Acting Without Anyone to React To: Willis admits working alone doing voice work was more difficult than he anticipated. “It’s the hardest theatrical experience I’ve ever attempted - really. You take away all of the actor’s tools. There are no props, no other actor to work with. There is not even somebody, most of the time, reading the lines. You’re just doing your lines and they continually change. It was like flying… I don’t know. I can’t think of a difficult enough metaphor for how hard this was.”
How the Process Worked: “I think we worked difference amounts of sessions, but I think I worked about sixteen or eighteen times. I would be in a different city, like New York or Toronto, and they would come and find me. It would be four months since I’d worked with them and the story had changed and the script had been honed more. Things that maybe Garry [Shandling] had done in his session now impacted the scenes that I had with him because they never thought it was the right thing to do, to put us in the same room and work together. I guess that’s just not how they do these things.
It would take me sometimes almost an hour to re-find the character and, sometimes, if my voice was scratchy from the work that I was doing during the day on another film up in Toronto, I wasn’t able to even find that voice again of RJ.”
Willis continued. “Let’s keep in mind that we’re not really thinking like the raccoon thought or the skunk or the turtle thought. I’m not sure any of these animals think anyway except maybe [pointing], ‘Is that an acorn over there?’ I think we all just tried to apply human emotions to it. Isn’t that what’s the interesting part of this, to see human emotions grafted onto an animated fuzzy little animal, or, in [Garry Shandling’s] case, a hard shell animal?”
Willis joked about doing research for the character of RJ the raccoon. “I actually went out and lived with some woodland creatures for about three weeks. Didn’t get anything from them so that didn’t work. Had to throw all that preparation away. I was bit by a possum. It, apparently, is called an opossum, did you know that? It’s not a possum and they actually do play possum if they are frightened.”
The Voice is Everything – Literally: Voice work takes away an actor’s main assets. “It’s really hard. It’s like standing there in your underwear. You’re just vulnerable. They take away all the tools. Normally you have the other actors in the room and there’s a give and take, especially in comedy.”
Willis got so caught up in doing the voice of RJ that he’d even forget there was a camera on him. “I always forgot it was there. In trying to get to some of the wackiness of RJ, I would do stuff and go, ‘Arrrr,’ or have a look on my face or whatever. And then when I saw the rough cut I said, ‘They took that animation based on what I did when I was doing the voice.’”
The directors of Over the Hedge would occasionally give Willis prompts to keep his voice up a bit higher than his normal speaking voice. Willis said, “That was helpful. I think the appropriate metaphor was that we were all lost in the woods in the dark and they were the guys with the flashlights going, ‘Over here. This is where the character is. Be this guy. Talk like this. You’ve got to pitch it up a little more…,’ because I was lost.”
Page 2: A Little Moonlighting, Improv, and Die Hard 4
