or any kind of warrior breed. It was the same in 300 as well."
Did you feel like you were doing a tribute to your own father, playing this very genial, concerned father who has a hard time expressing himself to his son?
Gerard Butler: "No. My dad wasn’t there until I was 16. I didn’t see him once. So, I don’t think there was any of that going on at all."
What was the best part about being able to do a voice for an animated film?
Gerard Butler: "Maybe the best thing was the treat that you get at the end of it, to see it all come together. As much as everybody in this cast is fantastic, the real geniuses are the guys who wrote it, the guys who directed it and the animators who created it."
Jay Baruchel: "Oh, 150%, yeah."
Gerard Butler: "When you see it, you go, 'Wow, I didn’t know that this magical, spectacular, wonderful world that we all entered into was there.'"
Jay Baruchel: "It’s unbelievable."
America Ferrera: "And, it’s proof when you see it in the different stages. I saw a version of the movie where 1/3 of it was animated, and then the other scenes were in different stages, like stick drawings or half-animated or animated but not lit. I didn’t know how many stages it goes through. I felt like, in the scenes where it wasn’t fully animated and it was just a voice to a stick figure, there wasn’t that emotional connection, like when the animators do their work and create the humanity in the characters through their animation. They’re more than half of the performances, I would say."
Gerard Butler: "Yeah, definitely. Well said."
Was there a liberation in doing a voice?
Gerard Butler: "It’s freeing, in the way that you’re not constrained by false beards and uncomfortable costumes, and you can do what you want in there. You don’t have to look at 150 extras, who you know are sitting there going, 'What the f--k are you talking about? You look like an idiot who’s wearing leather underpants.'"
Jay Baruchel: "What movie could you possibly be referring to?"
Gerard Butler: "But then, again, sometimes you miss the opportunity to be out there, actually on location with the true environment around you. But, more than anything, it was cool because it was different. It was something that I’d never done before."
America, what made you want to get involved with this?
America Ferrera: "I loved this movie. I didn’t really care what the movie was about. When Dreamworks called and said, 'Do you want to be in a Dreamworks animated film?,' I said, 'Yes.' They told me what the character was and showed me the world, but I would have said yes to any of it. When someone recently asked me what movie character, in the history of movies, that I related to the most, what I came up with was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. This was just wish fulfillment for me. I got to play. Something that is really fun about this is being a very small part of a huge result. It’s so satisfying to show up and be a part of something so cool, that you were really just a tiny part of. The amount of hours we put in, compared to the amount of hours everyone else on the project put in, was incomparable. I just wanted to do this because it seemed like so much fun. I just feel very lucky that I fell into something really fun and good."
